It was unclear on Wednesday where the football championship and other league events would be played.
Advertisement
However, the A.C.C. Commissioner John Swofford, a resident of North Carolina, felt the law has inhibited the state and its
residents far enough.
“This is political theater by the NCAA and ACC”, said U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, who represents North Carolina’a 8th District.
The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) announced Wednesday that it would relocate its neutral site championships for the 2016-2017 season out of North Carolina, in response to the state’s House Bill 2, which designates multiple stall restrooms on the basis of biological sex as opposed to “gender identity”.
Three of those had been scheduled for venues in the Triangle: the women’s soccer championship and men’s and women’s tennis championships in Cary, and the baseball tournament at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. But because the organization feels North Carolina’s “House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values”, it will relocate all neutral-site games out of the state.
North Carolina is the seat of the Atlantic Coast Conference and is also regarded as a mecca of championship sports events, most notably numerous “March Madness” basketball games.
Asked whether the athletic organizations’ decisions to pull games from North Carolina reflect a national distaste for the law, Earnest said looking at the loss of business to the state would put an individual on “solid ground” to conclude “opposition to the law is quite widespread, and that a number of people are quite uncomfortable with the discriminatory impact that it has”.
Last year’s ACC football championship game’s attendance in Charlotte was 74,514.
Rep. Chris Sgro, Democrat of Guilford County and the only openly gay member of the General Assembly, says it is well past time for HB2 to be repealed. As we stated last summer, after more than 20 years of operations, we undoubtedly have had transgender persons attend events here and, presumably, they have used the restroom of the gender with which they identify. The result of that vote among the league’s 15 school presidents was not known, but it required a simple majority. The game had been under contract to be played at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium through 2019.
Advertisement
The NCAA earlier this week took the unprecedented step of pulling seven championship events from the state over its objection to a law that can allow for discrimination against LGBT people. Cary had been set to host the ACC Women’s Soccer Championship on November 4 and 6, and the ACC Men’s and Women’s Tennis Championships from April 26-30 in 2017. “Once the NCAA made its announcement on Monday, this ACC decision was inevitable. I genuinely look forward to the NCAA merging all men’s and women’s teams together as singular, unified, unisex teams”, the statement from North Carolina GOP spokesperson Kami Mueller said.
