“It’s an insult, and it’s a political statement instead of a legal statement”, the governor said on CNN, referring to comments that Lynch delivered while announcing a federal civil rights lawsuit against McCrory and other state officials on Monday.
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“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah last night discussed North Carolina’s controversial bathroom bill, which requires transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond with their birth gender and not the one with which they identify.
In most cases in which a conflict presents between state and federal law, the state law must yield, according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.
There have been no documented instances of transgender people harassing people of any gender in public restrooms, while 70 percent of transgender people report harassment in bathrooms – including beatings and sexual assaults.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in a news conference announcing the suit, called the law a “state-sanctioned discrimination” against transgender people.
The Justice Department says it’s protecting the rights of transgender Americans and charges North Carolina with codifying discrimination.
Since the announcement of the bill, several prominent musicians have cancelled scheduled concerts in North Carolina including Bruce Springsteen, Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas and Pearl Jam.
There has been a fierce national backlash against North Carolina’s discriminatory law, including from musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas and Bryan Adams cancelling concerts in the state.
“This is about the dignity and the respect that we accord our fellow citizens”, Lynch said. “I’ve never discussed it in a campaign”, he added.
McCrory chose to file a lawsuit of his own instead against the Department of Justice, saying in a Fox News interview that, “It’s the federal government being a bully”.
Lynch also pointed out that this isn’t the first time we, as a country, have faced such disgusting, discriminatory laws.
Lynch had invoked policies used to ban people of color from certain public spaces in a speech that alleged illegal discrimination against transgender people in North Carolina.
Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division stated Monday, that the lawsuit “speaks to all of us who have ever been made to feel inferior – like somehow we just don’t belong in our community, like somehow we just don’t fit in”.
However, the state was not intimated by the letter and said that it will not comply with the deadline.
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North Carolina has until Monday to decide their course of action. North Carolina’s governor, in turn, sued the justice department, which wanted him to acknowledge the law was discriminatory.
