North Carolina: The culture war over bathrooms

Several days ago, North Carolina’s general assembly called an extraordinary special session, said David Graham in TheAtlantic.com. “The reason wasn’t a pressing budget crisis” or a natural disaster. Instead, Republican legislators rushed back to the statehouse to overturn a local ordinance passed in Charlotte prohibiting discrimination against trans people. After Democrats walked out of the chamber in protest, Republicans unanimously passed a new bill, HB2, that bars local governments from passing any nondiscrimination ordinance covering the LGBT community, and mandates that trans people in state schools use the bathroom aligned with the gender on their birth certificate. In other words, people in North Carolina can now be legally fired from their jobs or turned away at hotel chains for being gay. In the meantime, another 40 transgender bathroom bills are being considered in 16 states, said the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record, making North Carolina the front line in a new culture war against LGBT rights. This was a “bad day for our state

“Apparently keeping men out of the women’s loo is now considered discriminatory,” said Larry Thornberry in Spectator.org. “Virtuous progressives” would rather cater to the rare man who thinks he’s a woman than the countless women who would rather not have to share their bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers with a person who has “a penis, testicles, and a five-o’clock shadow.” Those of us with wives and daughters also are justifiably alarmed by that prospect. But for the cultural left, only the rights of “carefully selected categories of people” matter.

Enough with the “bathroom predator myth,” said J. Bryan Lowder in Slate.com. Social conservatives would have us believe that trans women “are really men trying to get into women’s rooms for nefarious purposes,” but there hasn’t been a single sexual assault of that kind in the 17 states and 225 cities that allow trans people to use the bathroom of their choice. Besides, how do North Carolina lawmakers expect to enforce their ban on trans women? By asking everybody to lift up their skirts or pull down their pants before entering the ladies room? The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed a federal lawsuit challenging the dubious constitutionality of HB2, said Mark Joseph Stern, also in Slate.com. If that lawsuit leads to federal courts establishing “robust constitutional protection for trans people,” North Carolina’s bigotry “will boomerang in a pretty stunning way