Pariah state

by | Sep 15, 2016 | Editor's Blog, HB2 | 10 comments

For months, Pat McCrory and the GOP leadership in North Carolina have been engaged in a game of chicken with college athletics in North Carolina. In the days following the passage of HB2, entertainers canceled concerts and businesses moved conventions. Pat McCrory and the GOP defiantly called them Hollywood elitists and blamed Charlotte for the losses. Then, the NBA moved the All-star game out of Charlotte. Still, the Republicans stubbornly refused to budge.

Through it all, everyone knew that the big decision would come from the NCAA and ACC. North Carolina has always prided itself for its college sports, especially basketball. Both the NCAA and the ACC have been making it clear that they weren’t happy with HB2 and its discriminatory policies. They’ve given McCrory and the state legislature six months to repeal it or seriously overhaul it. Instead, the GOP leadership seemed to be daring them to pull college events. This week, they did.

The NCAA response did to HB2 and other policies what the Fourth District Court did to the voter suppression bill. While McCrory and the GOP claim HB2 is about bathrooms, the NCAA made clear its decision was based on the collective impact of measures that discriminate against the LGBT community. The NCAA points out that North Carolina is unique because:

  • HB2 overrides any local nondiscrimination policies;
  • It “has the only statewide law that makes it unlawful to use a restroom different from the gender on one’s birth certificate, regardless of gender identity;”
  • The state allows government employees to discriminate against gays and lesbians by refusing to marry them;
  • Travel bans by other states put games at risk.

As the N&O states, “Regarding LGBT rights, North Carolina has at least one restriction that no other state has, and no other state has the combination of laws North Carolina has.”

Similarly, Republicans claim the voter suppression law is about voter ID. The court made clear that the law carefully targeted communities, particularly African-Americans, that might vote against them. Voter ID was just a component of a host of measures meant to discourage voting.

With both voter ID and HB2, the GOP could have passed laws that would have passed muster. Instead, they piled on provisions that gave lie to their stated intent. With voter ID, they were trying to rig elections. With HB2, they were pandering to their base in an election year. Those laws are the epitome of putting politics before people.

McCrory and the GOP have lost credibility and the benefit of the doubt. They repeatedly overreach to broadly discriminate against whole communities. Their thin rationales get exposed but they fail to change their behavior and instead attack the messengers. Now, the messengers are firing back. In their stubborn arrogance, McCrory and the GOP are turning North Carolina into a pariah state.

10 Comments

  1. Sue

    I can’t believe that these idiots think they can mess with basketball in this state. I remember when businesses shut down to watch the ACC Tournament. People are up in arms! They need to be ran out of town on a rail and some tar and feathers.

  2. Leedia

    How very sad that minority thinkers can bully a legislature into violating peoples’ civil rights. Stand up, NC! Vote the malignant SOBs out of office.

    No miscreants should shakle a state as vibrant and healthy and rising as N..C.

  3. Someone from Main Street

    Have you been reading Franklin Graham’s HB2 tweets? That’s all you need to know about why GOP has drawn the line in the sand. They’re mobilizing Franklin’s extreme Christian right-wing fan base.

    • Ebrun

      No doubt there are extreme right-wingers, but “extreme Christian” seems to be an oxymoron.

  4. Jay Ligon

    It sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit where big hairy men dressed in heels, wigs, clumsy makeup, and pearls stand around the Ladies Room talking football until girls come in the room. Then they make fumbling attempts to get dates.

    That is the scenario the Republicans recount when asked what the heck are they trying to accomplish with HB2: preventing J. Edgar Hoover in a dress from chatting up girls, hoping that real girls would not notice the gravelly voice and the five o’clock shadow. In the television version of this script, no one notices that the girls are really boys except the audience. The GOP has been watching too many “Bosom Buddy” reruns.

    Was anybody fooled in “Some Like It Hot?” when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon ran from the mob by pretending to be part of the all-ladies band? They tried to woo Marilyn Monroe who didn’t notice they were men. Well, wacky, zany hijinks ensued, but I wasn’t fooled. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were boys, not girls!

    The NCGA has bet big on the likelihood that the “Some Like It Hot” plot is playing out in every grammar school, every public toilet and every public building in North Carolina.

    I must say that Republican bathrooms are completely different from the ones the rest of us use. People want to spend the absolute least possible amount of time in the restroom. If I can get in and out still holding one breath, I’m happy about it, and I don’t want to touch anything but a clean towel as I dry my hands while escaping the room gasping for oxygen. If the experience can take less than 60 seconds, it was a success. I never meet anybody in there, ever.

    Republicans must meet a lot of people and make a lot of friends in the john. Is there disco music in GOP toilets? Is it raining men? Is it a wild, wild life in there? Is it a walk on the wild side? Are their bathrooms filled with cross-dressers and gay dancing queens? Do meaningful relationships begin in Republican bathrooms? Is the GOP restroom some version of Snoopy’s dog house with levels of fabulousness unseen from the exterior? The dance floor level, the cocktail lounge level, a stripper pole on level three. What a life those Republicans live!

    Back in the real world, it doesn’t happen like that for the rest of us. There are no court cases involving the need for such protections “There ought to be a law to keep Tony Curtis and Tom Hanks away from our children.” says no one except some weird legislators on Jones Street and Pat McCrory.

    The Republicans bet the house on protecting our girls from a threat that exists only in the minds of North Carolina’s GOP legislators and comedy writers in Hollywood. Reality keeps smacking them in the face, but their response has been wacky and zany while the hundreds of millions of dollars depart North Carolina.

    • Troy

      Hahahahahaha

      Saaaayyyy now, if there is a stripper pole on level 3 and all the Republican toilets are, of course, gender appropriate based on birth certificate, who pray is gliding up and down that stripper pole and what gender are they?!?!?!

  5. Mary

    Pride.

    Most large NC cities already had laws on their books like the one Charlotte passed. HB2 is 100% about the power struggle between the cities & the state legislature. The cities have blue majorities; the state government is deep red. They had already gerrymandered the city council election in Greensboro & the board of education election in Wake County (Raleigh) which the courts threw out. They have threatened withholding funds with other cities. The NCGA tried to wrest away control of the airport from Charlotte but Charlotte fought back & the state lost that battle with a federal ruling. They have bullied Charlotte by threatening to withhold other funds such as highway funds.

    So the NCGA grabbed the “bathroom” issue, threw in discrimination (hey, isn’t everybody doing it?), decreed that the municipalities can’t pass their own laws about it, threw in minimum wage restrictions (what the hell, why not?), & lastly removed the people’s right to any filing in state court based upon the bill. And accomplished all that in 12 hours without first publically vetting it or even letting the representatives have more than an hour to read or discuss it because they knew it would not pass if they did. Just to show the blue cities who’s boss. Pride.

    • Robert Hoots

      Very well said and written

  6. Yojji

    I understand the Republican rationale for voter suppression laws: try to keep African-Americans and young people from voting because those groups generally vote for Democrats. Unconstitutional, but disenfranchising voters is one way to win if you don’t have a compelling, relevant message. There is, however, no sane reason for HB2. Why risk the predictable backlash (both economic and electoral) only to pander to religious fanatics who will vote Republican no matter what? They have made North Carolina an international laughing stock, run businesses and sporting events out of the state and angered the electorate enough to increase Democratic voter turnout and turn independents blue – all for… what?

    • Russell

      As far as the why of it, well it hurts labor, especially union labor in Greensboro which provides professional labor for the shows at the coliseum and auditorium theater, not to mention conventions and the Furniture Show. IATSE 574 does this labor in Greensboro, and it’s professional riggers are known as some of the best in the nation.
      Concert and theater goers do not get burned to death in Union venues.
      Anything that hurts union labor far as NC, or Not Conscious entrenched old school leaders are concerned, is just great.

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