N.C. governor tries to calm furor, but law remains
Conventions have been canceled, rock concerts scrubbed and corporations have yanked their business from North Carolina to protest a state law that critics say discriminates against gay, lesbian and transgender people.
These are tough days for the Republican North Carolina lawmakers who passed a law last month limiting legal protections for LGBT people at hotels, shops and restaurants. The law also restricted what bathrooms and locker rooms transgender people can use.
Now, as North Carolina faces the possibility of more business lost to corporate and celebrity protests, Republican Gov. Pat McCrory is trying to douse national criticism over the law — without significantly changing the law.
In a video statement Tuesday, which he said was in response to public “feedback,” he announced he had signed an executive order intended to “affirm and improve the state’s commitment to privacy and equality.”
On its face, McCrory’s executive order expanded the state’s equal-opportunity employment policy to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — a seeming extension of protections for state government workers.
Additionally, McCrory said he would “immediately” seek approval of a new law in the upcoming legislative session to “reinstate the right to sue for discrimination in North Carolina state courts.”
Yet critics swiftly responded that the governor had not made any significant changes. The executive order did little to alter the law’s requirement that transgender people use the public bathrooms and locker rooms that match the gender on their birth certificates. Nor did the order restore the ability of cities to determine their own LGBT nondiscrimination policies.
The North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized McCrory’s order.
“Gov. McCrory’s actions today are a poor effort to save face after his sweeping attacks on the LGBT community, and they fall far short of correcting the damage done when he signed the harmful House Bill 2 into law which stigmatizes and mandates discrimination against gay and transgender people,” Sarah Preston, acting executive director of the state ACLU, said in a statement.