After the Charlotte, North Carolina City Council caved this week and repealed their LGBT rights ordinances in a deal with North Carolina’s GOP Senate to repeal the hateful HB2 bill that has cost thee state millions of dollars in revenue from tourism, entertainment profits, and conventions. State Senate leader Phil Berger who is the primary sponsor of legislation filed Wednesday that would repeal the law passed in March dictating which bathroom transgender people must use and limiting LGBT protections has used the old bait-and switch.
The new legislation would repeal HB2 but would also block local governments from passing ordinances regulating LGBT employment practices or public accommodations related to restrooms, showers or changing facilities for six months.
No other city or county in North Carolina other than Charlotte has any form of LGBT protection law on the books.
The six months’ delay, really, is probably a tactic to give the Republicans more time to think up other ways to discriminate against North Carolina’s LGBT community and get tourism back on track. Also to stop Charlotte from re-voting for LGBT protections as soon as possible. But now LGBT North Carolinian’s will be left with no legal protections in a state that has proven to be hostile and discriminatory to them.
Even though the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina, Lambda Legal and the law firm of Jenner & Block were challenging H.B. 2 in federal court but now that Charlotte, North Carolina has caved mostly because of the states loss of income more than anything else, LGBT ‘s in that state are left with no protections at all at the very least for 6 months.
If HB2 would have gone to the Supreme Court to battle as planned and the court found the measure was born of animus, it would have been struck down. HB2 is a constitutional monstrosity.
One of Anthony Kennedy’s favorite legal maxims comes from The Common Lawby Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
And North Carolina you have been kicked repeatedly.
*UPDATE
After recessing much of the afternoon, it seems lawmakers might be abandoning any attempt to pass anything. It seems that without the support of Democrats, there were not enough Republican votes to actually pass the repeal bill that includes a “cooling off period.” If that holds true into the evening, the NC GOP will have not only failed to pass a shoddy HB2 repeal bill; they will have failed to pass any repeal bill at all…
…At 6:20 p.m., the Senate approved an amendment to the repeal bill extending the six-month moratorium on local protections until the end of the 2017 legislative session. In other words, the deal got worse, because North Carolina Republicans refuse to vote for a bill that will still allow cities to protect LGBT people from discrimination.
*UPDATE II: The ACLU and Lambda Legal condemned lawmakers:
“The General Assembly and Governor McCrory are playing political chicken, and North Carolinians continue to lose for it. It is an outrage that North Carolina’s lawmakers could not follow the mandate of the voters and repeal H.B. 2,” said Simone Bell, Southern Regional Director at Lambda Legal. As long as H.B. 2 is on the books, thousands of LGBT people who call North Carolina home, especially transgender people, are being discriminated against and will never feel safe. This was a counterproductive exercise in reaffirming to the rest of the country that North Carolina wants to remain mired in this divisive dispute.
“It is a shame that North Carolina’s General Assembly is refusing to clean up the mess they made. The support for the LGBT community from political leaders, faith leaders, businesses, and everyday people that has emerged this year will not fade. These attempts to expel transgender people from public life will not be tolerated,” said James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project. “The legislature may not be willing to undo their unconstitutional overreach and respect the rights of LGBT people, so we’ll just have to see them in court.”
After the North Carolina GOP controlled Senates shameful behavior and lies. Back2Stonewall.com calls for the boycott of the state of the state of North Carolina to continue and be escalated.
