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NC law: Not Just about Bathrooms

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by rocketsjudoka, May 15, 2016.

  1. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    I'm starting this as separate thread than the one about voyeurism in Canadian bathrooms to focus on the NC law that really is at the center of this debate.

    As this piece points out there are many more aspects to this debate than just bathrooms but also how laws like these affect many other aspects of LGBT rights and other minorities.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...7946ec-186b-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html

    ‘Not about bathrooms’: Critics decry North Carolina law’s lesser-known elements

    DURHAM, N.C. — In this state where the modern bathroom wars began, some church and civil rights leaders have begun to spread the word that there’s plenty else to worry about in the controversial new law known formally as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act.

    The law not only reverses a Charlotte ordinance that had extended some rights to gay and transgender people. It also prevents city and county governments from setting a minimum-wage standard for private employers and limits how people can sue for discrimination in state court. And it contains a provision allowing for remaining parts of the law to stand if others are struck down in court.

    Those provisions, opponents say, are pernicious attempts to roll back rights, and they have been tucked into a bill that has a very different public face.

    “This is really a devious bill that harms workers under the guise of regulating bathrooms,” said Harold Lloyd, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law.

    A campaign is underway to explain just that to North Carolinians such as John Houston, a 70-year-old pastor from Kinston, who says he shares Gov. Pat McCrory’s moral conviction that a law is needed to make people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate.

    Activists and groups including the state NAACP are now on a crusade to educate conservative voters such as Houston, who agree with the law because of deeply held religious beliefs or live in more-conservative parts of the state, about its additional components.

    They say the totality of the law disproportionately affects African Americans, women and immigrants along with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and is reminiscent of the policies of the segregation era.

    Even as the heated debate on transgender bathroom accommodations spreads across the country in response to Friday’s directive from the Obama administration to all public schools, opponents of the new law are crisscrossing the state, often invoking the civil rights battles that took place here and throughout the South in the 1950s and 60s.

    “This is not about bathrooms. It’s about whether or not you can codify hate and discrimination into the laws of the state,” said the Rev. William Barber II, who leads the North Carolina NAACP and is also fighting the state over its voter-identification law.

    Barber and other opponents said the law, which was introduced, debated, passed and signed in a single day in March, was put forward to help McCrory (R) and Republican legislators hang onto their seats in what is bound to be a contentious November election in a state whose liberal cities and conservative countryside have turned it a solid shade of purple. McCrory is in a tight race with Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, who has denounced the law and said he wouldn’t defend it.

    “This is about November. It’s about wedge issues, and it’s about sexual and racial fears,” Barber said. He said it is the latest manifestation of the “Southern strategy” employed by Republicans to gain political support based on fear of the other.

    “It’s almost sad that they’re living in a historical time warp and they believe that they can run these little wedge issues and people can’t see through them.”

    A spokesman for McCrory did not return requests for comment, nor did the bill’s sponsors. The governor took action to try to blunt the backlash, banning discrimination in state personnel decisions and calling for the legislature to enact a law reversing the provision that makes it difficult to sue for discrimination in state court.

    But in places like rural Kinston, whose population is about 68 percent black, many said they agreed with the transgender bathroom part of the law for moral or religious reasons, but that they knew little about the minimum-wage and employment-discrimination provisions.

    “If you’re going to lose millions of dollars and affect everyone in this state, maybe it ain’t right,” Houston said. Lenoir County, where Kinston is located, gives free breakfast and lunch to all students, a program funded in large part by federal dollars.

    The White House said Thursday it would not cut federal funding to North Carolina while the lawsuits are winding their way through court.

    [Federal judge upholds controversial North Carolina voting law]

    Barber went to western North Carolina earlier this month to talk about the issue, and he plans to have what he calls a “Moral Monday” protest in Raleigh this week. At least 54 people protesting the law, which is also called House Bill 2 (H.B. 2) and which Barber calls “Hate Bill 2,” were arrested at a sit-in at the state Capitol last month.

    Barber said he tries to present the totality of the law, and people typically disagree with it once they learn more about the transgender issue and minimum-wage provisions.

    At least one legislator who voted for it said he didn’t realize all that the law encompassed. North Carolina state Rep. George W. Graham Jr., who represents Lenoir County and voted for the bill, told the Raleigh News and Observer that he didn’t know until after the vote that the legislation dealt with issues of minimum wage and discrimination suits.

    “Those are two of the major things that are antithetical to what the state’s history has been about and its evolution over the last 50 years,” said state Sen. Daniel T. Blue Jr. (D).

    The campaign against H.B. 2 is similar to one that advocates waged in the wake of a battle over voting rights here after the state passed a controversial voting rights law, one of the strictest in the nation in 2013. The Justice Department and state civil rights groups sued. In April, a federal judge upheld North Carolina’s law; the groups have appealed.

    Barber said the law and a redrawing of the state’s congressional maps led to an “unconstitutionally constituted legislature passing unconstitutional legislation.”

    U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, a North Carolina native whose father grew up in the segregated South, also used the language of the civil rights movement that Barber and others have employed when talking about H.B. 2. In a news conference Monday, she compared conflicts about bathrooms and transgender people to Jim Crow laws.

    McCrory said on “The Mark Levin Show” on Monday that he takes issue with people comparing the bathroom law to the civil rights struggle.

    “There is absolutely no relevance between the issue of civil rights for African Americans, which went through a tremendous struggle, and the issue of how do we determine the gender of a person going into our public showers or public restrooms or public locker rooms,” McCrory said.

    He said the church in which Lynch grew up supports the law; her father was the pastor at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham for years. The church said last week the pastor has not taken a public position on the law.

    Lynch’s lawsuit is suing over “compliance and implementation of Part I” of the North Carolina law, not the other sections. The Justice Department did not respond to a request seeking comment.

    “Who would you be in 1963?” Nancy “Mama Nia” Wilson, executive director of SpiritHouse, an arts and organizing group in Durham, said she asks people after she explains the law.

    That appeal has not yet changed the minds of voters such as Carlos Parker, who was chatting with a friend at Christian Cuts barbershop in Kinston. He didn’t know about the other provisions of the bill but agrees with McCrory’s stance on bathrooms.

    “I’m with McCrory. I hate to say that,” said Parker, 38. “I think McCrory is standing his ground for religious beliefs.”
     
  2. B-Bob

    B-Bob "94-year-old self-described dreamer"

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    So many people I know in NC are so upset about this (moderates, left-leaning, and youth), that I think it could really finally cost the state GOP in this case, ironclad gerrymandering or no. They could lose the governorship, for sure, but it wouldn't take that much to lose their supermajority in the state legislature too.
     
  3. Exiled

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    If some of the attention to these public bathrooms policy shifted toward more cleaner facilities and mandatory hygiene practices ,everyone win , expect those with diarrhea and filthy habits
     
  4. giddyup

    giddyup Contributing Member

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    I peed in the ladies restroom at a Waffle House in Winston-Salem, NC this evening just to prove a point!
     
  5. Exiled

    Exiled Member

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    Cool story Bro, pictures or it didn't happen
     
  6. giddyup

    giddyup Contributing Member

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    If I realized I was making history, I would have recorded it. I just had to pee and get back on the road. Necessity is the mother of invention...
     
  7. El_Conquistador

    El_Conquistador King of the D&D, The Legend, #1 Ranking
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    [Premium Post]
    Part of why Trump is gaining in popularity is because of the total lunacy of how issues have been prioritized over this administration's time in office. Are we seriously debating who can use whose bathrooms, right after we finished impugning the integrity of the police, right after we finished discussing whether the Redskins should change their name, right after Islamic State terrorists attacks are used as a reason to deflect attention to gun laws, right after we had a national discussion about a teenager who mocked up a clock-bomb and brought it to school and all of the sudden the teachers were racist... It's absurdity. This is the pussification of America -- led by a community organizing, once-a-week lecturer at a college, who answers to his live-in mother in law. People are sick of tip-toeing around trying not to offend people. Hear me now, I speak from experience, it's better to confidently insult someone than to meekly prance around an issue trying to avoid damaging a person's feelings.

    GOOD DAY
     
  8. arno_ed

    arno_ed Contributing Member

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    It is funny to see conservatives blaming liberals for Trumps succes in their own party....

    Repiblicans are voting for this idiot.
     
  9. peleincubus

    peleincubus Member

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    Haha exactly. So when the republicans lose all but one of the popular votes for president after this election in the last 32 years it will be ALL the liberals fault. Zero blame for having no one good enough to beat Donald freaking Trump in the primaries.

    I'm not a huge PC guy. At the same time abhor racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. etc. etc. So continue to remain willfully ignorant about those problems in the Republican Party and you will have the entire Supreme Court liberal as can be imaginable. I know the internet likes to make fun of the PC crowd, safe spaces, yeah it's annoying but the backlash that accompanies that annoyance can have its consequences also.

    In the meantime T Jorge you will always have John Kerry defeated at least.
     
  10. Rashmon

    Rashmon Contributing Member

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    Are you just a perv or transgender?
     
  11. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Standing up or sitting down?
     
  12. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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    I think you have this backwards. The Do-Nothing GOP Congress has suddenly sprung to action on all the important issues like bathrooms, Facebook trending topics, Planned Parenthood funding while sidestepping Zika funding, Surpeme Court vacancies, healthcare, budget.

    No wonder Obama's approval ratings have gone up, while the GOP led Congress continues to be in the low teens.

    Last, the GOP Congress is trying to avoid the stench of Donald Trump. They see it as a Lose Lose situation... not only do they see the Presidency as a lost cause in 2016, but they see the growing possibility that they lose the Senate.
     
  13. ima_drummer2k

    ima_drummer2k Contributing Member

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    I'm so glad Dan Patrick is spending all his time protecting us from child-raping trannies lurking in public bathrooms instead of wasting his time with meaningless issues like property taxes going up by 20% every year.
     
  14. Northside Storm

    Northside Storm Contributing Member

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    What happened to Honey Bear?
     
  15. AroundTheWorld

    Supporting Member

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    This happened to me a couple of weeks ago at a hip restaurant in Berlin. They are so hip, they don't have signs on the bathrooms stating whether they are for men or women. So I thought they just had one unisex bathroom. I did get a bit suspicious when the bathroom looked quite clean and had no urinals, but the matter was urgent, so I took care of business. Later I realized that the men's bathroom was at the other end of the rather large main area of the place.

    I guess if I had been "caught" (there was nobody else in the bathroom when I was there), I could have just said that I really felt like a woman in a man's body or something or whatever - according to the resident leftists.
     
  16. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    Conservatives lost the war on gays and so they're moving onto another wedge issue they can extort temporary political gain out of (i.e. rustle the jimmies of the base) before it blows up in their face again and costs them even more elections across the country.

    I'd say it were funny if it weren't legitimately negatively impacting humanity. But the worm will turn soon enough, and with it, another generation of disaffected pubbies and potential pubbies will be lost to the ether.

    Edit:

    ^^^^ Case in point. Reasonable conservatives see this as a conflict looking for a cause.
     
  17. AroundTheWorld

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    Donny - you are a reasonable guy, so I am not trying to be offensive and I am not trying to mock anything here:

    Can you please help me understand how it "negatively impacts humanity" if someone uses a toilet in one room vs. the other room, the only difference being who else is in the room? :confused:

    You go in there to get a job done, how does it even "negatively impact humanity" who else is there?

    Also, you made it seem like conservatives are driving this topic - isn't it the other way around?
     
  18. geeimsobored

    geeimsobored Contributing Member

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    Oh for sure. Unlike most of the South (with the exception of Virginia and Kentucky), North Carolina has a functioning Democratic Party with multiple elected statewide officials. Consequently, they're in position to put up an actual fight.

    At this rate, the GOP will take big hits in the legislature and could even get swept when it comes to statewide office. Even Richard Burr's senate seat isn't looking that solid anymore.
     
  19. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    Conservatives are the one's passing laws about it so I yes they are the ones driving the issue.

    As the thread topic indicates though this is more than just about bathrooms. Under the guise of protecting children and women in bathrooms from cross dressing pervs they are putting in several other things that turn back protections on minorities.
     
  20. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    Thanks!

    Not to put on an SJW Fedora here, but trying to marginalize or de-legitimize transexual people creates a negative net outcome for the world at large. Much the same way any kind of civil inequality or injustice does.

    In the states, no. The bustle around this is strictly conservative driven. Trans people have been using their restroom of choice almost entirely without drama or conflict in the history of forever. Laws have been passed protecting their right to fair treatment as such for many years. Not a peep.

    Then, all of the sudden, it became a huge goddam problem for social conservatives. They beat the drums of culture war, lit up talk radio, and flew the banners high for political action.

    Jimmy status = rustled
    Base = frothing
    Mission = accomplished
     

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