It took one year to pass legislation repealing HB2 — and it might take another three for its most disturbing legal effects to dissipate. Let’s count the hours.
In March 2017, after 12 months of enormous national pressure, North Carolina’s Republican-majority legislature passed, and Democratic Governor Roy Cooper signed, Session Law 2017-4. In doing so, they sent Session Law 2016-3, better known as HB2 (which excluded gender identity and sexual orientation from anti-discrimination and public accommodations protections and restricted public bathroom use by birth certificate-assigned gender) into the void.
One can see it right there in the first section of Session Law 2017-4: “S.L. 2016-3 and S.L. 2016-99 are repealed.”
At first, this looks like a simple story: Social justice warriors win! Whole phalanxes of conservative culture hoplites abandon their shields and flee.
Except when one reads all the way to sections three and four of the new law, things start looking a lot less triumphant for the rainbow-colored forces: “No local government in this State may enact or amend an ordinance regulating private employment practices or regulating public accommodations,” until Dec. 1, 2020, says the text of S.L. 2017-4.
What those last clauses mean is that the crux of the conflict — which began when Charlotte passed an ordinance placing gender identity into the same legally protected class as other attributes like race and religion — actually resolved in favor of the cabal responsible for HB2. Local governments still cannot legally protect their LGBTQ constituents from discrimination in employment or access to hotels, restaurants, bars, etc.
North Carolinians can use the public bathroom of their choice again, but they are still legally vulnerable to various methods of discrimination based on their gender identity and sexual orientation.
And that doesn’t seem likely to change soon: Now that the prurient problem of bathroom-choice has been solved, it seems that national interest in the more pertinent problem — that of local transgender anti-discrimination laws — has dissolved.
All this is a tragedy for liberals working for LGBTQ+ justice, for conservatives ideologically in favor of local power and for moderates who view the state’s one-size-fits-all legislative approach as facilitating friction between North Carolina’s rural cultural conservatives and urban progressives.
