As of Friday, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee (D) is banning city workers from any public funded travel to North Carolina “that is not absolutely essential to public health and safety.” This statement comes in protest of new Anti-LGBT law in North Carolina overturning protections for the LGBT community in North Carolina. The Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, signed by governor Pat McCrory (R), requires transgender people to use the restroom or changing room of the gender listed on their birth certificate instead of the gender they identify as.
The bill was rushed through N.C. General Assembly at the cost of $42,000 so that it would invalidate the legislature the city of Charlotte already had scheduled to take effect April 1. McCrory tweeted saying the ordinance “defied common sense” because apparently governor McCrory does not understand what civil liberties are or why we have laws to protect them. San Francisco mayor Lee said in his statement on the law that San Franciscans are “standing united to condemn North Carolina’s new discriminatory law that turns back the clock on protecting the rights of all Americans including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.”
Mayor Lee is not the only one against this law. Businesses and organizations like Paypal, Dow Chemical, Google, and even the NBA, who says that they “Do not know yet what impact it will have on our ability to successfully host the 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte.” If the NBA does decide to not host the All-Star Game in Charlotte, The city stands to lose millions of dollars in tourism revenue. It’s not only the city of Charlotte that may lose money. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the entire state of North Carolina is now at risk of losing $4.5 billion in federal funding because any N.C. school district that complies with the law will be in direct violation of Title IX.
At some point, political ideals shouldn’t even be a factor when you’re mistreating human beings based on nothing but their sexual orientation. Somehow bigotry and hatred is confused for politics in the N.C. General assembly and it’s making them sabotage themselves fiscally.
Currently, organizations like the ACLU of North Carolina, Lambda Legal, and Equality North Carolina are “reviewing all options, including litigation.” So there’s at least some hope that this revolting and discriminatory law will be repealed, but odds are that won’t stop North Carolina Republicans from trying again with some other terrible and expensive scheme to oppress their own citizens because apparently civil rights means nothing to them even if they belong to their own taxpayers.
Featured image via Flikr by Julie Pimentel used under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license
