So North Carolina state Republican lawmakers called a special session of the General Assembly yesterday to stop Charlotte’s LGBTQ anti-discrimination law from going into effect on April 1, and it turns out it’s not just Charlotte’s ordinance they want to outlaw, but any real progressive change sought by cities and counties in the Tarheel State.
WBTV obtained a copy of the proposed bill, entitled “An Act to Provide for Single Sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations,” Tuesday night.
The legislation requires that multi-occupancy bathrooms be limited to just one gender, using anatomy and birth certificates as a guide and applies to executive branch agencies controlled by the Governor as well as Council of State members and the UNC System.
A provision in the five-page bill allows school districts to use single occupancy bathrooms to make accommodations for students in special circumstances.
DOCUMENT: Click here to read the full bill
In addition to the provisions of the bill seeking to repeal the bathroom-related portions of Charlotte’s non discrimination ordinance, the bill also addresses several workplace issues.
The second part of the bill is referred to as the Wage and Hour Act. Under the act, local governments would be prohibited from setting their own local minimum wage.
The next section of the bill seeks to declare that the regulation of discriminatory practices in employment is an issue of statewide concern and, as such, must be left to the General Assembly.
Finally, the last section of the bill is referred to as the Equal Access to Public Accommodations Act, which places issues of public accommodation in the jurisdiction of the General Assembly.
So in addition to killing Charlotte’s anti-discrimination law, with this stupid bigoted bathroom bill, the NC GOP is looking to undo all local anti-discrimination, minimum wage, labor protection and equal physical access laws. because smaller, more responsive government, right?
Which just proves again that Republicans don’t care about government that works, they care about government that punishes those people whenever possible so that they become somebody else’s problem. The best part? It’s a combination of “bathroom bill”, home rule elimination, and “workplace protection” bill all rolled into one steaming pile of toxic GOP diarrhea.
By the way, the bill passed the NC General Assembly overwhelmingly, 83-24, the NC Senate 32-0 (as all NC Senate Democrats walked out) and GOP Gov. Pat McCrory signed this travesty into law last night. Total time on this legislation from start to finish: about 10 hours.
They had this ready to go, in order to steamroll any opposition to it and to prevent the kind of boycott backlash from building that Georgia is facing now over similar legislation. Blindside the opposition and dare them to react.
It’ll be up to the courts now to get the ball rolling on this.
One big hurdle, which reportedly killed South Dakota’s bathroom bill: Banning trans students from using the school bathroom that comports to their gender identity could violate federal law, particularly Title IX. The Justice Department and Department of Education interpret the law not just to ban sex discrimination in federally funded schools, but also ban anti-trans discrimination. So by passing an anti-trans bathroom law, North Carolina could risk big federal funds for public schools.
And my home state is well on its way to a complete disaster.
Redshift
My cousin lives in Charlotte, and her kid posted a link to this story with the caption, “And NC never missing the opportunity to try to attain the rank of worst Carolina”.
rikyrah
Yep. Read the whole thing…not about anti-discrimination laws. Look at all the rest of the stuff they put into the bill.
that’s who they are.
The Ancient Randonneur
The state that gave us Jesse Helms once again in the grips of bigots.
Anonymous At Work
Isn’t this type of legislation unConsitutional under Romer v. Evans? How can you distinguish it from that case?
Lex
Thanks for giving this abomination a national spotlight. This is how small-minded these dickheads were: An amendment was offered to leave in place local protections for VETERANS against discrimination, and they killed it.
Given the gerrymandering, Democrats have zero shot at taking control of either house this year. The best they can hope for is to render the GOP majorities non-veto-proof and to toss out Gov. Pat McCrory in favor of Democrat Roy Cooper (who, while not perfect, would be a huge improvement on Pat and would have vetoed yesterday’s bill). Y’all send Roy money.
Hoodie
@Redshift: I think NC has finally sunk beneath SC and is well on the way to Kansas and Lousiana. One of the problems with NC is that the state’s political and economic power is distributed among multiple urban areas, so that opposition to the troglodytes in the leg does not seem well coordinated (e.g.,sometimes it feels like Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham are in different states).
delk
And one NC Senator said with pride, “I will be a homophobic bigot until the day that I die.”
cleek
thanks for staying home in 2010 and 2014, NC libs.
hope you enjoyed that extra 45 minutes of couch time.
low-tech cyclist
Funny how conservatives don’t want Washington to ‘dictate’ to them, but are perfectly happy with a state government ordering local governments around.
S-Curve
I live in Durham, which is the most progressive city in the state. Please keep in mind that there are millions of us who find this absolutely despicable.
NC is about 50/50 Democratic/Republican in terms of population, but the post-2010 districts mean that the far-rights loons are over-represented. They got the bigoted base all fired up about the bathroom thing, and then threw some of their favorite goodies into the bill. This is, after all, the state that passed new abortion restrictions via a motorcycle safety bill.
Mustang Bobby
I don’t see anywhere in the bill where it allocates funding to pay for the inevitable lawsuits that will be filed to fight this bill. Good planning, dicks.
S-Curve
And Pat McCrory ran as a non-ideological, pro-business Republican, but he keeps pushing and signing anti-choice and anti-LGBT legislation that is going to cripple the state economy. Already has begun, in fact.
LAO
I was going to make a Caitlyn Jenner joke, but this is really not funny.
I’m old enough to remember when Republican elites secretly sighed in relief when the Supreme Court validated SSM because they believed it would remove the issue from our political discourse. Hahaha. Not going to happen. And it will not happen, for at least a generation because (1) they have been so successful whittling Roe and restricting abortion rights and (2) they don’t see a difference between granting full civil right to all of our citizens and abortion.
blueskies
@cleek: You got actual NC numbers to back that up?
lollipopguild
republicans never have a problem with big government ordering people around as long as they are running the big government.
cleek
@blueskies:
You got actual NC numbers to back that up?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/upshot/why-the-democrats-turnout-problem-is-worst-in-north-carolina.html?_r=0
and so, the GOP redistricted.
Read more at http://www.wral.com/2012-turnout-data-shows-nc-sharply-split/12009162/#hBkmkUrytM9U3p6c.99
lucslawyer
I was born in NC but was lucky to be adopted by an Army officer and his wife who got me out of that state when I was a baby. I get the shakes whenever I think of the bubba I could have become.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@cleek: Yep. And let’s not forget the blizzard of Pope-sponsored ads in every single district.
Ayn Rand acolyte Art Pope bought himself a state.
Thoroughly Pizzled
“Addresses” some issues? These weren’t issues, these were examples of local government functioning. It’s like Michigan’s emergency manager law, but not even bothering with the middleman.
jeffreyw
One thing that strikes me: “Bathroom Bill” is a pretty good ‘nym.
gene108
@Redshift:
I grew up in NC and one thing people there were proud of is NC was a lot more civilized than those hicks in SC.
I guess that is no longer the case.
philpm
Amazing how fast ‘pubs can get things done when it comes to fucking people over or invading their private lives, isn’t it?
Walker
This is bad, but people here are really underestimating SC if they think this makes NC worse than SC.
gene108
@Hoodie:
“e.g.,sometimes it feels like Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham are in different states)”
There's a real difference between the towns with major universities in them versus the rest of the state.
You can throw in Asheville, Boone, and Wilmington into this mix.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@cleek:
Clearly, what is needed is more aggressive progressive legislative proposals to energize youth turnout.
Full throated support from Mumia, free college, free daycare, free healthcare, a $25 minimum wage and daily excoriation of the wealthy from legislative chambers should do the trick of leading the proletariat to the glories of the historically inevitable revolution.
Martha
So when my dad needed to accompany my mom (who suffered from Lewy Body dementia) into the restroom to help her, he’d be breaking this law if “limited cccupancy restrooms” are only for one gender? Really? Okay then.
Or, I’m breaking the law when I use the men’s room when there’s the inevitable line of women for the ladies’ room (rebel that I sometimes am).
Figures.
Lex
@cleek: This, exactly. Dems stayed home in 2010 because Obama didn’t poop magical rainbow unicorns on health care or whatever, and this is what that petulance bought us.
NCSteve
@Anonymous At Work: Doesn’t matter. The hate on icky-trans people part is just the wooden horse to get the bill inside the gates. The real purpose of the bill is to attack local minimum wage, labor and accommodation standards. It’s all of the piece of the Kochtopus agenda that’s been behind every damn thing these assholes have done since the people who couldn’t be bothered to vote in 2010, and, worse, the 100-200K idiots who split their ballot to vote for Obama and McCrory (“because he couldn’t call himself a ‘different kind of conservative’ in his ads if it wasn’t true!”) in 2012 let them in.
Jado
“So by passing an anti-trans bathroom law, North Carolina could risk big federal funds for public schools.”
This doesn’t sound like anything that would concern Republicans. If any Republican Bubbas get affected by this, it’s because they haven’t pulled their kids out of public school and paid out the ear for private school. Republicans KNOW that government doesn’t work, therefore public school doesn’t work, and therefore any funding issues are, by definition, only supposed to affect “those” people.
If you GOP Bubbas still have kids in public school, it’s your own fault. Suffer with the Democrats.It’s not like any of this should come as a surprise.
No sympathy, no compassion, no equality, no compromise. Your NC GOP. Thunderdome for the 21st Century.
You’re welcome.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Lex:
Yeah, but Jane Hamsher is cute as a bug and helped rid us of those impure Blue Dogs of the 50 state strategy – of which I seem to remember North Carolina figuring highly in.
And now we’ve got some awesome voter ID requirements there, too.
I’d say that the accomplishments of the purity progressives in North Carolina are 100% of what would have been predicted.
Hoodie
@Lex: I don’t think this is particularly relevant to NC. The NC Dem party has been a trainwreck. It was devastated by a string of corruption scandals involving the traditional leadership, most of which came from down east. It has also suffered from factional infighting. All of this no doubt abetted the GOP in gerrymandering the everloving hell out of the state, which is easier to do because the Dem vote is concentrated in isolated pockets that don’t seem to communicate very well with one another. Candidates don’t have consistent messaging, and the consultants do stupid stuff like having Kay Hagan distance herself from Obama when a few more AA votes in Charlotte and Greensboro could have helped her retain her seat.
singfoom
Ah, doing the people’s will by denying anyone underneath their legislative heel the ability to do their will. Clever that. I always wonder how the cognitive dissonance tastes when they do shit like this. Hopefully some city will challenge this “law” and it’ll go up to the courts to strike it down.
jharp
Another reason that I would never live in the south.
And won’t go there unless absolutely necessary.
boatboy_srq
@lollipopguild: Republicans like state government. The highest authority the recognize (besides the local sheriff) is the state lege and the governor. “Federalism” was never about local control – it was about state control, especially when the state could override a federal impediment to the way they’ve always done things, but it’s also useful to keep enclaves of Those People™ in check as we see here.
Bex
OT, but check out the Twitter feed #InMyMuslimNeighborhood.
WarMunchkin
@Lex: Oh please. There is no evidence of this. The “liberals stayed home” narrative is purely the gut feeling of the subtribe of Democrats who are predisposed to blaming the left for losses. Show me numbers, or retire this tribally motivated truthiness.
I read through the NC bill and it is breathtaking. What’s to stop them from severely restricting voting on the day before the election? It will be destroyed by federal court but until then, there’s a time gap where they can do whatever they want right? Because in the space of time between when unconstitutional laws are passed and they are struck down, election officials who obey them do technically legal things?
Cacti
@Lex:
And you had losers like Ed Schultz using their media platforms to encourage lefties not to vote to teach Dems a lesson.
Cacti
@WarMunchkin:
See post 16, smile, have a Coke, sit down, STFU.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
I suspect the GOP doesn’t see this as a problem since they want to take things back to the 1850s.
Face
So….this forces trans people to use their “born” gender bathroom. What about those with sex changes? Are they required to revert back to their “born” gender bathrooms?
lurker dean
@Bex: Nice. It looks like #MuslimNeighborhood is being used more now..
Frankensteinbeck
I think a factor underrepresented in these explanations is Cleek’s Law. It’s a nationwide campaign to build as many structural barriers to liberals getting anything we want whatsoever before the demographic timer runs out. And nothing is an excuse for anything else. They want the whole pot, while they still have power.
Don’t underestimate the ‘demographic timer’ aspect, either. Whether or not it will happen, they see it happening. They see mixed couples on TV normalized, non-binary sexuality accepted, and more and more brown people every year. To us it seems normal, but to them it’s everywhere. And now a black president? It scares the shit out of them.
MattF
Somewhat OT. Microsoft introduced an interactive AI ‘chatbot’, and after interacting with the internet for a while, the bot turned into a Nazi. As noted by a commenter:
singfoom
@Face: I’m sure this bill authorizes the state to post “gender-checkers” to sit outside the door of each restroom in the state that has multiple stalls/urinals. They put their hand down your pants and confirm that you’ve got the right jiggly bits.
If you’ve got the wrong kind of bits, it’s the other bathroom for you. The whole bathroom thing / trans issue is just another shingle they can hang their “limited government” shingle on to make sure Those People know their place.
It’d be nice if we could stop this kind of shit from happening.
cleek
@jharp:
NJ, too
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/scott-garrett-stance-gay-candidates
Frankensteinbeck
@singfoom:
It means MtF TGs who don’t perfectly pass and women who aren’t attractive enough can be legally harassed. Asshole men (and some women) will feel perfectly safe to do so, so you can be damn sure they will.
Betsy
@Hoodie: Raleigh and Durham are two very, very separate cities and places. (Which I realize only underscores your point … I just hate seeing references to “Raleigh-Durham.” That’s an airport, not a place.
WarMunchkin
@Cacti: Have you actually read the links on #16?
Betsy
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: That may all be true, certainly. But the North Carolina takeover (from purple to red) has more to do with Art Pope’s money, ALEC, Koch and AFP influence. Citizens United kicked swing states like N.C., Ohio, Wisconsin rightward and there are parallel developments taking place in each of these states, and similar happenings in other purple states.
Humboldtblue
Speaking of laws, the President will speak today regarding the nomination of Garland to the Supremes. 9:30 PST
Betsy
@lollipopguild: Correct; these people define “freedom” as the freedom to make other people do what they want. Religious freedom, for example, means imposing your corporate “beliefs” on your employees, or a government clerk imposing her own definition of marriage on applicants for licenses.
In this mindset, liberty is defined by how many other people you control. See “Albion’s Seed” for details of this theory. It came out of the Virginia planter class via the English gentry (of the less mercantile portions of Great Britain). Played large role in the development of chattel slavery. Still echoes today and has explanatory value for U.S. politics. Unfortunately, it’s spreading from the South to the national arena.
Bruuuuce
::awaits announcements from Disney and the NFL that the sanctions they were threatening against Georgia for passing this sort of turd are now fully in force against North Carolina::
::drums fingers, and expects them to get bloody long before any word — if any — ever comes from those orgs::
Betsy
@S-Curve: Great points, truths.
Mike in NC
@Betsy: All true enough, but factor in voter apathy, which is huge here. There were massive turnouts in 2010 and 2014 by angry old white people, and basically nobody else bothered to leave the house.
Tractarian
These GOP idiots are acting as if it is still 2004.
This sh*t just won’t play any more, even in the South.
They just signed their own political death warrant.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@jharp: Michigan got there first. Just do what you can to protect your state, it could happen anywhere.
gene108
@Betsy:
It’s not a coincidence that Republican take over of state government started right after the Citizen’s United decision was handed down.
GOP operatives, like Ed Gillespie, saw it as a way to win down ticket races, in relatively less expensive local races, where a little bit of corporate cash can go a long way.
No one, even a somewhat tuned in person like myself, really knows much about who their state legislators are. One or two negative ads is all you need to define the person for voters, and because the fund raising needs of state legislator candidates, prior to 2010, was so low they did not have the money or time to respond to these ads.
scav
Well, I gotta assume that the legislators passing the thing just know in their heart of hearts that NC isn’t going to suffer any pushback from Disney etc because NC isn’t attractive enough to get films shot there anyway, let alone any superbowl action in the best of times.
Plus, with the whole fluidity of gender-identity and sexual preference pairings, they’ve probably pushed just as many people supposedly leering at their co-pee-ers (the places these people think are hotbeds of desire-based intrigue) as they’ve protected (!) others against. But then, it’s really all about the screaching on that subject, and not about any real issue. See also the existential religious threat of yoga.
greennotGreen
In about 1% of all births, the babies have some sort of difference from standard male/female. Most of those people are not apparent to anyone but their doctors and intimates. If you’re a male with androgen insensitivity (and therefore you are phenotypically female,) do you just break the law every time you use a public restroom, or do you use the one that aligns with your genetic makeup?
Why is it that conservatives are so obsessed with what goes on in everyone’s bedrooms and now bathroom stalls? Why can’t they just mind their own business?
NorthLeft12
Yes, its all about Republican control. They will champion whatever level of government gives them [the RWNJs] exactly what they want. If they had complete control of the federal branches, they would be extolling the efficiencies of standardizing all rules and regs to their liking.
gene108
@cleek:
Garrett’s an outlier in NJ politics. He’s a Bible-thumping right-winger, in a North Jersey community, which skews rich financial sector types, who tend to vote Republican, but are not much interested in the right-wing cultural jihad, other than what it can do to keep their taxes low.
Link
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@scav:
Um.
And, well….
singfoom
@greennotGreen: Because Jesus is watching you, especially when you poop. Pooping in the wrong gendered bathroom is a SIN.
Won’t someone think of the children/Christians/women/etc….
It’s just a continuation of the demonization of the other that the Republican party has doubled down on every year. In this case, the other is “scary transgender people”. Which equates to gays. And as all Republicans know, gay people are just a step away from pedophiles, so allowing people to use the bathroom they decide will lead to rape of children/Christians/women/men.
Playing to the baser instincts of the Christianists is all they’ve got in their playbook. MORAL PANIC!
Calouste
@Martha: And when a parent is out with their opposite gender child who can’t go to the bathroom on their own yet? I guess the kid just has to poop in their pants. Bonus for the haters: if it is a same-sex couple with an opposite gender child, neither of them can take it to a public bathroom.
RaflW
A preference for “Local Control” was of course a convenient fiction for as long as it was useful. Now that cities have done stuff like local wage ordinances, the true big-daddy urges of right-wing politics comes on full force.
These people have no principles, except power.
scav
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Oh dear, so the little sweethearts have some other secret scheme to somehow make them magically invulnerable to the business pushback they should know alreay is being exerted elsewhere? Or, again, is all about the screach?
RaflW
@Calouste: Yup, I was just in a bathroom in the Denver airport, and a stressed sounding daddy was calming his very young daughter who wanted to know why she was in a boy’s bathroom. I couldn’t care less, they went into a stall. I even reflected on how, in some other countries, there’s just a multi-stall bathroom, and a common sink area. Each person goes to their own booth to do what needs to be done, and no one cares.
But one of them will just have to wet themselves in N.C., apparently. Insane reactionary nonsense.
Calouste
@Anonymous At Work: It’s not unconstitutional if the GOP does it. Well, it wasn’t when Scalia was still alive.
Brendan in Charlotte
@cleek: It’s actually quite different. As of now, there are 2.6 million Registered Democrats, 2.0 million registered Republicans, and 1.9 million registered Unaffiliated. We here in Charlotte refer to our county as the blue state of Mecklenburg.
In spite of that, as several others have said, the 2010 losses mean that the Republicans were able to gerrymander their way to a huge advantage. Hopefully that will change soon, due to the court case regarding our Senate districts.
BTW, I didn’t see Republican lawmakers listed as a protected class, so I wonder if I could just go up to one and kick him in the family jewels…just kidding
greennotGreen
@singfoom: When I visited Paris and public restrooms were in short supply (oh they had them, but they were either out of service or being cleaned,) we used a unisex public restroom. There were only two stalls, so my female friend and I had to wait while men came, used the urinals, and left. Amazingly, neither of us was raped or in any way traumatized.
In China there were separate restrooms for men and women, but sometimes there were no doors, and the stall walls were only about three feet high. I survived that, too.
Why are Republicans such babies? Everybody poops. Everybody pees. Get over it!
lollipopguild
@boatboy_srq: You are correct-I am really surprised that one of these GOP state legislatures has not tried to bring back legal segregation.
raven
@Brendan in Charlotte: Like this?
cmorenc
There’s a fair argument to be made that any bathroom gender-identity nondiscrimination bill to accommodate the interests of transsexuals should only apply to those TS who have undergone gender-altering surgery, or at least are far enough along with hormone therapy that their outward appearance is substantially transformed to that of their new identity gender. That approach would also fairly accommodate the interests of folks concerned with non-TS voyeurs taking unfair advantage of nondiscrimination ordinances.
However, the approach by the NC General Assembly that indelibly locks a person’s sexual identity to their birth certificate is simply bigotry.
Eric U.
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Atrios keeps talking about how Democratic candidates are really bad at communicating why voters should turn out and vote for them. To me, simply outlining all the things that the republicans want to do should be enough. No need to get extravagant with the campaign promises. This seemed to be really starkly outlined in 2014, and the result was a rout.
Is this defense of religion thing something from ALEC, or is there another group that pushes these reactionary bills?
Mike E
@Mike in NC: The death of the state Dem party, schlerotic and ossified, was the determining factor..Fin de siècle fo’shizzle. Gov Perdue actually did some last minute good things before gracefully getting outa the way
Betsy
@Mike in NC: yeah.
Pee Cee
@gene108:
The thing with *South* Carolina is that the Republicans have been in power long enough so that they realize that they actually do have to make some sort of token effort to govern. The thing with *North* Carolina is that the Republicans do not yet realize (and they may not *ever* realize this) that they have to do more than blow through agenda items on the right-wing bucket list.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@scav: Personally? I think it’s about the election.
They learned with Amendment One in 2012 that a morality issue doesn’t have to be on the ballot to drive turnout. This gives the religious right something to talk about all summer.
NobodySpecial
Oh, look, it’s Punch a Hippie day in BJ land, complete with the most false falsehood since ‘They Stole Er JERBS!’
20 percent of Democratic voters in 2006 identified as ‘Liberal’.
20 percent of Democratic voters in 2010 identified as ‘Liberal’.
25 percent of Democratic voters in 2012 identified as ‘Liberal’.
23 percent of Democratic voters in 2014 identified as ‘Liberal’
The problem was NOT that the liberals didn’t turn out. The problems were that angry conservative older white men came out in droves and the youngs and ‘moderates’ did not. Period.
Let the fucking zombie lie die.
singfoom
@greennotGreen: It’s almost if MORAL PANIC is a tool in their toolbox and they’re doing this NOT for the benefit of their constituents but to preserve their own power.
I know, I know. I’m shocked, shocked….to learn that there’s governing in bad faith going on in this particular gambling establishment as it were.
Let’s remember though, it’s the Democratic party and the left that’s the NANNY state somehow.
patroclus
Given crap like this and the recent polls, I’m beginning to believe that the Democrats are headed towards a massive landslide victory this fall. Like this legislation, the Republicans have over-reached dramatically and their candidates are so boorish and vulgar and extreme (currently attacking each others’ wives) and so trapped in their own bubble that they have completely lost contact with the broader electorate. To make this a true wave election though, the Dems (Hillary or Bernie) need to begin to think about coattails and down ballot races. We haven’t had a massive Democratic landslide since 1964 and this could be a once in a generation chance.
gex
What amuses* me is that in almost every other instance, Republicans deny the fact of rape culture. When it comes to transgender access to public bathrooms, suddenly they are the ones arguing that it exists. And as is typical for them, they get it completely backward.
For certain, non-standard values of “amuses”
singfoom
@greennotGreen: It’s almost if MORAL PANIC is a tool in their toolbox and they’re doing this NOT for the benefit of their constituents but to preserve their own power.
I know, I know. I’m shocked, shocked….to learn that there’s governing in bad faith going on in this particular gambling establishment as it were.
Let’s remember though, it’s the Democratic party and the left that’s the NANNY state somehow.
FYWP…I got moderated so this might doublepost
singfoom
@NobodySpecial: It’s just a proxy for the standard “Every thread HRC vs Bernie/ Establishment vs. Purity Brigade food fight”. I’m sure something new and interesting will come out of it #snarkforthosewhocantsmellit
scav
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: That is fild under screaching, at least in my file drawers. It’s immediatly next to the folder that documents the public masturbatory pleasure they seem to take in being the religiously oppressed. oppressed being a) not getting their way in all instances and b) in seeing others be unlike themselves and happy with it / uncondemened. Christian faith and conservative lifestyles have become such a fragile hothouse little flower that must be protected from the slightest drafts.
WarMunchkin
@NobodySpecial: Post fact culture. Applies to all parties. The “truth” is defined by whichever team is in greater numbers. People know in their hearts and guts that liberals hated Obama and wanted to teach the Dems a lesson like children.
Lost in that is that this isn’t either of their faults. This is the fault of Republicans, full stop. They – and their voters – are the perpetrators of these crimes against human dignity.
patrick II
Transgender is the new gay. The battle against gay marriage has been lost, transgender bathrooms will help get the bigots to the polls in the fall. It seems that there are enough different subsets of prejudice that we may be fighting variations of prejudicial laws based on some aspects of race, sex, religion, age, or whatever forever. I am a little surprised they didn’t throw in a little extra voter suppression into this catch-all bill just to further piss off anyone who can think.
Amanda in the South Bay
@cmorenc: with no due respect go fuck your self.
beltane
@NobodySpecial: In my experience, it’s the “Who? What? I dunno.” Democrats who are the ones who fail to show up for midterm and local elections. However, I guess it’s a lot more fun to blame that mythical (and enormous) block of firebaggers than it is to accept the reality that an awful lot of registered Democrats really don’t give a shit about politics.
RSA
@Martha: @Calouste: There are exceptions listed in the bill for these circumstances, for people needing or giving assistance. Not that it makes the bill any better–it just means a narrow set of people targeted.
FlipYrWhig
@NobodySpecial: I agree that it’s a lie, but those stats still look weird to me. With lower turnout, I’d expect the proportion of self-declared liberals to go up: if moderates are bored and stay home, like you said, the median midterm D voter should be further to the left than the median Presidential-year D voter. If it’s holding steady, that’s a bit strange, no? Doesn’t that suggest that moderates and liberals are staying home for the midterms in roughly proportionate numbers? What am I missing?
Gin & Tonic
Is this thing on?
raven
@Gin & Tonic: It’s been down for 45 minutes.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
*taptaptap*
Ah, finally.
This statement from the North Carolina State AFL-CIO may shed some light on the real motive for this effort:
Matt McIrvin
North Carolina’s demographics have been gradually creeping toward those of a blue state for decades. It’s the same process that has turned Virginia to leaning Democratic in presidential elections. NC voted for Obama in 2008, though not in 2012, but if things keep going the way they’re going it looks like Hillary might take it again in 2016.
What we’re seeing here is just the latest stage of a scarily well-organized backlash against this at the state level. And, yes, poor turnout in non-presidential elections is what makes it all possible.
Brachiator
So,in North Carolina you can’t use the restroom unless you have your birth certificate in your back pocket and your junk hanging out for inspection?
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Seconded.
Matt McIrvin
@RaflW: Lots of public places now have small unisex “family restrooms” for exactly this sort of thing (usually with a single toilet, a baby-changing table and a lot of room to move around inside), but since they’re designed to be occupied by a single family, they can be in short supply.
greennotGreen
@Amanda in the South Bay: I think you’re being a little unfair to cmorenc. I read the comment as a sort of compromise, though I don’t think judging whether someone has sufficiently transitioned is the way to calm the new fear of the boogey-trains. Yeah, maybe it would be kinda creepy if a dude just threw on some eyeshadow and then used the women’s restroom, but what’s the big deal? Unless he was leering. But then, I don’t want another woman peeking through the stall door either. It should be about behavior, not anatomy.
Brendan in Charlotte
@raven: why yes, yes indeed!
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@patrick II:So we will live to see the day “Furriscution” becomes part of the national dialog? I am just trying to picture some Wingnut demigog whiping the base up about people dressing up like cartoon animals and,, my god, would that be so much like The Onion come to life.
Mai.naem.mobile
This both sex bathroom thing is old. I remember when Colorado was running some kind of gay rights protection proposition years ago(10 years ago maybe???) this RW Evangelical couple I knew was all over the men going into women’s bathroom. I’m assuming we all use public bathrooms. I seriously do not remember ever seeing a woman undressing in the sinks area of a public bathroom. Every large public bathroom has a disabled stall which ends up being used by people changing clothes. These are the same morons who think Sharia law is coming to town and Namaste is some ooh ooh pagan furriner witchy witchy musleemy term.
gene108
@Brachiator:
Well, Liberals keep complaining the government needs to invest in more programs, to help people get better paying jobs.
Just think of the bathroom inspectors as the first wave in the government hiring we could use to really help put people back to work.
D58826
@Matt McIrvin: These uni-sex bathrooms are a godsend for folks with disabilities. When traveling from the Charlotte airport in the mid 90’s we had to have some one meet us to help my wheelchair bound wife to the ladies room. Once they installed the uni-sex bathroom, then traveling became much less stressful. And the sky did not fall in.
American Airlines, Wells Fargo and some other large employers are starting to pitch a fit over this law.l
Matt McIrvin
@Mai.naem.mobile: Hell, I remember people raising a stink about men creeping in the ladies’ bathroom as an argument against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
Jay C
@Anonymous At Work:
At first glance, it would seem so: IANACL, of course, so all I know about the legal ramifications of the NC bill comes from reading the Internet* – but AFAIK, the main difference between the NC “Bathroom Bill” and the Colorado Amendment that was struck down in Romer is that the latter was more specifically discriminatory, while NC’s is a much broader law. Why that would make a difference is beyond me, but I’m guessing that a lot of the Bathroom Bill wouldn’t, in fact, pass Constitutional muster. Maybe. I hope.
But: as WarMunchkin points out in @#35, It will take a considerable time for any challenge to this law to reach a Federal Court (or SCOTUS): time for a lot of damage to be done. And even if it’s immediately struck down, its demise will merely serve as just another rallying point/grift opportunity for the RW.
D58826
@NorthLeft12: They already are. In the hearings last week on the Flint water issue, the Goopers beat up on the federal EPA administrator for not overriding the actions of the state. Never mind that a Gooper sponsored law prevented the EPA from doing just that.
pseudonymous in nc
@Redshift:
It’s a compelling start for the NC legislature. If it goes on like this, SC will re-introduce slavery around Christmas to seal the victory.
20-fucking-10. Not only let in those bastards, but allowed them to gerrymander themselves seats for a fucking decade.
@cleek:
Needs some correction. FWIW, the Dems showed up pretty well in 2014, but the gerrymander on the state and congressional level means that a 50-50 state delivers about 66-34 in seats to the GOP.
Rob in CT
I think it’s a little silly to believe that it’s leftier-than-thous staying home that typically hurts Democrats in mid-terms. There simply aren’t enough of them to matter most of the time. They’re loud and annoying on the internet, but hey, so were the PUMAs. Remember them? Exactly.
It’s “marginally attached” voters who don’t show up for mid-terms. Generally speaking, these are not people who obsess over politics (we’d be better off if they did, most likely). This is the group that thinks voting is something you do every 4 years and are bewildered when everything doesn’t work out because one election went the right way. Various demographic groups have more mid-term turnout drop-off than others (GOP turnout typically *also* drops in mid-terms, it just drops by much less), such as young people, various minority groups, and so forth and those groups lean D.
That’s why the Dems get their asses kicked in mid-terms. I really don’t know what to do about it. It may simply be part & parcel of the makeup of the Democratic/leans-D coalition.
gene108
@pseudonymous in nc:
It’s gonna last longer than a decade, unless some more teeth can be put into the VRA, so as to force redistricting.
If you can’t get enough votes to flip legislatures or the House, even in 2012, which was a Presidential year, I don’t see any way things can be changed in 2020.
I think the best hope is a Democratic appointed majority on the Supreme Court undoes the damage the Roberts court has done in the last 5 years.
Brachiator
@Rob in CT:
This is not true. Here is something from the Pew Center on this.
1840s. It’s not a marginally attached voter problem, or even a Democratic voter problem. And it’s not a coalition problem.
J R in WV
@pseudonymous in nc:
It seems to me that if the count of Dems voting and Repugnants voting are equal, the fact that those votes deliver 66-34 legislative seats to the GOTea party is proof on the face of it that there is illegal fiddling with something going on in the state!
Over the past 20 years we have spent thousands of dollars visiting friends and relatives in NC, and once we even drove to Charlotte NC, spent the night there in a Sheraton, in order to fly out the next morning to a tropical isle, returning via Charlotte a week later. The Sheraton allowed us to leave our car parked at their hotel lot, no charge, while we were traveling.
We will never be flying out of or through Charlotte again, ever. Sorry to screw Sheraton, but their problem isn’t us, it’s the government where they are doing business.
There are plenty of beach towns that welcome LBGTQ people to visit or even move there. In states where the LBGTQ population is protected against this kind of stupid archaic prejudice.
Seanly
I am so sick of this hatred – here’s what I posted in my FB feed:
“F*ck McCrory and all the nasty little hateful jagoffs in the NC legislature.
America is not being destroyed by single mothers, people with a foreign name or darker skin tone, people who can’t find a job after Wall Street nearly wrecked the economy, or women who want access to contraception and control of their own bodies. It’s being ruined by white, male jerks afraid of letting go of the levers of powers they’ve had for over 2000 years. It’s being ruined by people who think their brand of angry sky daddy agrees with their misinterpretations of the mistranslated scribbles of lonely shepherds (or alternately Roman propaganda to control their slaves). I’m so sick of all of these a*sholes. So many jerks who are so wrong about so much and yet control so many of our lives.”
Did I say how sick & tired I am of all these douchebags? It’s nothing but hatred of gays, blacks, women, etc. etc.
Ultimately, they’re just bullies in suits. As a kid who was always picked on for being small, quiet, slight, wearing glasses, buck-toothed, etc, I learned to hate bullies. Arrrgh
PaulW
I hope that the major employers in North Carolina refuse to support this bill, and openly fundraise candidates to run against these Republican a-holes in the state lege. They ought to, it’s the best way to express their frustration with these bastards.
To every independent voter in North Carolina: this is what you get when you vote Republican. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP THAT.
father pussbucket
@jeffreyw:
Yeah, before I started reading I assumed it was some GOOPer.
Summer
@cleek: dens win the popular vote!
NobodySpecial
@FlipYrWhig: Sorry I couldn’t get back to this, the blitz happened while I was composing my reply, and I had to sleep for work.
Anyways, for what it’s worth, self described Conservatives voted at 37 percent in 2014; in 2010 it was 42 percent. It’s just that they were incredibly motivated in the off year elections, and we got our asses handed to us as a result. Demographics will change midterms for the better, but the dying off of the angry old white male voter as the key voting block will take a while. I’m hopeful 2020 will be the change election we need.
3am
@Zandar
Thank you for bringing this up. The impact of the bathroom restriction will be minimal, as vile as they are (are they going to do sex checks on people that look too manly or feminine for their stated gender? Law enforcement must have had a collective eye roll that registered on the Richter scale). The bastards in the NCGA are taking advantage of the troglodyte reaction to the Charlotte ordinance to 1) take any sort of workplace standard for government contractors at a municipal or county level and 2) guts penalties for violations of public accommodations laws.
The whole “bathroom” aspect is a smoke screen to keep attention away from this aspect of the bill. Please keep the pressure on.
3am
@Zandar in same boat on the home state. Very embarrassing, and if you believe Chris Sacca on Twitter, has *already* cost the state tech jobs. To emphasize, it didn’t just remove the ability for cities/counties to set standards, it removed a floor for them:
“A county may not require a private contractor under this section to abide by any restriction that the county could not impose on all employers in the county, such as paying minimum wage or providing paid sick leave to its employees, as a condition of bidding on a contract.”
becomes
“A county may not require a private contractor under this section to abide by regulations or controls on the contractor’s employment practices or mandate or prohibit the provision of goods, services, or accommodations to any member of the public as a condition of bidding on a contract or a qualification-based selection, except as otherwise required by State law.”
Unbelievable. Same deal for cities.
Also,
“The Human Relations Commission in the Department of Administration shall have the authority to receive charges of discrimination from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pursuant to an agreement under Section 709(b) of Public Law 88-352, as amended by Public Law 92-261, and investigate and conciliate charges of discrimination. Throughout this process, the agency shall use its good offices to effect an amicable resolution of the charges of discrimination.”
becomes
“The Human Relations Commission in the Department of Administration shall have the authority to receive charges of discrimination from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pursuant to an agreement under Section 709(b) of Public Law 88-352, as amended by Public Law 92-261, and investigate and conciliate charges of discrimination. Throughout this process, the agency shall use its good offices to effect an amicable resolution of the charges of discrimination. This Article does not create, and shall not be construed to create or support, a statutory or common law private right of action, and no person may bring any civil action based upon the public policy expressed herein.“
mrmike
@cmorenc:
No. No there is not. Defining away parts of someone’s personhood based on how you perceive them is pretty much the definition of indefensible.