This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/north-carolina-senate-acts-to-repeal-restrictive-bathroom-law.html

The article has changed 6 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 3 Version 4
North Carolina Governor Signs Repeal of Bathroom Law Bathroom Law Repeal Leaves Few Pleased in North Carolina
(about 4 hours later)
ATLANTA — In a day of swift legislative action, North Carolina lawmakers passed and the governor signed on Thursday a repeal of a controversial state law that had restricted transgender bathroom use in public buildings. ATLANTA — For a year, it prompted boycotts, demonstrations and economic fallout that helped dethrone a sitting governor. In the end, in a strange and profoundly American collision of polarized politics, big-time sports, commerce and the culture wars, North Carolina’s notorious House Bill 2 was finally laid to rest on Thursday — though many were left wondering if some of its negative effects might linger.
The bill, passed by both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly, was part of a compromise worked out earlier in the week between Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed legislation repealing the law after it was approved by the Republican-controlled legislature. House Bill 2 had restricted the ability of municipalities to enact anti-discrimination policies and required transgender people in government and public buildings to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificate.
“Today, we repealed HB2,” Mr. Cooper wrote on Twitter. “It wasn’t a perfect deal or my preferred solution, but an important first step for our state.” In addition to repealing House Bill 2, the new law gives the General Assembly the sole power to regulate access to “multiple occupancy restrooms, showers or changing facilities.” It also creates a moratorium on local nondiscrimination ordinances through 2020.
But with anger rising over the compromise from groups on both the left and the right, it was unclear whether the signing of the new bill into law would extricate North Carolina from the roiling national controversy over the proper levels of legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The compromise agreement came amid a looming threat that the N.C.A.A., which had already relocated a year’s worth of championship tournament games from the state, was planning to eliminate more, including future men’s Division I basketball tournaments. It was met with bitter criticism from gay rights groups, which said it was barely a repeal at all, and from conservatives, who said it backtracked on protecting public safety and traditional values.
The repealed law, known as House Bill 2, triggered a national backlash from companies, entertainers and sports leagues that considered it to be discriminatory. Performers like Bruce Springsteen canceled concerts, and the N.C.A.A., Atlantic Coast Conference and National Basketball Association have moved high-profile events. In a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Cooper said that the agreement would begin undoing the economic damage and that both sports events and economic development would begin coming back to the state. This week, The Associated Press calculated that North Carolina stood to lose more than $3.7 billion over the next dozen years if House Bill 2 were not repealed.
This week, a new flurry of action over the law came as the N.C.A.A. warned North Carolina that it could lose the opportunity to host championship sporting events through 2022, which could mean millions in lost revenue. The league had already relocated championship tournament games that would have been played in the state during this academic year, including the Division I men’s basketball tournament. “This is not a perfect deal and it is not my preferred solution; it stops short of many things we need to do as a state,” Mr. Cooper said. “In a perfect world, with a good General Assembly, we would have repealed HB2 fully today, and added full statewide protections for L.G.B.T. North Carolinians.”
The compromise bill passed the Senate, 32 to 16, in a late-morning vote after only brief discussion. It passed the House in the afternoon by a vote of 70 to 48 after fiery denunciations by some conservative and liberal members. Still, it remained to be seen if the deal would now lift what Mr. Cooper has called “the dark cloud hanging over our state.”
Phil Berger, a Republican and the Senate leader, acknowledged that many people were probably not pleased by the arrangement. However, he said, “compromise sometimes is difficult, and this bill represents that.” The N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, said on Thursday that the league’s governing board would soon determine whether the changed law was “sufficient” for “the board to feel comfortable going back to North Carolina.” The National Basketball Association, which relocated its most recent All-Star Game to New Orleans to protest House Bill 2, did not comment on the new law.
House Bill 2 was signed in March 2016 by the governor at the time, Pat McCrory, a Republican. It curbs legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and, in perhaps its most contentious measure, requires transgender people in public buildings to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificate. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which pulled recent league championships out of the state, indicated that it would take a fresh look at North Carolina.
The new bill would repeal House Bill 2, create a moratorium on local nondiscrimination ordinances through 2020 and leave regulation of bathrooms to state lawmakers. “The recently passed legislation allows the opportunity to reopen the discussion with the A.C.C. Council of Presidents regarding neutral site conference championships being held in the State of North Carolina,” John Swofford, the commissioner, said in a statement.
In a brief statement on Wednesday, Mr. Cooper — whose razor-thin victory over Mr. McCrory in November was due in large part to voter frustration over the national backlash over House Bill 2 — said that the measure was “begins to repair our reputation.” PayPal, which in April had canceled an expansion in Charlotte over its concerns about the law, did not respond to a request for comment. A number of celebrities and organizations that had announced they were boycotting the state since the law’s passage one year ago had not commented on the repeal on social media.
In the House, Representative Deb Butler, one of the state’s few openly gay legislators, was among those who said the compromise would not ameliorate “the stigma and suffering” associated with House Bill 2. “We would rather suffer HB2 than to have this body, one more time, deny us the full and unfettered protection of the law,” she said. Pope McCorkle III, a public policy professor at Duke, called the deal an “awkward compromise.” He said it would ultimately be judged by how many of the sports events, entertainers and businesses who had turned on the state would eventually change their minds.
Representative Bert Jones, a Republican, also opposed the compromise, citing his belief that God “created us male and female,” and arguing that it was not discriminatory for him to hold that belief. “There could be a split among the outside arbiters about whether this is good enough,” he said. “The deal is only as good as what it achieves in terms of the change in economic development perceptions nationally.”
“It troubles me today that we are doing this in this manner,” Mr. Jones said. It appeared that the threat of losing even more big-time basketball games had much to do with the breakthrough. The agreement comes on the eve of basketball’s Final Four weekend, with the University of North Carolina men’s team facing off against Oregon on Saturday night in Phoenix.
But in the end, more legislators appeared to believe that the state needed to do something to end the boycotts. Senator Dan Blue, the Democratic minority leader, said that the compromise “brings an end to an economic threat.” Looming even larger, perhaps, was the broader threat of sustained business boycotts.
Gay rights advocates have been harshly critical of the proposed compromise. Cathryn Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said that it would leave lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people with no statewide anti-discrimination ordinance and no ability to seek such protections from local government for a number of years. Yet despite these stakes, and in a sign of the deep fissures that continue to run through both the state and the nation, there was little celebration when the law finally died.
“What that means for the L.G.B.T. community is that we continue to be boxed out of nondiscrimination protections,” she said. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, a gay rights group, called the compromise a “fake” repeal bill that “keeps in place the most harmful parts of the law.” The Human Rights Campaign and other gay rights groups called the deal “shameful” and accused the governor and the legislature of engaging in a “sell out” of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Chris Sgro, executive director of the gay rights group Equality North Carolina, said the proposal “keeps North Carolina as the only state in the country obsessed with where trans people use the restroom through law.” Some religious and cultural conservatives denounced the removal of transgender bathroom provisions. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, based in Washington, said the compromise showed that “elected officials are ultimately willing to surrender to the courts and the N.C.A.A. on matters of safety and public policy.” Others argued that girls and women would be robbed of privacy and dignity if forced to confront biological men in restrooms.
The conservative NC Values Coalition had urged its followers to contact lawmakers and tell them not to repeal House Bill 2, arguing that the existing law guaranteed that men would not be allowed “into women’s and little girl’s bathrooms and showers.” Gay rights advocates said that the moratorium on local anti-discrimination ordinances, combined with the absence of a statewide anti-discrimination law addressing sexual orientation and gender identity, would leave lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people at risk of continued discrimination.
“No NCAA basketball game, corporation, or entertainment concert is worth even one little girl being harmed or frightened in a bathroom,” Tami Fitzgerald, the coalition’s executive director, wrote in an email. “She should not lose her privacy and dignity to a boy in a locker room.” “That, to me, is astonishing, that we’re going to make L.G.B.T. people wait another four years to be protected from being fired because they’re gay,” said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group.
The announcement of a compromise on Wednesday came after months of acrimony over the bill and a seeming inability to find middle ground after numerous efforts. Conservative legislators, citing safety concerns, have been worried about the idea of men using women’s restrooms since the Charlotte city government, in February 2016, passed an ordinance that allowed transgender people to use the restroom of their choice. Charlotte officials repealed that ordinance in December as part of one of the efforts to broker a compromise in the state capital, but that effort failed during a special legislative session. There appeared to be some disagreement about the freedom that local governments would have to pass protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people under the new law. Mr. Cooper said that local governments were now free to “pass protections for their L.G.B.T. employees.”
The possibility of further punishment, particularly from the N.C.A.A., placed tremendous pressure on lawmakers in the basketball-obsessed state, a pressure heightened by the fact that the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team has reached the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four and will be squaring off against the University of Oregon on Saturday night. Cathryn Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said she did not believe that was the case. “I don’t think the language supports that,” she said.
The Atlantic Coast Conference also moved its neutral-site championships out of North Carolina this year in response to House Bill 2, and the National Basketball Association moved its All-Star Game to New Orleans from Charlotte. Under the new law, transgender people in state government buildings will not be prohibited from using a bathroom that does not match the gender on their birth certificate. Mr. Cooper emphasized the impact on school children. “Now transgender kids aren’t subject to the horrible requirement and embarrassment that could put them in more danger of being bullied or preyed on,” he said.
Some local news outlets reported this week that the N.C.A.A. had set a Thursday deadline for the state to address the bill. Officials at the association could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. The league said in a statement last week, “Absent any change in the law, our position remains the same regarding hosting current or future events in the state.” The Obama-era Justice Department had issued guidelines to public schools stating that denying students the ability to use the restrooms of their choice violated Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. A Virginia case that might have settled the matter was scheduled to be heard by the United States Supreme Court, but when President Trump’s Justice Department rescinded the guidelines, the justices in March sent it back to a lower court to decide.
Some conservatives in the House said that it felt as though the legislature was caving to pressure from the N.C.A.A. Mr. Jones said two flags should now be flown outside the legislative building: that of “a certain intercollegiate athletic association” and “a white flag.” Jane Wettach, a law professor at Duke, said that beyond schools, few institutions had ever policed people’s bathroom choices. “Which is what made the law sort of symbolic,” she said, referring to House Bill 2.
The Associated Press released an analysis this week estimating that House Bill 2 would cost North Carolina more than $3.7 billion in lost business in the next 12 years. House Bill 2 has already dealt a major political blow to the Republican Party in North Carolina, with the backlash helping Mr. Cooper defeat former Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, by a razor-thin margin in November. Time will tell if Mr. Cooper retains the support of disappointed gay rights advocates on the left wing of his coalition. National gay rights groups could also see a perceived loss of clout if the N.C.A.A. and other sports organizations ignore their continued protests and decide to play ball in the state.
If the costly drama in North Carolina serves as a cautionary tale to other conservative-leaning states looking to take up such volatile social issues, only some appear to have heeded it. On Thursday in Texas, some conservatives reiterated their support for a bill that would revise the laws regulating bathroom use in government buildings. The bill has been approved by the State Senate. But according to The Texas Tribune, it may not survive in the House.
The Tribune reported that Texas businesses were worried the proposal could cost them “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue.