It is hard to know what the North Carolina legislature will do next in its quest to turn back the clock at least 50 years. Or maybe to the 1920s, prior to the New Deal efforts to help people who were poor. None of that liberal stuff anymore in North Carolina!

 

This article in NC Policy Watch sums up the backward steps of the current special session, just concluded. It refers to the legislature’s “shameful legacy.”

 

 

The defining moment of the absurd special legislative session held this week in Raleigh had nothing to do with the common sense decision by the Charlotte City Council to allow transgender people to use the public restroom that corresponds to their sexual identity—the way many other local governments and private companies do.

 

And it had nothing to do with the anti-worker provisions of the secretly crafted legislation that forbids cities from requiring companies that contract with local governments to pay decent wages—as damaging as those provisions are to workers and the economy.

 

And it wasn’t even about a provision debated on the House floor that takes away the right of workers who are fired simply because they are African-American or Jewish or female to sue under state law—as shocking as that provision is, joining North Carolina with Mississippi as the only places where workers cannot sue in state court for being fired people for their race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex or disability.

 

No, the defining moment in what has to be one of the most offensive special legislative sessions in North Carolina history came in the House on amendment proposed by Rep. Grier Martin that would have broadened the state’s nondiscrimination law to include military status, sexual orientation and gender identity.

 

Martin’s proposal came after bill sponsor Rep. Dan Bishop boasted that the legislation, unveiled minutes before it was debated in a House committee, would establish a statewide nondiscrimination law that protects people in employment and public accommodations based on their race, religion, color, national origin, age, biological sex or disability.

 

Biological sex was added to make sure transgender people were not protected.

 

The ordinance passed by the Charlotte City Council also included protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, in addition to the bathroom provision that was the subject of some of the worst demagoguery and fear-mongering to ever come out of the Legislative Building–and that’s quite a high bar to clear.

 

Bishop’s bill voids Charlotte’s protection of LGBT people from discrimination and prohibits any other local governments from protecting them either. That didn’t deter Bishop from repeatedly bellowing about what he called the historic statewide nondiscrimination standard the legislation established….

 

What the vote means is that the majority of the state House affirmatively decided that is ok for companies to fire people who are gay simply because they are gay—in Charlotte and everywhere else in North Carolina.

 

They voted to allow hotels to refuse rooms to same-sex couples and let taxis refuse rides to transgender men and women. The majority of the House voted to give restaurants permission to refuse to serve a gay man and allow theaters to refuse to seat him based on his sexual orientation.

 

What is amazing is how quickly North Carolina went from being recognized the most progressive state in the South to the most regressive. The slide began in 2010, with the election of a Tea Party legislature, and accelerated with the election of Pat McCrory as governor in 2012.

 

To learn more about the political regress of North Carolina, read NC Policy Watch’s Altered State: How Five Years of Conservative Rule Have Redefined North Carolina, which documents disinvestment in the public sector, starving the public schools and public higher education, the advance of privatization, and other consequences of the conservative takeover since 2010.