Paypal bids NC a fond farewell:
In a move that will cost the city hundreds of jobs, PayPal on Tuesday scrapped plans for a new Charlotte operations center in the most dramatic corporate response yet to a new North Carolina law that limits the legal protections of LGBT individuals.
The payment processor’s decision led to renewed calls for Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature to overturn a law that has drawn criticism from big companies such as Bank of America and American Airlines as well as sports organizations such as the NBA. The CEO of Red Ventures, a prominent Charlotte-area marketing and technology firm, on Tuesday said he would “seriously reconsider” adding jobs in the state because of the legislation approved last month.
N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat running against McCrory in this November’s election, said the legislation, known as House Bill 2, poses a threat to the state’s economy.
“These are new, better paying jobs North Carolina won’t get because Governor McCrory has put his political ideology above all else,” Cooper said. “It’s time to reverse course and take actions to undo the damage.”
WV voted down our religious bigotry bill, it sure would be nice if maybe someone like PayPal would give us a looksie. It’s not being overdramatic to say 400 jobs like that could be a game changer here for a community. Plus, if it works out, maybe more companies will show up.
Betty Cracker
This might be the only way to drag the more backward states kicking and screaming into the 21st century — make them pay a steep price when they pull this shit. After the Invisible Hand punches a few of them in the snot locker, maybe they’ll find baking a wedding cake for Sue and Ellen isn’t exactly the same as being thrown to the lions after all.
Berial
MS giving NC a run for their bigoted money.
Clarion Ledger piece from their editor. This bill was signed into MS law today.
LAO
While I hate to hurt the people of Charlotte — who are on the correct side of history on this civil rights issue — the only thing that may burst the epistemic bubble of the far right Christianists are actions like this. Of course, it hasn’t made any difference in places like Kansas, so perhaps I’m also stuck in an epistemic bubble?
JMG
The only way to drag the old Confederacy into social progress is to use the armed might of the U.S. government. True in the 1860s, true in the 1950s and ’60s, true now.
dedc79
I’m with you 95% of the way. Will just note though that this sucks the most for the people of Charlotte – and they were the ones who passed the good ordinance. It just so happens the wingnut legislators and governor responded to the good ordinance by drafting/enacting horrible legislation.
ETA: Or, what LAO said above…
Mnemosyne
@LAO:
Sadly, it will do nothing to burst the epistemic bubble, because the problem will be said to be that those mean ol’ gays aren’t letting people punch them in the face anymore, and if they would just stop demanding equal rights and let people punch them in the face without repercussions again, we wouldn’t have any of these problems.
OzarkHillbilly
The fine Republican dominated state legislature of Misery is working up their own Gay Hate law/amendment. They want to put it on the ballot for November. No doubt it will be a very close call.
RaflW
Will McCrory now try making a poorly produced youTube video calling PayPal names?
I am a PayPal user and I am pleased with their show of backbone.
The Ancient Randonneur
… “Bathroom Safety Law” the current euphemism amongst the true believers. Wow. Why no “Protection from Clergy” Laws? Aren’t they more likely to prey on the unsuspecting?
OzarkHillbilly
@LAO: Nobody wants to go to Kansas, North Carolina is quite beautiful tho.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mnemosyne:
LAO
@Mnemosyne: I think you are right. I don’t want you to be right but, here we are. The good news, however, appears to be the young folk — who may love their bible — but do not appear to be homophobic bigots.
bemused
@dedc79:
The Republicans are blaming Charlotte non-discrimination ordinance for push back from corps and loss of jobs. Typical.
LAO
@OzarkHillbilly: True. I’m one of those people who will not willing spend my money in states that codify discrimination or seek to criminalize and marginalize women’s health issues. My vacations options are dwindling fast.
RaflW
@Berial: I am not one to excuse anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry anywhere. But Mississippi has never made any pretensions to being the “new South.” There is no Asheville, or even Charlotte or Golden Triangle in Mississippi. North Carolina has been in play politically, and a bit of a culture-war-straddler for a while.
MS has long been a regressive, racist, gay-hating backwater, and clearly wants to stay that way.
Patricia Kayden
Kudos to PayPal for doing the right thing. I hope other companies follow suit. Discrimination needs to be costly and painful so that bigots can get the message clearly that this is not the 1950s.
Anoniminous
goddamn bigots
For anyone (like me) working in an allied field of Cognitive Neuroscience gender dysphoria is a fascinating subject.
If you are interested in what we know — which ain’t much — go to Google Scholar and look for “The transsexual brain – A review of findings on the neural basis of transsexualism” and click on the link to researchgate.net. (Clicking on the title will take you to a paywall.)
And if you haven’t seen Little Game … do.
WereBear
Kicking them in the wallet is more effective. Sure, you’ve got the types who want to be martyrs to this cause, but headlines with big money lost by bigotry, followed by pointed ridicule on the comedy shows… that’s how we make political progress in the 21st Century!
Patricia Kayden
@JMG: President Obama could withhold federal funds until N.C. gets a clue. That would be a great way to get N.C. to reconsider this silly law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/us/politics/north-carolina-anti-discrimination-law-obama-federal-funds.html?_r=0
Iowa Old Lady
The fervor with which Republican lawmakers in these states cling to LGBT bigotry is just incomprehensible to me. Move on, people.
Kylroy
I think it would be hi-fucking-larious if they move the center to WV, or anywhere that recently rejected a hate law.
WereBear
@Iowa Old Lady: What have the Republicans got left? Bigots, and Fundamentalist Christians.
But then, I repeat myself.
bemused
We have family in the Raleigh area and have seen the increase in business growth over the years we have visited. North Carolina does have a lot of beautiful areas, Asheville is a favorite. This law is really going to hurt the state economy. I wonder how many residents would put their fear of non-discrimination over jobs.
RaflW
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh I’m sure PayPal is on the cusp of opening a 400-employee unit in Riyadh, too.
Jeepers, the stupid from these bigotry-defenders.
RaflW
@Iowa Old Lady: They pretty much have no one else small enough to kick any more. They’re that desperate. Which as a gay person, I find both upsetting, and indicative of how screwed the wingers are. And that gives me some hope for the not too distant future.
Steve in the ATL
@LAO:
Which is pretty impressive for a city that has the Billy Graham Parkway running right through the middle of it!
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
Weird connection the good Bishop is trying to make. For one thing, this is the US, not China or Saudi Arabia.
OzarkHillbilly
@RaflW: “First they came for the Fundamentalist Christians…..”
CONGRATULATIONS!
@JMG: Sherman had it right. It’s a damn pity nobody, including Lincoln, would listen to him.
Disarm the South entirely, break it up into military districts and eliminate even the names of the states. He had an eighty year timeframe for this.
The South would have been much better off and so would this entire nation.
cmorenc
If the NC leg had been content to legislate something to the effect that only folks who were bona fide transgendered could legally use bathrooms of the sex they identified with – and stopped right there, their move might at least be congruent with the supposed native gender “privacy” concerns they allegedly are meant to address – suppressing those who allegedly might falsely claim transgender status for voyeuristic purposes. However instead, the legislation is bigoted on its face, because it rejects that transgendered people have any legitimate status whatsoever, but are instead either repulsively bizarre self-mutilating freaks or else fraudulent voyeuristic perverts claiming to be transgender in order to sneak looks at naughty female bits in toilet stalls. The legislation also goes out of its way to go well beyond transgender issues to prohibit localities from adopting or enforcing any anti-discrimination ordinances based on sexual orientation, or from adopting any local minimum wage laws.
OzarkHillbilly
@bemused: Hey now, they along with Iran are some of our top competitors in death penalty usage.
Obdurodon
I don’t quite get how responses like these are supposed to change legislators’ minds. Who is most affected when a company decides not to hire in North Carolina? The *workers* in North Carolina, and also the small businesses who support those workers. Those workers have just had to suffer the impact of a discriminatory law, now they have to suffer economically as well. I’m sure they really appreciate it. Meanwhile, the legislators don’t seem all that affected. The lost tax revenue wasn’t supposed to be going into their pockets anyway. Their salaries remain the same. The voters might blame them for the economic effect of this measure in years to come, but any such effect might also be diffuse enough to be lost among myriad other more directly economic decisions and effects. The *moral* opprobrium of voters is probably a far bigger factor, but that would exist regardless of whether businesses decide to staff up or down there. If there’s any effect at all, it might well be to make the very people most opposed to this resolution within NC cease being voters there, leaving *only* the evangelical rednecks to enact something even worse. Driving out those Johnny-come-latelies might be a political positive for the creeps in charge.
An explicit moratorium on *political contribution* would have had far more and better effect.
Bill
I’m thoroughly enjoying watching those who worship at the alter of “free markets” getting screwed by free markets.
Anoniminous
As a gay friend points out, what the governor and legislature of NC is afraid of is heterosexual men using transgender as an excuse entering the women’s public bathroom. So what they should have done is made that illegal instead of discriminating against transgendered.
MattF
Is there any need to point out who is really to blame for this?
LAO
@RaflW: I think there is also an element of shock here as well. “Kicking the gays” has been such an effective way to rouse the base and win elections for the GOP since 2000 (maybe longer, I’m not sure) and the deep red states of this nation are totally unprepared for any blowback. They believe that a judiciary has forced marriage equality on an unwilling nation. They do not believe that anyone supports “gay rights” but for a loud and aggressive gay lobby. They are wrong. They are afraid. And their fear is pathetic.
rikyrah
uh huh
uh huh
Trump is playing GOP voters for chumps. And they love every bit of it.
By Greg Sargent April 5 at 8:53 AM
THE MORNING PLUM:
The big news of the morning is that Donald Trump has finally revealed how he’ll force Mexico to pay for the Great Trumpian Wall that he would erect along our southern border. In a memo to the Post, Trump said he’d threaten to cut off “remittances” sent home from Mexicans abroad (meaning those in the U.S.) as leverage to force a $5-10 billion payment for that wall. Experts doubt the legal and practical viability of this scheme.
But the details don’t matter in the least. What really matters is the story Trump is telling, which is that economically struggling Americans are getting fleeced by illegals and the elites who are gaming the system in their favor (and on behalf of other various villains); that only Trump is politically incorrect enough to say so; and that only Trump is tough enough to do something about it.
A new Quinnipiac poll helps shed more light on this dynamic: It finds that an enormous majority of Trump supporters think “the government has gone too far in assisting minority groups.”
………………..
Today’s Quinnipiac poll also finds that 78 percent of Trump supporters say they are “falling farther and farther behind economically,” a larger percentage than any other candidate. Meanwhile, 85 percent of Trump supporters say that “America has lost its identity.” This suggests the possibility that the “economic anxiety” often described as the source of Trump’s success does matter, but it’s one side of the coin, while the resonance of Trump’s suggestion that he’d turn back the demographic tide through sheer force of will is the other. As Wonkblog’s analysis of recent polling data concluded, Trump supporters tend to believe their “losses are being caused by other group’s gains.”
OzarkHillbilly
@Obdurodon:
Clear now?
burnspbesq
@LAO:
*Waves from California.*
scav
Not quiet poetry, let alone haiku yet, but we could work up some slogans.
Give Mississippi a Miss.
Miss-a-Pee-Pee: The Christian Defenders of Restroom Purity!
Missouri: Show Me your papers before peeing (but not before gun purchases).
LAO
@burnspbesq: I’m not over Reagan, yet.
@Steve in the ATL: I though all southern cities were required by law to name a major highway after a evangelical.
@Bill: lol. Excellent point. By making your point you have infringe on their 1st Amendment freedom to impose their religious beliefs on all.
burnspbesq
@cmorenc:
Read somewhere that HB2 also strips state courts of jurisdiction to hear descrimination cases. True?
Obdurodon
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks for the snark, but that doesn’t really clarify anything at all. Those voters/workers aren’t going to draw the line from their own economic circumstances all the way *through* the companies making these announcements, to the legislators, let alone to this specific decision. Especially not the voters/workers who elected those reptiles in the first place and share their anti-LGBT views. They’ll mostly attribute their woes to any number of other factors, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. Maybe a very few will blame the companies doing the posturing, but their reasoning won’t go any further than that. Politics just doesn’t work that way. Punishing the victims in the hope that they’ll turn around and punish their legislators isn’t a very sane strategy.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Iowa Old Lady: Still wins them a lot of votes. Not much else they can run on, when you look at the big picture. So you go with what works.
Most of the country will have these laws in 2 years. Either we get a Supreme Court that stops this crap in its tracks, or we don’t. Only one way to do that.
scav
For any of them: Small(-minded) Government peeping into Bathrooms.
cmorenc
@LAO:
Red-state reaction to LGBT issues is but one facet of their fear, resentment, and resistance to a huge overall tide of social change that threatens their belief that the country has been morphing ever since the mid-1960s into something malevolently, perversely different – which the Reagan administration slowed down somewhat in the 1980s, but failed to reverse. They think the US in the era 1945-65 was the retro-model we should somehow go back to, when American society last seemed to them to be in the right place, although this is but a false idyllic vision that never really was what they imagine it to have been, except through rose-colored retro-glasses.
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
They have that remarkable skill of holding two (or more) opposing, disconnected beliefs in their minds at the same time. That’s gotta take a toll. Just watching them do it gives me a bad headache. No wonder they are so mean.
burnspbesq
@Obdurodon:
So lay out an alternative strategy (P.S. I think your read of the situation is dead wrong.
rikyrah
Journalist Arrested During Ferguson Protest Is Convicted
Videographer Mary Moore is among more than two dozen news professionals arrested covering protests since the police killing of teenager Michael Brown.
03/18/2016 07:17 pm ET | Updated Mar 19, 2016
ST. LOUIS — A freelance journalist has been convicted in Ferguson Municipal Court of failure to comply with a police order for taking video of a peaceful protest against police brutality in 2014.
Mary Moore, a videographer who has worked with ABC, CNN and BET, was notified this week that Municipal Judge Donald McCullin dismissed charges of disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, and imposed a suspended sentence on the failure to comply conviction. The suspended sentence means Moore won’t be punished if she avoids trouble in Ferguson for a year.
Moore is one of least two dozen journalists arrested or detained covering Ferguson protests since the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. Some of the journalists have sued police over their arrests, and at least one has won a legal settlement. Moore said her conviction is likely to affect how she approaches her job covering news.
“I think the failure to obey charge is very untruthful and unfair,” said Moore, who claimed she followed police commands prior to her arrest. “This is Ferguson’s way to control how and if we cover the news or exercise our rights. I feel like now it would be a target on my head.”
piratedan
@Iowa Old Lady: but we’ve already had to make them recognize the spades as people, and now the spics, wops and frogs want the same consideration. If you take away the quers and trannies, they’ll have to go back to hating on the yankees… what’s a genteel shitheel trailer trash enthusiast to do? It’s like at least another four to five months before SEC football is back in play…
rikyrah
@RaflW:
.
TELL.THAT.TRUTH!!!
Mike in NC
Like every other current Republican governor, Pat McCrory ran for office on a platform of “jobs, jobs, jobs” but once elected it magically became “abortion, guns, gays”. He lacks the spine and has shown no interest in opposing anything the Tea Party legislature wants to inflict. It doesn’t help that his puppet-master Art Pope is a massive homophobe who pushed for the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the state.
Mnemosyne
@The Ancient Randonneur:
I would be happy to have better bathroom safety, but I also know that transgender women aren’t the ones making the ladies’ room unsafe — it’s creepy straight male fetishists who do that. Transwomen just want to come in, do their business, and leave like everyone else.
And because my Facebook is mostly cool people, the Kroger bathroom sign has been getting a lot of love. Athens, GA is still a liberal place, it seems.
Obdurodon
@burnspbesq: I already did. Hit the politicans *directly*, by denying political contributions. Make a point of contributing to their opponents. Also, provide legal and financial aid to groups within NC that are taking effective action to have this overturned or reversed. Provide direct support to LGBT people who are affected. There are all sorts of other things they could do, both for moral reasons and to reap a PR reward.
You think my read of the situation is dead wrong? Good for you. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I think recent US political history supports it pretty darn well.
Ex Libris
Kind of cracks me up that these doorknobs saw what happened in Indiana when they tried this and the entire state economy practically crashed in a week. They seemed to say to themselves, “Hey, look what happened over there. Bet if we do the same thing, it will be different.” Now, like Mike “Dumbest Man Ever In Congress, and Boy Howdy, That’s Saying Something” Pence they will have to weasel-talk back track it for the money boys while clearly not really believing it when they could have just left it damn well enough alone.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Obdurodon: If only you’d been around to explain this to Dr. King, I’m sure he and the rest of the Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have wasted time on things like boycotts, which clearly never work. Oh, wait.
Chris
@LAO:
It won’t burst their bubble. No matter how poor they get, they’ll only keep blaming their minorities and the minority-enabling Damyankees, and electing people who promise to stick it to both of them, who are the same people causing their problems in the first place.
We have seventy years of post-Civil War abject poverty for precedent.
Calouste
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Yep, missed chance there. Luckily lessons were learned from that and applied in the aftermath of World War II when the Allies reorganized Germany. Prussia and most of the other German sub-national entities were consigned to the dustbin of history. One of the few that survived is Bavaria, which not surprisingly was for a long time the most reactionary part of the country by a mile.
Obdurodon
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: Boycotts work when they impact the personal bottom line of the people in a position to make change. These “won’t hire in NC” announcements aren’t in that category.
Mnemosyne
@Obdurodon:
How do you propose doing that? I doubt that anyone here has ever voted for one of those legislators, much less contributed to them. Which contributors do you think they currently have that would stop contributing over LGBT rights?
What you could do is get their constituents angry with them so they stop contributing, but you’ve already said we’re not allowed to do anything to make these politicians’ constitutents uncomfortable with the legislators’ decisions, so that’s a non-starter.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@LAO: Au contraire, it feeds into their very sincere belief (and this is one of the few of their beliefs that is sincerely held) that they are a genuinely oppressed group of Americans.
The more we take away from them, the harder they cling. Obama knew this when he made his infamous “guns and religion” comment.
The way you break them out of this is, oddly enough, by making everyone around them prosperous. And wait for the old ones to die because you’re never changing their minds.
Can’t use the victim excuse then.
RaflW
@LAO: Yes, this very much. This is one of the many risks they face since they refuse to even consider any non-vetted, non-right-leaning media.
It is akin to poor Newtie melting down when Ohio went against Romney. They just believe their own crap way too much!
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman:
Was that you putting out traffic cones?
Mnemosyne
@Obdurodon:
Voters are not in a position to make change? Then why even have a political system? Why encourage people to vote or to participate in government by contacting their representatives when they want or need something?
Mike in NC
Governor of Mississippi declared April to be ‘Confederate Heritage Month’ according to a report on TV. Most of us thought every month in MS was Confederate Heritage Month.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
Yep. If a big corporation says, We’re going to boycott your shit if you don’t back down, states have backed down. It’s probably more effective than a citizen boycott, because corporations have a lot more leverage.
smith
@RaflW: Think that was Turdblossom who melted down, but the point still stands. It reminds me of a comment from some Republican Southern lady a few years back, during fights over teaching creationism, that she had never met anyone who believed in evolution. Don’t recall who she was, but recall that she was prominent, connected, and nominally well-educated, but so much in the bubble that knowing someone who accepted evolution was completely outside her experience.
Woodrowfan
@efgoldman: at least Lee Highway is named after a local. there’s no such excuse for Jeff Davis Highway.
Gin & Tonic
@Calouste: I have friends who say “I’m not German, I’m Bavarian.”
RaflW
@Obdurodon: The Democrat running for governor is explicitly running on this issue. He is embracing the PayPal decision and other economic threats to educate a wide swath of N.C. voters. Why do you think they won’t hear this message?
And you don’t need to convince committed GOPers in reptilian districts anyway. You only need to reach a few percentage of voters in each of a subset of N.C. state house districts and move them, not the base that is voting for the reptiles, to swing enough votes in the lege. I’m sure there are quite a few D+2 to R+2 state districts that should be in play that would be reachable on the issue of how fairness leads to greater economic opportunity.
Gin & Tonic
@smith: Like Pauline Kael saying she didn’t know anybody who’d voted for Nixon?
Chris
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
The South after the Civil War was in abominably bad need of a post-WW2 style combo of economic reconstruction, thorough denazification, and long term occupation.
The problem is that the will in the North just wasn’t there, I think. Not enough ordinary white Northerners cared about black people, and the wealthy white Northerners who were now taking over (the robber barons) had zero interest in a more democratic and egalitarian South.
Steve in the ATL
@Mike in NC:
Zing!
But not wrong.
ETA: is this one of those “it’s funny because it’s true!” moments?
bemused
@smith:
If they don’t hear it on Fox or all the other rightwing media, it doesn’t exist.
Brendan in Charlotte
@Steve in the ATL: to be fair – that’s the road we use to get to the airport!!!
Woodrowfan
@Gin & Tonic: yeah, but wasn’t she remarking on her own isolation?
philpm
@OzarkHillbilly: Hopefully it’ll at least be a closer call than the gay marriage amendment was, or if we’re even luckier, the numbers will flip this time. I was completely embarrassed to say I was a Miseryan after that one.
smith
@Gin & Tonic: Sure, there are bubbles everywhere, but I didn’t personally know anyone who voted for Nixon either, but wasn’t surprised when he won. I think the difference is in how far your horizon extends.
Gin & Tonic
@Woodrowfan: Don’t recall the context.
Iowa Old Lady
@smith: One time I was teaching some novel and evolution came up and a student asked me in shocked tones if I believed in evolution. She was in her bubble, but I was in mine because despite having gone to Catholic schools, I’d never met anyone who didn’t accept evolution. The nuns had no problem with it.
burnspbesq
@Obdurodon:
Not remotely good enough. Completely misunderstands the sources of cobtributions to NC repubs at the state level.
cmorenc
@burnspbesq:
It doesn’t take away NC courts’ jurisdiction to hear discrimination cases (as such) – but rather eliminates the rights of citizens to have any cause of action to bring discrimination suits on the basis of LGBT issues addressed in HB 2. Which in practical effect, achieves the same goal – presuming HB 2 (for the sake of argument) is constitutionally valid, it will result in dismissal of LBGT discrimination cases by NC courts for lack of stating any actionable cause (but not because the court lacks jurisdiction to hear such cases if a cause of action did exist, which it doesn’t thanks to HB2.)
RaflW
@smith: There is also the matter, in my guesstimation, that most people who feel comfortable with evolution don’t actually talk about it much. Sort of like gravity: it’s there, it makes sense, why chat about it? Unless this discourse took place circa the Scopes trial, anyway…
ETA: Yup, Turdblossom. I’ll try to get the toadie southern talkinghead Repubs clear in my mind.
Well, no, I probably won’t waste the brainspace.
WJS
PayPal already has quite a few open positions here in Maryland. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just shifted the 400 lost by North Carolina to a known hotbed of diversity, liberalism and godlessness.
Mnemosyne
@Iowa Old Lady:
Not believing in evolution is a Protestant thing. IIRC, the Catholic Church has been on-board with evolution since the 1950s at a minimum, and it may have been earlier.
Obdurodon
@Mnemosyne:
How about companies in NC (or doing business in NC), which have contributed to them in the past? I don’t know if my employer, which is headquartered in NC, would ever have supported the Weasel Party, but if they had then I’m pretty sure their switching allegiance would get legislators’ attention right quick.
Only indirectly. Clue for you: we don’t have direct democracy. Voters themselves don’t sit in the legislative chambers and vote on bills. They elect others to do so. The line between a boycott and the people it’s meant to affect is too long and thin *in this case* for it to be effective.
Also, let’s please stop ignoring those other voters who aren’t like us. They put these people in office. How they react matters too. When they’re not completely losing the thread of causality, they’re likely to have it spun into something very different than it is. Haven’t you been watching as economic ills are blamed on immigrants instead of those truly responsible? It’s easy to see how any boycott of NC could be spun as the Second War of Northern Aggression, waged via economic means to impose our alien morality on the right-thinking people of Nawth Carolina. Do you think that wouldn’t be tried? Do you think it wouldn’t work? It would only confirm that we liberals are their deadliest enemies, and that they’d best support their dear local GOP in opposition.
Geeno
Sooooo… PayPal has to open a new site in a place where its professional recruitment efforts might be affected by the local laws just because. People – whom PayPal might be trying to hire – will say “um, no, I’m not going to move there”, “that’s on my short list of places not to go”,”I’d definitely need more money to go there”, etc.
But PayPal has to suck that up, because … reasons?
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Although thanks to the religious right and just general U.S. culture, a big chunk of American right wing Catholics have picked it up by osmosis.
Origuy
Replacements.com com, based in Greensboro, NC, is the world’s largest supplier of replacement pieces of china, crystal, tableware, and collectibles. They’re the people you call when you break a plate in a discontinued pattern. The founder is a gay man. He recently issued this press release.
Obdurodon
@RaflW:
Mostly because I’ve seen such messages fall on deaf ears before. It’s not that nobody will listen. It’s that those who will are a fraction of what’s already a minority. Meanwhile, the effect on that minority has to be balanced against the effect on the majority. If you’re looking for an educational/awareness benefit, there are other ways to achieve it that neither galvanize the opposition nor make the people of NC poorer. I’ve already mentioned some. While I laud the impulse, I think the strategy fails to account for the nature of the enemy in front of us.
Steve in the ATL
@cmorenc:
Shit like this is why people hate lawyers.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne:
Evangelical Protestants only. Mainline Protestants are pretty normal people.
Mike in NC
I believe that the success of the GOP in taking over North Carolina in the last few years is primarily related to the Citizens United ruling and the tsunami of outside money it unleashed (Kochs, Art Pope, and assorted right-wing PACs and think tanks).
? Martin
@WereBear:
Is it? Alabama sure as shit hasn’t figured out the economic/discrimination death spiral. They’ve been in it since 1861.
RaflW
@Obdurodon: Then we have a basic, everyday disagreement on the effectiveness of this or that organizing/political tactic. I think it is useful, both in terms of N.C.’s particulars, and in shifting the national dialog. You don’t, and have your line of reasoning to support you, even if I don’t quite see it. Good enough.
Brachiator
@Chris:
This doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of Reconstruction. The myth of rapacious white carpetbaggers was used to help rationalize “righteous” white Southern resistance (aka, the Klan), and still informs not only conventional wisdom about the South, but the official story in many history books.
Left out is the initial optimism that saw many white people and free blacks travel to the South (joining Southern born whites and blacks) to try to help in efforts to help the newly emancipated slaves and to try to rebuild the Southern economy along more egalitarian lines.
But of course, even back then, white people were encourage to act against their own self-interest to make sure that black people were kept down. And so, you have attempts to block public education for poor whites along with attacks on Freedman’s associations, with foolish whites joining in.
Woodrowfan
@Brachiator: And a lot of the “Carpetbaggers” were northerners who liked the south when they were there and thought it’d be a pleasant place to live. Nicer winters than up north maybe.
RaflW
@? Martin: Call me cynical (I do!), but I guess I don’t that much care if the heart of the old reprobate south remain refuges for racist, homophobe, idiot right wingers. We need to win on the preponderance of the turf. North Carolina, Indiana, Georgia (heck, maybe even Missouri) are useful battlegrounds. Expecting the worst actors to reform is wasted time and energy at this phase of the fight.
Hoodie
Most of the wingnut legislators behind this bill in NC probably could care less about jobs in Charlotte, and they have a supermajority in each house. They’re safe in gerrymandered rural and exurban districts, where they feed off a bitter concoction of religious nuttery, fear and rural white resentment, which is mostly directed at places like the Triangle and Charlotte, which also happen to be the only places actually adding jobs. Thus, in a perverse way, this could feed that resentment. The situation in NC is a lot different than Georgia, where Atlanta is an 800 pound gorilla. McCrory is an empty suit who is the eunuch of senate leader Berger and speaker Moore. If he had vetoed the bill, they would have overridden it.
Brendan in Charlotte
@Mike in NC: That, and the gerrymandering after Republicans gained control in 2010
J R in WV
@The Ancient Randonneur:
You are so right about the danger of the clergy. Kay posted THIS link not long ago. Stomach turning, page after page, with priests being shielded by bishops for decades.
Yet the LGBT community is what the RWNJs think we need protection from!!
I can avoid Mississippi for the rest of my life. The last 2 or 3 times I was in MS briefly, I was driving through on the way to or from TX or NOLA. But North Carolina is different, I have loved friends there, unfortunately. As John Cole mentions, we here in West Virginia were almost protected against our cousins and brothers and sisters, with the same vile law that Indiana and NC and MS have passed. It is coming that you will need an atlas to keep you informed of states where you are safe to travel in. Safe from religious hatred!
We were shocked the first time we drove into Missouri when smoking was going on in mixed (with non-smokers right to clean air ignored) company. We had to cross Missouri on the way back, but tried to avoid spending time or money there. Pretty countryside, but sick indoors.
These states are killing their tourist industries, which is why I think the effort failed here. The tourism business here has passed the Coal Bidness in importance to the state. And gay and gay-friendly people travel and spend money doing it.
We certainly don’t intend to spend money in states that facilitate religious hate in their law. I don’t think these laws will stand up in court, if we manage to keep the supreme court even handed. I don’t want a liberal court, just fair and unbiased courts. If Republicans can’t deal with that, they deserve the scorn of all Americans everywhere. And a liberal court, too.
Pigsmoker
But we’re still better than South Carolina! And Mississippi!
smith
@Geeno:
This. Paypal is acting in its own interests here, and it’s a good business decision. It’s also good for moving the debate in red states. We talk about red states as if their population were static, but it’s not. If red states can be strong-armed into refraining from retrogressive laws, it will not only bring new jobs into those states, it will bring new people into them. On an earlier thread today a commenter mentioned the possibility that GA could turn blue in our lifetimes. If that were to happen it would not only be due to increased AA enfranchisement, but also to the influx of new people because of economic development, especially in places like Atlanta. It’s potentially a snowball effect and I think is worth pushing for.
Villago Delenda Est
“Governor McCrory has put his backwards, barbaric political ideology above all else” would have been better.
Berial
@Mike in NC: April 25th is ‘Confederate Memorial Day‘.
Kid you not.
Steve in the ATL
@Hoodie:
To a degree, but we still get fucked over by the rural rubes who hate us for our prosperity. That’s why we get idiot country fuck governors like Zell Miller and Sonny Perdue.
raven
So many of you are so fucking full of shit. Last week it was Indiana, further down it’s been Kansas and Oklahoma, Then you circle back to “the south” fuck all your bullshit. Nowhere is worse than Chicago and I grew up there. It AMERICA you dumb fucks.
Steve in the ATL
@raven:
(1) how was Augusta?
(2) I was shocked as a kid that my Chicago family was WAY more racist than my Mississippi Delta family. Hell, my grandfather in Chicago would change the channel every time a black person came on TV. And that was before remote controls!
Mike in NC
[1] I believe one of the main reasons that Reconstruction failed was because President Andrew Johnson was at heart a Confederate sympathizer who wanted it to fail.
[2] Next door neighbors own a condo in Charlotte, and to get there they avoid heavy weekend traffic by using back roads that skirt the NC-SC border. Those roads pass through several small towns where if you see an idle factory, it was probably closed down years ago and no decent jobs ever came along to replace the ones that were shipped to off Mexico or China. That’s where the folks are clinging to their guns and bibles and listening to Glenn Beck.
scav
Proud Mississippian and Carolinians et al should look to their closest allies in action and embrace the common cause: Yoga guru outrages India with beheading remark (and won’t that confuse piously concerned parents about PE cooties in Georgia!)
pseudonymous in nc
@Hoodie:
Exactly this, alas. Fuckwits like Phil Berger and Tim Moore have picked their own voters and the voters of their GOP colleagues, and are embarked upon year six of a ten-year mission to loot the bits of the state that actually generate jobs and revenue — easy for the inhabitants of Bumfuck County to resent the areas where outsiders to the state want to live — and it’s hard to see how that changes until the gerrymander unwinds a little in 2018 and 2020 due to demographic shifts.
That’s why having Cooper win the governor’s race matters. Somebody’s got to veto those fuckers.
Brachiator
@RaflW:
People who say this seem to think that only white people exist in this world. They forget that black people, gay people and non rightwingers also live in the “old reprobate south.”
J R in WV
@Obdurodon:
This is one of the most poorly thought out posts here on Balloon Juice in many years. These companies are using their only weapon to defend themselves against pin-head haters – their commitment to invest in NC is their biggest weapon.
You would have people just – what? Ignore the passage of religious hatred into law? That’s as evil as the people who push for legalized hatred.
And your posting Nym, that seems intended to show that you have your mind made up, and no one is going to change it, not with reason, not with a soft word of advice, no way. Obdurate in a walking, talking, but not thinking body. Fitting for your comment and attitude. Kind of hateful, like your comment.
Any means to change this absurd and horrid wave of legislation that has any chance of working is better than doing nothing. We work to free our neighbors, cousins, friends from the spiteful hatred that has tried to hold them down for a very long time. Get on board, or don’t. Hope you can move to somewhere your obdurate prejudices are codified into law, somewhere we will know to avoid. And be sure not to wear any clothing that’s woven with a mix of linen and cotton, or linen and wool. That’s spiteful to g-d’s will… he may smite you for it…
raven
@Steve in the ATL: We had a great time!
Read Conroy’s “The Death of Santini” about his Chicago Irish family. It’s disturbing if you are not from there, if you are it’s just MEH.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Being from Massachusetts, these policies are just so sad and hurtful, with no merit except spite and hate. It’s the anti-miscegenation laws all over again. The South is just so backwards and medieval in their approach to the modern world. They always have to find someone to immiserate and scapegoat. Wake up, stupid white people.
Villago Delenda Est
@RaflW: Don’t you mean Kkkarl Rove? He’s the one who melted down on air on Faux when Ohio went for the evil blah guy and not white destroyer of other people’s pension funds.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav: They’re all just the assholes of Daesh, but with only slight differences in the vile deities they worship.
smith
@raven: Chicago is plenty racist but it in no way supports governmentally enforced homophobia.
J R in WV
@Chris:
We have
seventya hundred and fifty-one years of post-Civil War abject poverty for precedent.Fixed that for you!
Berial
@RaflW: Not to disagree with your sentiment but there IS a ‘Golden Triangle‘ in MS. It’s in the Columbus, Starkville(MS State NOT Ole Miss), West Point area. :)
raven
@smith: and?
smith
@raven: State-sponsored homophobia was the topic of this thread.
raven
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Tell it to Southie.
raven
@smith: Yea, and moving businesses to fucking West Virginia was too.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
I blame the converts. A lot of them seem to have brought their weird Protestant beliefs with them when they converted.
@Steve in the ATL:
Shhh! I’m trying to foment religious conflict here!
More seriously, I do think that the best way to break apart the hegemony of “Christians” is by pointing out that not all Christians believe the same things. Why should an evangelical Christian who believes that being gay is sinful be allowed to override the belief of a UCC member that it’s not?
Berial
I think this is Mississippi’s Atty. General, letting everyone know that this new bill ISN’T going to make it after it gets challenged.
debbie
I can’t find it now, but there was a post on my FB page from McCrory (a couple of my friends live in NC) claiming the law was misunderstood. The comments were priceless; not one of them supported the governor.
@raven:
I lived in Boston in the early 70s and moved out just before the busing riots. That was some Cradle of Liberty, that town.
debbie
@efgoldman:
Glad to hear it’s changed. One day, I looked up on Zillow the apartments I had rented there. We paid $200 for a 3-bedroom, roach-ridden railroad flat near the BU Bridge. Not only did the building still exist, but it was a $500,000 condo unit!
john fremont
@Mnemosyne: Yes, EWTN is mainly run by former Evangelical clergymen now Catholic evangelists now that Mother Angelica has passet away. Frequent guests were people like former Lutheran minister turned Catholic priest and editor of the conservative religious journal First Things, the late Rev. Richard Niehaus. It was always a select segment of Catholics that host and get invited on their programs. Mother Angelica went from a moderately progressive order of nuns to pre Vatican 2 revival during the course of starting EWTN. The early audiences really liked it so they ran with it. Now, so many Catholics think EWTN’s take on an issue is the only authentically “Catholic” one.
boatboy_srq
@Betty Cracker: Lions? Never.
Fire ants.
boatboy_srq
@LAO: There are moments when I think the Teahad is hell-bent on recreating the preindustrial, agricultural, feudal economy – complete with landed elite and armies of serfs. Subsistence farming: it’s not just for the history books anymore.
And then I remember that these dingbats can’t seem to live (or at least, walk or drive) without their smartphones and their Internet and their laptops and their air conditioning.
MobiusKlein
Just as a reminder of the PayPal loyalties – note that PayPal’s CEO went to Cuba with Obama just recently.
Dan Schulman
Disclosure – I am associated with that company.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Paypal isn’t alone.
Also:
There was another article, which I can’t find right now, where an Observer reporter went to one of the companies on the pro- list, and the CEO was appalled that someone claimed his company supports HB2. KeepNCSafe backtracked, saying that “someone at the company” had sent a statement of support.
Steve in the ATL
@boatboy_srq:
their government subsidies and disability checks?
pseudonymous in nc
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: most of the pro-HB2 companies on that list look like small / family businesses, which isn’t a surprise, because for all the talk of impassive corporations and small businesses as Real American Capitalism, it’s the family firms that often stiff their workers and let their bigot flag fly, while larger companies have anti-discrimination policies
RaflW
@Brachiator: Black people, gay, lesbian, bi and trans people, latinos, migrant farm workers (documented and not), etc. I know. My cynicism is ugly, and I don’t condone it in myself, and I know that many can’t or don’t want to leave their home states. I hope we can do better for the south, which is why having a decent SCOTUS is so essential going forward. They can impose things (and on this, the right is correct to worry, and I hope their fears are realized).
Chris
@Brachiator:
I’m not talking about that mythology. The Gilded Age and robber barons are not a myth. They are also, of course, not limited to the South, but neither was it exempt from them. And they did in fact take over the country in the years after the Civil War. Do you think these people were ever going to give that new, democratic, egalitarian South their blessing? Based on the way they ruled everywhere else, I’m guessing “no.”
And I have no doubt that there were plenty of whites who genuinely wanted integration and equality, even if popular history erases them in favor of the “everyone was racist back then!” narrative that makes conservatives more comfortable. The question is whether there were enough of them in either North or South to overrule the racists, particularly if these racists had the backing of financial elites.
Sorry, I tried to reply last night, but the website seemed to be down until this morning, or at least closed to me.