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All about Nature, about the outdoors<>I love it, photograph it and protect it.
In a previous posting about North Carolina’s discriminatory House Bill 2, I wrote about the NBA’s decision to move the 2017 All Star Game out of North Carolina because of the newly-enacted law that removed local protections for LGBT people. That posting hit da bulldog blog on July 22nd. HB2 also mandated that transgendered people use the bathroom corresponding with the gender listed on their birth certificate rather than the one with which they identify.
The back story here is that the city of Charlotte had just passed an ordinance giving specific protections to LGBT citizens; this sent conservative people and legislators into a state of virtual panic. HB2, aka the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, was their strategy to make sure that no city in North Carolina could get away with the horrible crime of offering protections to LGBT citizens or allowing transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender to which they had or were in the process of transitioning.
When the NBA made the decision to take away the All Star Game, North Carolina was put on notice that the NCAA was also taking a hard look at the NCAA events which had been scheduled for the up-coming year in the state. Well, the proverbial “other shoe” just dropped; the price paid by a state for openly discriminating against some of its citizens just went up. Went up quite a bit.
To read an in-depth article about the latest economic hit North Carolina is taking because of its elected officials carrying on this guerrilla campaign against civil rights for gay and transgender people, follow this link.
Governor Pat McCrory played a major role in bringing into being this hated law. The good governor and his cronies are not going to reconsider this very, very ill-advised piece of legislation. Their position is that the God-fearing citizens of North Carolina must be protected from crafty, skirt-wearing male predators hell-bent on committing unspeakable crimes in the locker rooms and bathrooms of their state. Protected at all costs. Even if it puts at risk the safety of transgender people; even if it causes very, very serious economic damage to their state. They will not back down.
People who are very upset that the country at large has made a conscious decision to stop treating LGBT people as second-class citizens will go on passing laws that allow them to keep up the discrimination. The justification may be the safety of the (straight) citizens of the state; the justification may be the preservation of religious freedom. The bottom line is that they’re not going to stop. And people and institutions — such as the NBA and the NCAA — are going to go on letting North Carolina know that that is not acceptable. Watch this space…
Enjoy the Outdoors. Love the Planet. 
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