The fallout from House Bill 2 only continues to get worse as time goes on. Last week, both the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its Atlantic Coast Conference moved 2016-17 championship games from North Carolina to add on to Charlotte's loss of the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. Various musical artists as prominent as Bruce Springsteen have also canceled performances in the Tar Heel State. The controversial bill, which was signed into law to "combat transgenders using the wrong bathrooms," has made this once-seemingly progressive Southern state now look like a mockery and an embarrassment, even worse than Mississippi and Alabama. What's worse is that incumbent governor Pat McCrory has shown absolutely zero common sense in trying to get this law repealed, or at least significantly altering it.
Here's a much-needed reality check: it's not about bathrooms. At all. If it was, then those who are actually deluded enough to seriously support the law would have realized that transgenders have been using the same bathrooms as them for years. Years. HB2 is a discriminatory bill that deliberately targets LGBT Americans in North Carolina. Perhaps the most significant issue in the entire bill is that LGBT members are no longer protected from the discrimination in the workplace. This means that corporations and businesses can literally fire LGBT employees for nothing more than being LGBT.
North Carolina has lost and will continue to lose millions of dollars because its bigoted governor is too ignorant, stubborn, and selfish to recognize that he's taking his state back to the Stone Age. The whole ordeal has become so cringeworthy that the Justice Department even sued the state after United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch came out in the law's denouncement. What's even more hilarious is that McCrory has been making these gaffes in the midst of running for reelection against longtime North Carolina AG Roy Cooper.
What I struggle to believe is that there are people who still are in full support of this law even after seeing the toll it's clearly taking on North Carolina. You either believe that transgenders using the bathrooms of the gender they identify with post-transition is a problem, or you're just an insanely insufferable, unbearably self-righteous jerk who believes that anyone different from you is undeserving of the basic right of protection against discrimination. That they're undeserving of human decency and basic common respect.
The bathrooms that fully-transitioned transgenders use are none of your business at all. I'm just there to do my business and quickly get out. I don't give a single thought to who else is in the bathroom with me; and unless I'm sharing a bathroom with a murderer, I don't expect that to change. You don't have to agree with transgenderism if you don't want to. But you shouldn't openly discriminate against them and have your state lose tens of millions of dollars just so you could practice hatred. Pat McCrory has singlehandedly turned this great and beautiful state into a joke and has shown exactly why he doesn't deserve to be its governor past his first term.
