N.C. yanks its law on bathrooms

ATLANTA — North Carolina lawmakers passed and the governor signed Thursday a repeal of a state law that had restricted transgender people’s use of restrooms in public buildings.

The bill, passed by both houses of the General Assembly, was part of a compromise worked out earlier in the week between Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

“Today, we repealed HB2,” Cooper wrote on Twitter. “It wasn’t a perfect deal or my preferred solution, but an important first step for our state.”

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 debate over the proper levels of legal protections for homosexual, bisexual and transgender people.

The repealed law, known as House Bill 2, triggered a national backlash from companies, entertainers and sports leagues that considered it to be discriminatory.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, such as Bruce Springsteen, canceled concerts, and the NCAA, Atlantic Coast Conference and National Basketball Association have moved high-profile events.

This week, a new flurry of action over the law came as the NCAA 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 already has relocated championship tournament games that would have been played in the state during this academic year, including the Division I men’s basketball tournament.

The compromise bill passed the Senate, 32-16, in a late morning vote after only brief discussion. It passed the House in the afternoon by a vote of 70-48 after fiery denunciations by some conservative and liberal members.

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.”

House Bill 2 was signed in March 2016 by the governor at the time, Pat McCrory, a Republican. It curbs legal protections for gay, bisexual and transgender people and, in perhaps its most contentious measure, requires transgender people in public buildings to use the restroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificates.

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.

In a brief statement Wednesday, Cooper — whose razor-thin victory over McCrory in November was attributed in large part to voter frustration over the national backlash from House Bill 2 — said that the measure “begins to repair our reputation.”

The governor said he would have preferred a bill that extended discrimination protections even further, but that wasn’t possible while the GOP holds veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers. “This is not a perfect deal, and this is not my preferred solution,” he said.

Cooper was elected in November on a platform that called for repeal of the legislation. In the House, Republican Rep. Scott Stone urged his colleagues to vote for the new bill.

“We are impeding the growth in our revenue, in our ability to do more things for tourism, for teacher pay, while we have this stigma hanging over,” Stone said. “The time has come for us to get out from under the national spotlight for negative things. You can’t go anywhere on this planet without somebody knowing what is HB2 and having some perception

about it.”

Rep. Deb Butler, one of the state’s two openly gay legislators, was among those who said the compromise would not ameliorate “the stigma and suffering” associated with the measure. “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.

Rep. 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.

“It troubles me today that we are doing this in this manner,” Jones said.

Republican Sen. Dan Bishop, a primary sponsor of House Bill 2, called the repeal “at best a punt.”

“At worst it is a betrayal of principle,” he said on the Senate floor.

But in the end, more legislators appeared to believe that the state needed to do something to end the boycotts. Sen. Dan Blue, Democratic minority leader, said that the compromise “brings an end to an economic threat.”

STATE’S IN CHARGE

While the new measure eliminates the rule on transgender bathroom use, it also makes clear that state legislators — not local government or school officials — are in charge of policy on public restrooms.

House Bill 2 had invalidated any local ordinances that

protect gay or transgender people from discrimination in the workplace or in public accommodations. Under the new measure, local governments can’t enact any new such protections until December 2020.

That moratorium, according to GOP leaders, will allow time for pending federal litigation over transgender rights to play out.

“This is a significant compromise from all sides on an issue that has been discussed and discussed and discussed in North Carolina for a long period of time,” Berger said. “It is something that I think satisfies some people, dissatisfies some people, but I think it’s a good thing for North Carolina.”

Gay-rights activists blasted the proposal, saying it was not a true repeal.

Cathryn Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said that it would leave discrimination victims with no statewide anti-discrimination ordinance and no ability to seek such protections from local government for a number of years.

“What that means for the LGBT community is that we continue to be boxed out of nondiscrimination protections,” she said. Chris Sgro, executive director of the gayrights group Equality North Carolina, said the repeal “keeps North Carolina as the only state in the country obsessed with where trans people use the restroom through law.” 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.”

“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.”

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore said that he hadn’t spoken directly to the NCAA but that he had been told by business leaders who served as intermediaries that the bill should prove acceptable to the NCAA. The NCAA did not respond to a request for comment about the new bill.

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.

On Thursday, Springsteen guitarist Steven Van Zandt tweeted that the Legislature’s move fell short: “It ain’t over until the LGBT community and the ACLU say it’s over.”

House Bill 2 was signed in March 2016 by the governor at the time, Pat McCrory, a Republican. It curbs legal protections for gay, bisexual and transgender people and, in perhaps its most contentious measure, requires transgender people in public buildings to use the restroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificates.