Icarus, you may remember, was the mythical Greek whose arrogance drove him to fly closer and closer to the sun. One day, he got too close, and the heat of our star melted the wax from his wings, dooming him to oblivion. So too with the NCGOP. They have tempted fate for years. And now HB2 has brought their flirtation with destiny to a disastrous end.
It’s clear HB2’s architects thought they could get away with it. Betting on the media’s Trump preoccupation, they hoped to rush the bill through with resistance limited to the state-politics community (a small group). At most, there would be a flurry of national blog posts. One of the law’s few Democratic supporters put it this way:
“I don’t think we anticipated the firestorm it created.”
That confession is rather stunning. The source of the quote, Rep. Ken Goodman, is an active Twitter user who must have seen the #boycottIndiana movement. But this law’s GOP authors were so drunk on hubris they thought that somehow, they could escape the Hoosier state’s fate. Obviously, they were wrong.
Why? Because most people no longer accept discrimination and they fight back. The Web is a weapon against bigotry. Any assault on gay/trans rights will quickly spread through the global consciousness and engender severe retaliation toward its perpetrators. The NCGOP is not exempt from this reality.
But they believed they were. Intoxicated by years of legislative success, people like Tim Moore thought they inhabited a unique space of invulnerability. In fact, the world is much less impressed with them than they are with themselves.This is the GOP’s Icarus Moment. They have earned it.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
We should not pay these legislators anything, until they repay the cost of their lawsuits. Where or where did Phil Berger get that law degree? Online from Burma? I don’t understand why he is so poor at gaging constitutionality. Where did he get that law degree. It cannot be from an American school, he would have learned American Constitution. He seems to be totally clueless
I don’t think they believe they are Icarus – he was an adventurer who soared too close to the sun and then died.
I don’t think NCGOP is in the pantheon of Greek heroes, gods and humans. These are people who called an unusual special session, costing the state $47K, in order to codify discrimination into law and limit the power of local authorities to determine a minimum wage and to prevent individuals from using a court of law to resolve discrimination issues. In doing so, they’ve created some highly crafted fiction that allowing transgendered people to avoid using the potty of their biological birth would significantly increase bathroom rape.
I honestly have no idea where they are coming from. I do not believe they are so incredibly stupid as to do something that will ruin their chances in November. They’ve whipped up their base into an excess of froth with this bill – we’ll see who comes out to vote in November…
Or they were planning on the firestorm to distract the public from their dismal performance on the economic front . most of the new employment stats point to a large number of low paying service job and a rapidly growing state debt . North Caroline is well on it’s way to becoming Kansas II that is why it is taking them so long to cook the book in the state budget plan to cover that up ..
somebody need to start a FOA and deep investigative reporting on North Carolina Debt
Your analogy is perfect. Indeed, Icarus learned his lesson the hard way, but the North Carolina GOP legislative leaders and Governor have not and will not learn theirs. For so many years, the inability and unwillingness of politicians to learn from their errors has just astounded me.
Take McCrory, for example. The Governor claimed the credit for passage of what I call the first “HB2 (His Bonds for $2 Billion)” and Pat was going to run for re-election based on this voting triumph. And, what do he and the GOP legislative leaders do right after that election? In one day, they come up with the second HB2 (throttling local governments and civil rights) , and generating what many strategists could have told them in advance was a p.r. and voting disaster. The North Carolina GOP doesn’t have enough going against them with Trump (or even worse, Cruz) in the November general election, now they must carry this blunder and defend it for the next seven months! Watch the wax melt from the wings of the GOP leaders in the November, 2016 election. Sad, isn’t it?