North Carolina Gov. Photo: Takaaki Iwabu/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT/ Getty Images.Update, March 28: The ACLU has announced that it will sue North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), Attorney General Roy Cooper III, and W. Louis Bissette Jr., the chairman of the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina, over the state's new law, ABC News reports. In addition to civil rights activists, corporations including Google and Apple have criticized the law, which forbids people from using restrooms that don't correspond with their birth genders.
"By singling out LGBT people for disfavored treatment and explicitly writing discrimination against transgender people into state law, (the new law) violates the most basic guarantees of equal treatment and the U.S. Constitution," the lawsuit claims, according to a report from The Associated Press.
This story was originally published on March 24, 2016.
In a startlingly swift political maneuver, North Carolina adopted a new law eliminating protections for LGBTQ individuals across the state and prohibiting cities from enacting new ones.
The state ordinance, which bans individuals from using public restrooms that don't match their gender at birth, was pushed through on Wednesday in a special one-day session and signed by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory late that night, according to the Associated Press. The legislation also bans municipalities from enacting new nondiscrimination laws and prohibits cities from raising their minimum wage above the state level.
The bill was channelled through the legislature so quickly that some lawmakers hadn’t even seen it before it was introduced on Wednesday morning, according to The New York Times. In the state Senate, the bill sailed through on a 32-0 vote after Democrats walked out in protest. Senate Democratic leader Dan Blue said in a statement that the proposal was "a direct affront to equality, civil rights, and local autonomy."
The move came in response to an antidiscrimination ordinance passed by the city of Charlotte, NC, which would have gone into effect April 1. The Charlotte ordinance expanded nondiscrimination laws to cover LGBTQ individuals in the city, allowing people to use their preferred bathroom and prohibiting businesses from denying services based on gender identity or sexuality. Legislators overturned that ordinance with a statewide nondiscrimination law that omits LGBTQ individuals from the list of protected classes.
North Carolina's new measure is in line not only with federal law, but with the policies enacted in many other states. Federal law prohibits discrimination based on age, disability, sex, national origin, race, and religion, but doesn’t include gender identity or sexual orientation. On the state level, 30 states allow discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in the workplace, and 37 states allow it in schools, according to Vox.
In North Carolina, arguments against the Charlotte measure hinged heavily on the issue of bathroom access, according to The Charlotte Observer. State Rep. Dan Bishop, a Republican who helped co-sponsor the statewide bill, said that without the issue of bathroom flexibility, the state would likely have allowed the city's policy to remain unchallenged.
"We might not be here today," he said.
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