Last week, the Justice Department told North Carolina they would have until Monday, May 9 to make a decision about HB2, a bill that overturned “every local LGBT anti-discrimination measure in the state” when passed in March: either dump the law and comply with the the Civil Rights Act, or implement the law and risk losing federal funding for public schools.
After a weekend of deliberation, the state lawyered up and steamrolled through door number 2 while screaming, “It’s Pat!” On Monday, the Washington Post reported that Gov. Pat McCrory filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, accusing the feds of “baseless and blatant overreach” and calling their actions “an attempt to unilaterally rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws.”
Writes the Post:
McCrory said he had asked federal officials to push back its “unrealistic” Monday deadline but was told he could only get more time if he publicly called the bathroom law discriminatory.
“I’m not going to publicly announce that something discriminates, which is agreeing with their letter, because we’re really talking about a letter in which they’re trying to define gender identity,” McCrory said in an interview Sunday with Fox News. “And there is no clear identification or definition of gender identity. It’s the federal government being a bully.”
This is sort of like a high schooler using a slur and punching another kid in the face during gym class, getting suspended for it, and filing a complaint with the superintendent’s office saying he’s being bullied for going to gym.
Image via AP.
DISCUSSION
He’a going to lose this and lose this hard, which is what they want. This bathroom bill is just a smoke screen. The really terrible meat of the bill makes raising the minimum wage in the state illegal and strips a ton of LBGT rights away, such as housing protection and medical care.
They want us to only focus on the bathroom part so the rest of it will go unchallenged. We can’t let them. The entire bill needs to be done away with, not just this reprehensible part of it.