Gay-rights advocates have scorned the compromise, noting that it still forbids cities from passing anti-discrimination laws until 2020.
Advertisement
“The Board of Governors will determine whether or not this bill that was recently passed today was a sufficient change in the law for the board to feel comfortable going back to North Carolina”, Emmert said, something he expected to happen early next week. The bill was signed into law by Governor Roy Cooper Thursday afternoon.
The Atlantic Coast Conference also pulled its conference championships scheduled in North Carolina, including football, baseball and women’s soccer.
The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce thanked Cooper and Republican legislative leaders “for coming together on a bipartisan basis to find a solution”. “North Carolina’s economy is booming, so the state should not let the NCAA and others dictate the state’s policies and sell out their citizens’ interests based on flat-out lies about an economic doomsday that never happened”.
Charlotte had hosted the ACC football championship game from 2010 until 2015 and the state of North Carolina is the hub of the conference with four member schools in the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Wake Forest and Duke. “Every North Carolinian deserves to have their privacy respected in intimate settings like locker rooms and restrooms”, said Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Kellie Fiedorek.
The ACC Council of Presidents voted Friday that North Carolina may again host conference championships. It was announced Wednesday night that Gov. Roy Cooper and the GOP-controlled legislature finally reached an agreement to repeal the bill following marathon negotiating this week and months of failed attempts. It does seem to let nondiscrimination laws passed by local governments before HB2 kick back into effect.
In its place, the HB 2 repeal prevented local jurisdictions from enacting such anti-discrimination measures until 2020.
Anti-discrimination groups still want the NCAA to skip North Carolina for future events. “This new law does not repeal H.B. 2”. “This is the first major step in a continued fight for statewide antidiscrimination protections”.
“Hopefully, with a new Supreme Court justice that’s been nominated by President Trump, there will be a ruling in which we keep the definition of gender as we’ve been using in the 1964 Civil Rights Act for generations”, McCrory is quoted as saying.
“I don’t know why any of these people thought they could use the exact secret process and incompetence that got them into this problem to get them out of this problem”, Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in an interview Friday. “2’s most basic and offensive provision”. In an interview Thursday after the bill was passed, McCrory both agreed with and mocked the groups that had assailed him a year ago.
While the repeal comes too late to affect the events that the ACC had already moved, it may save the 2017-18 events already on the schedule.
The NCAA board is also considering a return to North Carolina, NCAA President Mark Emmert told reporters on Thursday. That’s not their right to make that decision.
Advertisement
McCrory had forcefully defended the bill after signing it, even as the legislation came to define North Carolina in the public eye and cost the state jobs and tourism revenue.
