Governor Pat McCrory signs the bill into law after a whirlwind day of special session votes.
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Earlier on Thursday, director Rob Reiner said that he would not shoot in North Carolina until the new law was repealed. That bill barred businesses from discriminating against their customers based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Other Republicans argued that the ordinance would put women at risk because male predators will be able to enter women’s bathrooms easily.
“The basic expectation of privacy in the most personal of settings, a restroom or locker room, for each gender was violated by government overreach and intrusion by the mayor and city council of Charlotte”, McCrory said in a statement.
“The legislature is correct in addressing Charlotte’s misguided bathroom ordinance, especially the safety and protection of children and inevitable predicament law enforcement will find themselves in when trying to enforce this policy”. It declared open season on the LGBT community by striking down every local law that protected gay and transgender people from discrimination and barring any municipality from adopting such protections in the future.
Transgender people who have transitioned to the opposite sex wouldn’t be affected if they get their birth certificate changed.
Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat who threw her weight behind the city’s anti-discrimination measure, said that the state legislature’s new law appalls her.
North Carolina doesn’t have any statewide measures in place to prevent LGBTQ discrimination.
The Charlotte ordinances “defied common sense, allowing men to use women’s bathroom/locker room for instance”, McCrory wrote on Twitter, explaining his decision to sign the new bill.
The bill passed the Republican-controlled General Assembly 82-26 in the House, and 32-0 in the Senate. “It is on the wrong side of history”, Roberts said in a statement.
The companies said that equality in the workplace is a priority for fostering talent and innovation and that such state laws can stifle investment and economic growth.
Ordinance supporters and opponents spoke to legislators in House and Senate committees. It also requires that individuals must use the restroom which corresponds to their biological sex under the arcane idea that transgender men and women are sexual deviants and a danger to society. “They don’t realize due to their actions, especially because of the anti-transgender bathroom bill today, that they could cause the suicide rate for transgender teens to go up in the state of Tennessee. I feel bullied by you guys”, Thompson said.
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Economist Lee Badgett, a Winston-Salem native, said corporations tend to tout cultures of nondiscrimination for competitive reasons, and they oppose policies that go against them. Advocates for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights call the law a “devastating” setback that they may try to challenge in court.
