North Carolina’s Bait-and-Switch on HB2

Faced with continued economic hemorrhaging, and an ultimatum by the NCAA, North Carolina has passed a supposed repeal of HB2, a toxic anti-transgender law that also attacked many other civil rights of minorities in that state.  The problem is that what was passed and signed into law is not a full repeal of HB2.  It's not even close to a full repeal.  North Carolina Republics still put appeasing one of the foulest elements of society - so-called "Conservative Christians" - ahead of the best interests of the state as a whole.  Hopefully, the NCAA and others will see that the new legislation is a farce and will continue the boycott of North Carolina and openly rebuke the state for continuing to legalize discrimination.  Religion has absolutely no place in public laws or public policy, especially when the beliefs fostered are based on fear and hatred of others.  Time will tell if this legislative attempt is seen for what it it is: a disingenuous attempt to dupe the NCAA and others.  Here are highlights from a New York Times main editorial that trashes this false repeal effort:

Facing a deadline to do away with a law that turned North Carolina into a national pariah by denying the right of transgender people to use public restrooms of their choice, state lawmakers rashly settled on a terrible compromise.

On Thursday, they repealed the law in name but not in substance, hoping to assuage organizations and employers that have boycotted the state to protest its discriminatory law. The National Collegiate Athletic Association had given state politicians until Thursday to get rid of the law before it would resume holding championship games in the state.

All those who have taken a principled stance against the law, known as H.B. 2, should stand firm. The law’s revision would deprive North Carolinians of protection from discrimination for years, and retains the odious notion that transgender people are inherently dangerous.

“We can never compromise on fundamental civil rights,” William Barber II, the president of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a call with journalists Thursday morning. “It was never just a bathroom bill. It’s a bill that discriminates against so many people in so many ways.”

The original. . . . law mandated that transgender people use restrooms that matched the gender marker listed on their birth certificate, and barred localities from enacting laws to protect gays, lesbians and transgender people from discrimination.

It’s mystifying that Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat whose narrow election in November was seen as something of a referendum on H.B. 2, would regard the amended law as a suitable compromise. The repeal law did away with the birth certificate requirement, which was unenforceable all along because it would have turned law enforcement officials into genital inspectors. But it bars schools and other government entities from adopting policies allowing transgender people to use the restroom of their choice. And it still prohibits anti-discrimination ordinances until 2020.

He and other Democrats who supported the compromise said they concluded that a modest step toward undoing the law was the best they could hope for while Republicans have veto-proof majorities in the legislature. That is misguided. The deal was struck days after The Associated Press reported that the backlash against the law would cost North Carolina at least $3.7 billion in business over 12 years.

Getting employers and organizations to steer business and jobs to North Carolina should require more than window dressing. State officials must address the underlying problem: a law that enshrines discrimination against minorities and perpetuates harmful stereotypes about transgender people. Until they do, business as usual will represent an endorsement of bigotry and intolerance.

 The husband and I will continue our avoidance of visiting or spending money in North Carolina.  The embrace of bigotry has to made to bear a heavy price. 

How Republicans Are Destroying North Carolina

I've noted on a number of occasions how Gov. Brownback and his band of Republican troglodytes have done much to destroy the state of Kansas - all, of course, as they claim to be merely imposing dogma on all the state's citizenry.  But just south of the border  a similar campaign of destruction is underway in North Carolina.  The goal there has been to inflict the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda on the state and to grant special rights to knuckle dragging Christofascists with no concern for the damage being done.  An op-ed piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the North Carolina's agenda which ought to make Virginian's terrified of what GOP wins in Virginia in 2017 might do to this state.  Here are op-ed highlights:

The governor and General Assembly have:

• Tragically refused to expand Medicaid. Merely to show disdain for President Obama, they’ve denied health care to a half million poor Tar Heels though the federal government would pay almost all the fare. Hospitals have closed, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, over $30 billion in federal funds are surrendered and a thousand or more of us die each year as a result of one of the most cruel and indefensible decisions in N.C. history.

• Enacted the most aggressive voter suppression law in a half century. The central purpose of North Carolina’s monster voting law — imposing a biased ID requirement, limiting early voting and eliminating same-day registration, out of precinct voting and early first-time registration — is to make it harder to cast the franchise. It is foundationally un-American.

• Launched an internationally derided war on LGBT people. Beginning with Amendment One, followed by a discrimination-abetting religious exemption law, the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of state dollars to pursue already-concluded litigation and, most famously, the passage of House Bill 2, Republicans have inflicted enduring wounds on North Carolina merely to prove they despise the LGBT community.

• Moved systematically and pervasively to dismantle the public schools. Through teacher and teaching assistant layoffs, reductions in pre-K programs, massive budget cuts, the expansion of charters, the introduction of vouchers, the (attempted) elimination of tenure, the closing of a celebrated teaching fellows program, the creation of a destructive A-F school grading system and, now, the adoption of achievement school districts, the General Assembly has worked to lay waste to public education.

• Initiated the nation’s most appalling crusade against poor people. Despite burgeoning poverty and hunger rates, enacted the sharpest cut to unemployment compensation in history, ended the earned income tax credit, drastically cut food-stamp eligibility, abolished legal aid appropriations, sharply reduced child care subsidies and greatly increased regressive sales taxes — all to cut taxes for the wealthy. As if it’s no longer thought unworthy to steal from the poor.

• Violated the personal liberty, constitutional privacy and bodily integrity of NC women. Enacted not only the infamous “motorcycle” abortion bill and the nation’s longest waiting period, but also passed a shocking mandatory sonogram law — enlisting a woman’s body, physician and pocketbook in a coercive campaign to intimidate her from the exercise of constitutional rights. Requiring doctors to mouth a state-mandated script, like Stalinist apparatchiks, contrary to their perception of the best interests of their patients.

• Abused legislative power to limit necessary and traditional prerogatives of public and private institutions. Warming to totalitarianism, the General Assembly has threatened, coerced and (sometimes) restructured courts, municipalities, county commissions, universities, community colleges, regulatory commissions, administrative agencies, school boards, unions, legal services programs, corporations, academics, civil servants, lobbyists, journalists and citizens unwilling to bend to the will of its leaders.

• Opened the door to degradation of the environment and natural resources. Sought (notoriously) to limit research on climate change, revoked tax credits for renewable energy, enthusiastically embraced fracking and off-shore drilling, crushed funding for state parks and environmental enforcement, repealed state rules more protective than federal counterparts, crafted sweetheart deals with donors/polluters and changed the Department of Environmental Quality’s mission to “customer service” — seeking to become the least regulated state in the union.

• Embraced government by perjury. Electoral participation was suppressed to stop non-existent voter fraud, HB2 protected against fanciful transgender assault, local elections were overturned to assure democratic accountability, abortions were restricted out of a newly discovered concern for women’s health and tax cuts for the rich were reportedly designed to create prosperity for the poor. It’s hard to see why any political ideology demands its adherents constantly lie about their motivations.

• Perhaps most distressing, ruled as a white people’s party. From their veto-proof legislative caucuses, without a single black member, they repealed the racial justice act, eliminated race discrimination lawsuits, racially gerrymandered legislative districts, made it harder for African-Americans to vote and increased racial segregation in the public schools. Knowing they won’t be able to govern as a white party in a decade, they’ve been in a hurry.

Rarely have so few inflicted so much, so quickly, on so many, with so little justification. Revolution born in malice.

North Carolina GOP Braces for "Bathroom Law" Blowback

What some in the North Carolina Republican Party thought was a ingenious way to rally the Christofascists in the party so as to sweep them to re-election in November is now looking more likely to sweep them out of office, especially Gov. Pat McCrory who appears to be falling further behind in the polls with every passing day.  McCrory is trying to play the victim of an over reaching Washington, D.C., but other than rabid Christofascist simpletons, most North Carolina residents do not seem to be suckered into support for McCrory and his party that are now defined by anti-LGBT bigotry.  A piece in Politico looks at how the North Carolina GOP seemingly out smarted itself by a mile.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans in North Carolina are increasingly worried that the state’s new “bathroom law” blocking protections for the LGBT community will cost the GOP dearly in November’s elections.

They say the reason is simple: The party that took over North Carolina as champions of small government is now seen by moderate voters as the party of the bathroom police.

Republican lawmakers and strategists in the state say the GOP is badly losing the public relations battle over House Bill 2, the law banning local nondiscrimination ordinances, which Gov. Pat McCrory signed in March. That trend only worsened Monday, when U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called the law “state-sponsored discrimination” and compared it to Jim Crow-era laws while announcing new legal action.

The GOP argument that the law is about public safety has been overrun by a coalition including some of America’s biggest businesses, which says HB2 discriminates against transgender people by, among other things, forcing them to use bathrooms that may not correspond to their gender identities — and the law has come to define the Republican Party in North Carolina.

“The reality is that HB2 hurts,” said state Rep. Charles Jeter, the GOP lawmaker responsible for maintaining his party’s majority in the state legislature. “It doesn’t matter that I’m opposed to it or that I’ve called for its repeal … because the mailer to voters [in my race] is going to say that I was a part of the Republican majority that passed the most discriminatory bill in the state. HB2 is going to have reverberations for our party no matter what we do, in November and probably beyond that.”

[T]he strategist said. “Republicans could lose their veto-proof majority in one or both [legislative] chambers, with a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the governor’s race.”

McCrory has staunchly defended the law, especially after the Department of Justice told the state last week that it was in violation of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX, jeopardizing billions of dollars in federal funding.

“Had [McCrory] been a strong leader, he still could’ve fixed this,” Cooper said. “He could’ve vetoed the legislation and said it was too broad and it would hurt our economy, like Gov. Nathan Deal did in Georgia, but he chose not to.”

The Democratic Governors Association started airing TV ads last month targeting McCrory and Republicans for “taking North Carolina backwards,” highlighting economic fallout as companies like PayPal have backtracked on planned expansion in North Carolina since McCrory signed the law.

[O]ther North Carolina Republicans have been eager to keep the conversation on HB2 going because it is popular in rural areas of the state, which have become GOP bastions as the Democratic Party has shifted into the growing cities and melting-pot suburbs.

“When I saw [HB2], I could not believe they were going to pass that legislation,” Cooper said. “I spoke out immediately and said discrimination was wrong, period. We should not write discrimination into our law and it was going to hurt our economy, but they passed it anyway and the governor signed it that night, and that has come true.”

Perhaps the most amazing thing about HB2 is that it is a self-inflicted wound for the North Carolina GOP.  Its sole purpose was to pander to Christofascists - a group that more and more Americans are rightly being seen as motivated solely by hate and bigotry - with no thought of the likely repercussions.  I continue to believe that North Carolina needs to be crucified if you will so that no other state will ever opt to embrace anti-LGBT bigotry again. 

North Carolina’s Anti-LGBT Law Is Based on a Total Lie

North Carolina's heinous anti-LGBT Law passed by the GOP controlled legislature and signed into law by the Republican governor is prompting sharp reactions across the blogosphere and gay rights groups are gearing up to file a federal lawsuit to have the law struck down since it does exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in Romer v. Evans.  Meanwhile, in Georgia the Republican governor is under growing pressure to veto that state's foul "religious freedom" law by Hollywood and the movie industry with the clear implication being that Georgia could lose 1.7 billion dollars in movie industry revenue if the governor signs the bill into law.  The ultimate irony, however, is that both laws are based on lies - a fact that should surprise no one who follows the Christofascists who lie more often and more deliberately than just about about any segment of the populace.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the lie behind North Carolina's heinous law.  Here are highlights:

North Carolina just wrote, passed, and signed into law the most anti-LGBT measure of the past decade—and it was all based on a lie.

The state has undone not just local ordinances protecting transgender people, but all LGBT nondiscrimination provisions across the state. Literally overnight, people in Charlotte and across North Carolina can now be fired from their jobs for being gay, turned away at hotel chains for being gay, and even forced to show their genitals to a police officer if the cop thinks they might be transgender.

And unlike in Georgia, where a constellation of businesses has arrayed to oppose an anti-LGBT bill, bigots in North Carolina don’t even need religion as an excuse.

Instead, they’ve used a lie about anti-discrimation ordinances: that they will cause girls to use the boys room and vice versa. Legislators who, in an act that surely must be considered child abuse, even got a high school student to testify that “Girls like me should never be forced to undress or shower in the presence of boys.”

That is completely, 100 percent untrue. The ordinance that ignited this debate, passed by Charlotte on Feb. 22, only prevents businesses from discriminating against gay people. That does include enabling transgender people to use gender-appropriate restrooms, but only if they are really transgender. Nor would gender-appropriate restrooms lead to sexual assault: in fact there is not one case in 17 states and 225 other cities with such ordinances of rapists using their legal cover to attack women.

Yet the North Carolina legislature went far, far beyond overturning that ordinance. Part I of the law does, indeed, require all bathrooms to be restricted by “biological sex” as defined on one’s birth certificate, but Parts II and III have nothing to do with that, and instead roll back any local ordinances protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people from discrimination in employment and public accommodations. It is sheer opportunism, piggybacking an unrelated anti-gay law atop a misinformed anti-trans one.

Now that the Big Bathroom Lie has worked twice—the first time was in Houston—the question all right-thinking people must ask themselves is: Do the people telling the lie even believe themselves?

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” So wrote Adolf Hitler (not Goebbels, as often thought), in his chapter on “War Propaganda” in Mein Kampf.  That seems to be the case here. Some people clearly are dupes . . .

Some of the law’s supporters may also be so transphobic that they still call Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce” and think she belongs in the men’s room. These may be the worst of all, because unlike the fictive “bathroom menace,” there are very real statistics about violence suffered by transgender people, especially transgender women. Some of these women testified to the legislature, to no avail.

But mostly, the backers of this bill are liars. They are cynically creating and exploiting public fears to score points with their base, raise money, and win victories against LGBT people in areas of employment and public accommodations—victories they know they couldn’t get if they attacked the issue honestly.

Surely, by now, the national groups behind this legislation—the [hate groups] Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Family Association—are fully aware that they are lying. They know that there is not a single case on record of a man taking advantage of a nondiscrimination bill, dressing up as a woman, being allowed into a women’s restroom, and sexually assaulting someone. They also know that ordinances like Charlotte’s would not eliminate single-sex restrooms and locker rooms.

So, these purported men of God are liars.

Quotes of the Day - Done with Republicans

UPDATED: For those inclined to boycott North Carolina and companies based in that state, in the wake of what happened yesterday, a list of North Carolina based companies can be found here.

As promised, Pat McCrory, the Republican governor of North Carolina, signed the Republican anti-LGBT bill last night that his fellow party members had rammed through a special session of the North Carolina legislature yesterday.  The result is that LGBT citizens of that state now have no non-discrimination protections in employment, housing or being served at businesses in the state.  All because of the desire of Republicans to prostitute themselves to Christofascists in the worse tradition of that state - and the South's - history of bigotry and discrimination.  Blogger friend Matthew Morrell Comer sums up the situation and the decision that decent people need to make:

Done with Republicans. Was once friendly with the moderates among you. No more. Take your Trump-led, homophobic, transphobic, anti-woman, anti-worker stances some place else. Your party of hatred and bigotry will be judged with the same distaste and disgust as every other form of bigotry in history. Especially to LGBT people who identify as Republicans: time to choose sides; your own people or those who hate us? Your choice. No more waffling. No more excuses. Change parties now; silence and complacency isn't an option.

A reader also provided this quote from Romer v. Evans which struck down a similar attack on LGBT citizens in Colorado in the 1990's:

Finding that "laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected," the Court inferred that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group".[2] The Court added: "[I]f the constitutional conception of 'equal protection of the laws' means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare ... desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest."

I truly long for the day when Christians are a minority in America and, if there is any justice, they find themselves treated as they have treated others.  Meanwhile, we have a family wedding scheduled in the Outer Banks.  If it is not relocated, I guess we will drive down for the day and return rather than spend the night in such a horrible state - thankfully, my car gets good enough mileage that we wouldn't even need to buy gas if we have to go. 

I hope LGBT travelers will adjust their travel plans so as to avoid flying through Charlotte and avoid the state entirely.  I also hope that a federal court challenge is commenced immediately.