For over a month now, the North Carolina General Assembly’s so-called “bathroom bill” has been on the books as an embarrassment to the state – the Republicans in the legislature have ruined NC’s reputation as one of the South’s more progressive states, already costing us at least $40 million in lost investments and shaping up to cost the state as much as $5 billion a year. Furthermore, the bill places every single one of the estimated 22,000 transgender residents of North Carolina at risk every time they use a public restroom, and the doubling-down on this bill in the face of action from the Department of Justice shows just how little the NCGA Republicans care about our children, as they are currently happily risking billions of dollars in federal education funding – funding which, if lost, would outright prevent thousands from attending university in the state, myself included, as it includes federal financial aid. The worst part of this, though, is that I suspect that everything is going according to plan for the NCGOP.
Most of the fuss around this bill has been around the provisions which require people to use the bathroom which corresponds with the sex that a person was assigned at birth, regardless of their current gender identity or whether they have gone through sex reassignment surgery, which is certainly worrying: in fact, the Department of Justice’s letter to Governor Pat McCrory focuses only on these provisions. This means that, when this law goes to court (as it will), there seems to be a significant chance that the eventual ruling will only be able to strike down as unconstitutional the provisions which discriminate against trans people. Cue victory celebrations from the state’s residents, progressive groups and the businesses that have withdrawn from NC in protest – and, I suspect, state lawmakers (though these celebrations will happen, of course, privately).
If a court only strikes down those provisions of the bill in violation of Title VII and Title IX – those which affect the trans community – then the rest of the bill’s provisions would stand, meaning that employees will continue to be unable to sue for discrimination at the state level and that local municipalities will continue to be unable to set their own minimum wages. What is left, then, after a court strikes down the provisions of the bill which discriminate against the trans community, is this: a bill passed as a smack on the wrist for Charlotte daring to pass its own anti-discrimination ordinances and which, as a consequence, both denies municipalities the right to set their own ordinances on labor and forces ordinary people who face employment discrimination to bring suit on the federal level. The bathroom provisions, then, are an effective smokescreen: everybody kicks up a fuss, gets those overturned and then goes home in celebration while provisions that continue to deny local governments the ability to legislate on the local level stand. The NCGA and Pat McCrory are using the trans community for their own gains. It seems that the GOP is only the party of small government when it comes to Washington, because they seem very interested in concentrating power in Raleigh here.
Now, here comes the real kick in the pants on this: the state GOP is in a very comfortable positions to get away with this because while we can turn the entire legislative branch blue this November, over 90 percent of the legislators who voted for HB2 are either running unopposed or are in districts so safe for the Republican party that it would be almost impossible to get a Democrat elected. We can get McCrory out, sure, but the people who wrote this bill and rushed it through the legislature? They are, for the most part, here to stay regardless of how the election in November turns out. They have us good and fooled, and there is not much we can do to fix it.
