In one fell swoop, North Carolina politicians held a special session on Wednesday in which they created, passed and signed into law a wide-ranging bill that invalidates a host of legal protections for LGBT individuals statewide.
Some are calling it the “most anti-LGBT bill in the country.”
Understanding that a protracted public debate on the bill would likely create a PR nightmare, elected officials in North Carolina crammed the entire process into a single day — presumably with the belief that it would save them from a fate like that of Georgia, where companies including Disney and the NFL are now threatening consequences if the governor signs a similar bill into law.
It won’t.
Whereas Georgia Governor Nathan Deal still has the power to veto the bill or send it back to the state house for important revisions, North Carolina has made a tremendous miscalculation in rushing it through in one day.
It’s likely corporations will begin announcing statewide boycotts as early as this afternoon as word begins to trickle out about what North Carolina has done.
Let me give this issue some context.
The current governor of North Carolina is a Republican named Pat McCrory. He was the mayor of Charlotte for a record 14 years until 2009 and served on the city council there before that.
The current mayor of Charlotte is a Democrat named Jennifer Roberts.
Earlier this year, Charlotte passed legislation protecting many different basic human rights of LGBT individuals. One of those rights, the ability for a transgender individual to use a public restroom of the gender they identify with, became a lightning rod statewide. The protections — including that restroom clause — were scheduled to take effect April 1.
Mind you, Republicans, as a foundational principle, consistently argue for the rights of local elected leaders to govern themselves. This, apparently, in the minds of republicans outside of Charlotte, did not apply to the largest city in the state. So, they held a special session on Wednesday to not only overrule Charlotte, but to strip a series of key protections that truly take North Carolina back in time.
The full bill wasn’t made public until Wednesday. It passed within three hours, and later that night Governor McCrory signed it into law. He had 30 days to consider it. He took just a few hours.
Knowing the bathroom provision of the Charlotte protections were controversial, politicians used it as justification for its swift passage — claiming sexual predators would use the law to rape women in their own restrooms.
The thing is, though, the law North Carolina just passed did far more than that.
“I am appalled with the General Assembly’s actions today,” said Roberts. “It has passed a bill that is worse than what we have seen in Indiana and Georgia and other states. This legislation is literally the most anti-LGBT legislation in the country. It sanctions discrimination against the LGBT community.
“This legislation overturns the ability of local governments to provide, as we have for many years, protections for our transgender employees,” she added. “It prohibits local governments from providing to their employees the same protections that private employers provide to their employees and puts us at risk of violating federal laws.”
In other words, North Carolina now has no legal protections whatsoever to prohibit businesses from refusing to serve whoever they want to refuse — including LGBT individuals. Any privately owned business is now allowed to refuse service to someone because they are gay. Charlotte’s new provisions, which were to take effect on April 1, would’ve prohibited such a thing.
The new law also prohibits public K-12 schools or universities from creating separate restrooms or stalls for transgender individuals.
It must be said that while the bill was authored by conservatives and passed by a Republican majority, nearly a dozen democrats in the North Carolina House joined in to support the bill.
Clearly, McCrory and politicians who supported the bill statewide believed their constituents would support them through the impending firestorm that is sure to come.
Ultimately, this new North Carolina law is hateful. The government should always protect all of its citizens from discrimination but what they’ve done instead is strip basic human rights from LGBT individuals in their state.
I’m disgusted and I’ll never travel to North Carolina
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