This year the Human Rights Campaign, the national LGBTQ advocacy organization, is celebrating 10 years of its Municipal Equality Index. The group calls the annual report “the nation’s premier benchmarking tool for municipal officials, policy makers and business leaders to understand how well cities across the nation are embodying LGBTQ+ inclusion in their laws, policies, and services.”
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HB2
HB2
Last week Charlotte became the latest — and, by far, largest — North Carolina community to pass new LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination protections. The new protections come five years after state lawmakers and then-Gov. Pat McCrory passed HB 2, preventing local governments from introducing new non-discrimination ordinances.
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As the legacy of HB 2 continues to fade, nine North Carolina cities and counties now bar discrimination against LGBTQ individuals Four new North Carolina communities now have LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances, protecting citizens from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
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It’s been almost four years now since North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders capitulated to global economic pressure and effectively admitted the error of their ways by agreeing to repeal the infamous anti-transgender law known as HB 2.. And while the agreement that Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore cut with Gov. Roy Cooper at the time was far from complete or satisfactory...
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North Carolina was a legitimate swing state this year, having gone narrowly to President Barack Obama in 2008 and narrowly to his Republican challenger Mitt Romney in 2012.
The state leaned conservative this year, part of a series of swing state Republican flips that put presidential candidate Donald Trump over the top in the electoral college.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
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The official response by the North Carolina Republican Party to the decision by the NCAA to move seven championship events out of the state next year because of the anti-LGBT law HB2 was startling and offensive.
GOP spokesperson Kami Mueller said the NCAA decision was “so absurd it’s almost comical” and was looking forward to the “NCAA merging all men’s and women’s teams together as singular, unified, unisex teams.”
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Gov. Pat McCrory thinks transgender people are sick and mentally ill and that they need treatment, not protections from discrimination.
And he is sure that allowing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity puts thousands of women and children across North Carolina at risk from sexual predators, even though that hasn’t happened in the more 200 cities that already allow it.
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As the battle of HB2 continues it is instructive to look at Gov. Pat McCrory’s shifting positions on the law, its necessity and the arguments used to justify it.
Whether he was voicing concerns about “public safety” and protecting “long established values and norms,” defending “state sovereignty” or contending that that transgender people are actually mentally ill, the Governor’s explanations for the law (and, indeed, his position on the law itself) have changed frequently and sometimes dramatically over the last six months.
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Last week's federal ruling blocking part of HB2 for three defendants in the ongoing lawsuit was seen as a victory for LGBT people and their advocates.
In his 81-page ruling, federal Judge Thomas Schroeder concluded those challenging HB2 "are likely to succeed" in arguing HB2 violates Title IX, ?the federal law against gender discrimination in educational institutions.
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