Stop if you’ve heard this one before, but North Carolina’s HB2 law is causing more problems for the state. A growing number of people have called for the league to strip the 2017 NBA All-Star game from the city of Charlotte due to the anti-LGBT law. Six United States Senators have now signed an open letter to NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, asking him to move the game to another state. This after NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley called for the same.
Five of the six signees are Democrats, while one is a Republican. The letter was written by Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D-OR) and signed by Senators Tammy Baldwin, (D-WI), Cory Booker, (D-NJ), Mark Kirk, (R-IL), Pat Leahy, (D-VT), and Patty Murray, (D-WA). According to Merkley regarding HB2:
“It represents an attempt to bend the arc of the moral universe, in Dr. King’s words, away from justice and equality.”
The law says that people must use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificate and removes protections against discrimination in the workplace, among other things.
Since the law was passed, various corporations have decided to cross North Carolina off their list for expansion. PayPal and Deutsche Bank are two notable examples of organizations that had already announced plans for North Carolina expansion.
Seeing the millions of dollars fleeing the state, Governor Pat McCrory signed an executive order that supposedly “clarifies” the law. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that at all. The law is still discriminatory. While the executive order does prevent employment discrimination for state employees, it does nothing for those in the private sector.
It lets businesses decide what they want their bathroom policy to be. This is essentially the debate of whether or not a business has the right to discriminate against what customers it serves based on beliefs.
This story is not finished. There will surely be more developments in the near future.
Featured image via Flickr, available under a under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 license.
