Why House Bill 2 should matter to you regardless of where you stand

You’ve probably seen the news a lot over the last two days. The hashtags #ThisIsNotUs and #WeAreNotThis have been trending, and pretty much everyone knows that this week, the North Carolina General Assembly signed a controversial bill many are calling the most anti-LGBTQ  bill in the United States. Many people are calling it a breach of human rights and a violation of the 14th Amendment.

February 22, 2016

The Charlotte City Council approved an LGBT protection bill by a vote of 7-4. A year ago, the bill failed 6-5. In essence, it made it illegal for Charlotte businesses to discriminate against gay, lesbian, or transgender customers. This applied to all places of public accommodation, including restaurants, bars, stores and taxis.

The bill was met with a mixed response of praise and concern. Many lauded the bill for its progressive measures, while others feared allowing people to choose which bathroom they could use based on gender identity raised privacy concerns.

February 23, 2016

Governor Pat McCrory, former Charlotte mayor, said the bill could be met with “immediate action” by legislators.

March 23, 2016

A special session was called by the North Carolina General Assembly in which House Bill 2 was drafted, passed in the House and Senate and then signed by Governor McCrory over the course of 10 hours.

The bill blocked all state municipalities from making gender identity or sexual orientation discrimination or non-discrimination laws in public places. North Carolina does have anti-discrimination laws, but none that provide specific protections for LGBTQ people.

Perhaps none of this is new information. Proponents are glad the “privacy concerns” are fixed. Everyone else is shell-shocked.

Regardless of where you stand on what happened, you should be concerned by the amount of power the General Assembly has on the state. The State Congress was on leave and the General Assembly spent $42,000 in tax dollars for the special session to take place.

The city of Charlotte approved a bill on February 22nd, 2016. Regardless of whether or not you agreed with the bill, the decision was made. As citizens of NC, Charlotte residents are to respect the law. If they want to attempt to repeal it, they can do so. Appeal to the people they voted in charge of their city to change it. See how the bill does for a few months.

But that didn’t happen here.

Via ABC 11 News

What instead took place was the NC General Assembly flexed their power and played a trump card – a trump card that directly overruled a city’s governmental power and said to the rest of the state: “Watch out, we’re still in charge. Do something we don’t like and we will shut you down.”

Rarely is such a blatant, parental “NO” delivered by a state to its constituent municipalities, especially one made very controversially and very rapidly. When was the last time the US Executive Branch made a decision of such sweeping impact on all the states?

North Carolina is now at risk of losing more than $4.5 billion dollars from the federal government for possibly violating Title IX. Many companies, including big names PayPal and American Airlines, have publicly renounced the actions taken by the state and are threatening to remove business from NC.

The NBA and NCAA, the latter of which has events planned in 2017 and 2018 within NC, are planning to “monitor current events” before making decisions about business and possible relocations.

At the end of the day, regardless of where you stand on the issue, North Carolina’s citizens are in trouble. There should not be a day when a governing body has to fear that a decision it makes in the best interest of its citizens could get shot down by an authority which rarely interferes in its affairs.

It should worry you that national decisions could cripple the state economically and socially, and that a system designed with so many checks and balances could be virtually overwritten in a 10-hour span.