I have no idea why incoming Democratic NC Gov. Roy Cooper and Charlotte's City Council decided to trust the NC GOP, but it completely blew up in their faces as Republicans in the state legislature laughed and refused to repeal HB2.
The North Carolina Senate voted down a repeal of House Bill 2 Wednesday after a day of increasingly partisan rancor that pitted conservative Republicans against the Charlotte they so distrust.
The state House adjourned without voting on repeal of the bill that has cost North Carolina millions of dollars in lost jobs, sports events and boycotts. With that, the hope of compromise between legislators and Charlotte, which enacted the ordinance that gave rise to HB2, dissolved.
Protesters massed outside the Senate chamber rained down shouts of “Shame!”
After a long and frustrating day, the Senate’s top Republican Wednesday lashed out at Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, blaming the Democrat for the legislature’s failure to repeal the bill.
“I think Roy Cooper tried to do everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after a more than nine-hour session.
Berger said Cooper called Democratic senators and urged them not to support Berger’s bill, which would have coupled HB2’s repeal with a months-long moratorium on city ordinances like the one Charlotte passed and repealed. The Charlotte ordinance allowed transgender people to use the public restrooms of the gender with which they identify.
Cooper had lobbied Charlotte council members for repeal, which they had twice before rejected, saying that in return Republican leaders had promised to “repeal HB2 in full.”
Charlotte repealed the ordinance that led to HB2 on Monday. It voted again Wednesday morning, wiping away all action taken in February, after legislative Republicans said they hadn’t rescinded it all.The bottom line is that the NC GOP refused to vote on a repeal of HB2 until Charlotte eliminated the city's protections for LGBTQ community because no Republican considers a gay person to be human anyway, just a bundle of ambulatory oozing sin. Repealing HB2 without getting rid of the protections would actually consider people with sexual orientations other than "1950's sitcom" to be actual human beings, and Republicans were not going to stand for that nonsense. The Charlotte City Council then happily sold out the LGBTQ community completely in order to get the NC GOP to the table.
Then the NC GOP tacked on an amendment that would prevent Charlotte from reenacting those protections long enough for Republicans to force through a new measure over a Cooper veto that would make the moratorium on local ordinances like that permanent. The deal disintegrated after that, and the Bathroom Bill remains law into next year.
The reality is that Republicans in my home state are such gay-hating assholes that they're fine with the state continuing to take tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in financial boycotts and tourism damage just to stay true to their barbaric beliefs that they can "cure sexual deviancy" with the power of an invisible sky dude. It's clinical mass insanity.
Not as insane as Democrats like Charlotte's knuckleheads in city council and Roy Cooper, who really should have known better, to trust the NC GOP for a picosecond however. That is stupidity bordering on dereliction of duty and gross negligence on their part.
So off we go into 2017 with HB2 still doing the Damocles thing over the state, and Kentucky still being a slightly better place to live than North Carolina. Who'd have seen that one coming?
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