Opponents of North Carolina's "bathroom bill" denying transgender individuals access to restrooms reserved for the gender with which they identify rightly call the measure a "solution in search of a problem." But it might be more accurately described as a "solution that keeps generating problems," the latest coming from the U.S. Department of Justice.
On Wednesday, state officials were advised by the Justice Department that House Bill 2, which sets a birth certificate test for bathroom privileges in the "First in Flight" state, discriminates against transgender state employees and thus is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Gov. Pat McCrory has until Monday to respond to the warning, and the consequences could be substantial — a loss of billions of dollars in federal funds.
That follows what has been a dramatic exodus of potential business investments in North Carolina, from Bruce Springsteen's canceled concert to the possible loss of an NBA all-star game, as employers try to distance themselves from this obvious slap at the LGBT community. Among the most dramatic was the decision by PayPal last month to withdraw a planned $3.5 million global operations center from Charlotte at a cost of 400 jobs.
The backlash has even generated its own backlash, as Mr. McCrory's supporters, certain evangelical groups and other social conservatives have vowed to boycott and stage protests around Target, which has set a companywide policy of permitting transgender individuals to choose bathrooms based on their gender identity.
What utter nonsense. The nation was running along just fine in the ho-hum business of choosing the appropriate bathroom before states like North Carolina started intervening and discriminating against such a relatively tiny sliver of the human populace. Even Governor McCrory talks about the "expectation of privacy," and he's right but has it backward — transgender individuals have a right to privacy as well.
It's unfortunate that many people do not have a first-hand experience with transgender individuals to know that they do not pose a threat. If anything, they are the ones threatened — witness what took place five years ago in a Rosedale McDonald's restaurant when two teens viciously beat Chrissy Lee Polis, a transgender woman, for attempting to use the women's restroom. The incident helped motivate the Baltimore County Council to approve an anti-discrimination law (and specifically kill an amendment that sought to exempt bathrooms from those protections), and the General Assembly followed suit with statewide protections not long after.
How ironic that a half-decade later, Baltimore County is in line to attract the very PayPal facility that was withdrawn from North Carolina. County Executive Kevin Kamenetz this week made a pitch for the financial technology company to expand its existing Hunt Valley location — a prospect made possible by the anti-discrimination laws.
Even the claim by HB2's proponents that it's aimed at bathroom "predators" is absurd on its face. Not only is there a nationwide scarcity of attacks (documented or otherwise) by transgender individuals in bathrooms, but sexual assault remains against the law whether the perpetrator is male or female, straight or gay, or where the attack takes place.
This week's message from the Justice Department should be heard loud and clear. This isn't just about HB2 and bathrooms. It's time for a number of states to stop their misguided attempts to dial back the clock on the LGBT community and equal rights. And it's entirely appropriate for the federal government to recognize these efforts for what they are — attempts to discriminate based on gender and sex.
Whether those efforts are cloaked in claims of "privacy" or "religious rights," they are no less discriminatory. This isn't politics, it's common sense. Even the Supreme Court recognized that there is a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry — a ruling so widely accepted one year later that you rarely hear conservative Republicans in Congress even talking about using a constitutional amendment to reverse it.
It's a shame that it requires bringing so much pressure — from businesses, protesters, government agencies and private lawsuits — before some will recognize a legitimate civil rights violation. But that's hardly unprecedented. From the Rosa Parks era on down, discrimination is rarely ended without such intervention. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, "our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."