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North Carolina Lawmakers Met With Protests Over Bias Law North Carolina Lawmakers Met With Protests Over Bias Law
(about 7 hours later)
RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina lawmakers, buffeted by more than a month of bitter debate over a law about gay and transgender rights, returned on Monday to competing demonstrations in the hours before the General Assembly opened its annual session. RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina General Assembly, already buffeted by weeks of bitter debate over a law about gay and transgender rights, faced competing demonstrations and new pressure as lawmakers opened their annual session here on Monday.
Thousands of the supporters of the law, which many people still refer to as House Bill 2, gathered near the General Assembly on Monday, when many arrived in church buses and sat on lawn chairs for a rally that sometimes had the feel of a revival meeting. The immediate fate of the law, which limits bathroom access for transgender people in public buildings and broadly forbids discrimination claims in state courts, was not in question, after Republican leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers said they anticipated leaving the measure intact. Yet supporters and critics alike used the General Assembly’s return as a rallying point about a law that set off an economic backlash and shoved the state into a rollicking national debate.
“Has this nation gone crazy? Has this nation gone nuts?” State Representative Paul Stam, a Republican and the speaker pro tempore, asked the crowd, which he urged to lobby lawmakers to leave the law intact. “Some people have, but you haven’t.”
Representative Phil Shepard, a Republican, made a similar plea for pressure: “If we don’t take a stand, then we’ve lost the war. But we’re going to win the war.”
Opponents also planned a pair of afternoon sit-ins.
“We are using the tools available to us in democracy — petitions, lobbying, public protests, civil disobedience — to say this law is wrong at its core, and it must be immediately repealed,” said the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality.“We are using the tools available to us in democracy — petitions, lobbying, public protests, civil disobedience — to say this law is wrong at its core, and it must be immediately repealed,” said the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality.
Ms. Beach-Ferrara said critics, many holding signs saying “My faith doesn’t discriminate” and “Governor McCrory, we’ll see you in court,” were committing to “a season of resistance until this law is struck down.” During public gatherings across the state government complex, supporters of the law, which many people refer to as House Bill 2, outnumbered critics. At one rally, after church buses ferried supporters from places like Thomasville and Rural Hall, thousands of people, many of them in lawn chairs, heard speaker after speaker praise the measure.
The General Assembly was scheduled to convene at 7 p.m. Monday, about a month after legislators met in a special session to pass the measure that prompted a storm of criticism from major businesses and gay rights groups. The law limits bathroom access for transgender people in public buildings, and it forbids people from bringing discrimination claims in state courts. The law also blocks local governments from approving certain policies, including anti-discrimination and minimum wage ordinances. “I suggest, to the chagrin of many that believe otherwise: to resist any appeal of H.B. 2 is to show love,” the Rev. Mark H. Creech, the executive director of the Christian Action League, said at the rally, which had the feel of a revival meeting. “It is a tough love. Nonetheless, the struggle to support the measure is a proper application of loving the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul and your mind.”
Republicans have signaled that they intend to leave the law mostly unaltered, and a proposal to repeal the measure, announced Monday by Democratic lawmakers, is widely expected to fail. The Associated Press reported last week that it and other news organizations had queried the state’s 168 legislators and found that 41 supported “revisiting” the law. The battle about the law, approved during a one-day special session last month, is poised to ripple throughout the so-called short session, which often deals with the budget.
“My job is to listen to the people who elected us to represent them, and the vast majority of North Carolinians we’ve heard from understand and support this reasonable, common-sense law,” Phil Berger, the president pro tem of the State Senate, said last week. “I can only speak for myself here, but, no, I do not support repealing the bathroom safety bill.” Democrats have moved to repeal the law. With the repeal proposal widely expected to fail, critics of the law argued Monday that the existing statute is more far-reaching than its supporters like to acknowledge, in part because it blocks local governments from enforcing policies like anti-discrimination and minimum-wage ordinances.
Democrats, however, are hoping that public pressure will force Mr. Berger and others to reconsider, and they expected the law’s fallout to ripple throughout the General Assembly’s so-called short session, which typically focuses on the budget. “They want you to call this a bathroom bill,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina NAACP and a leader of Monday’s protests against the law. “It’s not a bathroom bill, but there’s a lot of stuff in here that ought to be thrown in the outhouse,”
“I think it will dominate the conversation for the first few weeks,” said State Representative Darren G. Jackson, a Democrat from Wake County who is among the sponsors of legislation to repeal the law. “Whether it continues on through the summer will depend entirely on whether the majority in the General Assembly continues to ignore it and say, ‘We’re not going to make any changes,’ and if the business community continues to react the way they have so far.” Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican who is seeking re-election this year, urged legislators to change the part of the law limiting where discrimination claims can be filed. It is unclear whether lawmakers will heed Mr. McCrory’s recommendation.
Although Mr. Jackson’s ambitions for a full repeal appear unlikely to succeed, a modest revision could make it through the General Assembly. Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican who is seeking re-election this year, has asked lawmakers to consider changing the portion of the law that limits where discrimination claims can be filed. Republican leaders have framed the law’s preservation as a matter of public safety. Critics, the governor and his supporters contend, are political opportunists who have misconstrued the law.
But he and other Republican officials have defended the most contentious parts of the law. “Our values are not shaped by the N.B.A. or Bruce Springsteen or some opinion poll,” state Representative Phil Shepard, a Republican and a Baptist minister, said, referring to some of the bill’s critics. “We’re standing strong.”
“North Carolina is a proud state, and it is very unfortunate that the Bathroom Bill and the General Assembly’s actions have been unfairly reported and maligned by political activists,” Tim Moore, a Republican and the speaker of the State House of Representatives, said amid the uproar this month. “We remain confident that a factual analysis of what the Bathroom Bill does and does not do will reinforce that North Carolina is a great state in which to live and do business.” Another Republican legislator, state Representative Dan Bishop, described the outcry as “a dishonest, media-fueled carpet-bombing.”
The law has faced substantial resistance from companies that operate in North Carolina, a state that has long cherished and cultivated its status as a place with close ties to business. PayPal and Deutsche Bank are among the companies that have abandoned or paused plans to add jobs in North Carolina, and other businesses have said they are considering how to proceed with projects here. But legislators were still left to reckon with a law that led companies including PayPal and Deutsche Bank to abandon or pause plans to add jobs in North Carolina, and prompted the Obama administration to weigh whether the state will remain eligible for billions of dollars in federal aid.
The state has also faced a cascade of pressure from entertainers like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, who have canceled performances in the state. Many of the law’s opponents fear that North Carolina’s reputation has already been tarnished, perhaps irrevocably. On Friday, in a development that did not go unnoticed here, the law was even a subject during President Obama’s news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain.
The Obama administration has also declared its frustration with the law, which officials have said could jeopardize North Carolina’s ability to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. Speaking in London on Friday, President Obama criticized the North Carolina law, as well as a separate measure in Mississippi that has been criticized as discriminatory. “I can’t get over the fact that the president and the prime minister were talking about us in an international news conference where they were talking about the fate of the European Union and some other major issues,” said state Representative Darren G. Jackson, a Democrat and an architect of the repeal effort. “That’s not what I want to project for the state of North Carolina.”
Mr. Obama said that “the laws that have been passed there are wrong and should be overturned.” And so critics renewed their vows for a long campaign of resistance to the law, already the subject of a legal challenge, in a broadening of the Moral Monday movement that has shadowed the Republican-dominated Legislature in recent years.
“I think it’s very important for us not to send signals that anybody is treated differently,” he added “The religious right has always been there, but it just seems we’re living in a context now, in the national political discussion, where hateful bigotry is allowed to stand loud and proud in public,” Barbara Zelter said while she considered whether she would stay long enough to be arrested at a sit-in later Monday, when many protesters were escorted away by the police after chanting inside the General Assembly’s building.
Mr. Obama’s remarks angered many officials in North Carolina, where Republicans have framed the measure as crucial to ensuring public safety. Ms. Zelter, 66, conceded that her display of outrage was unlikely to produce quick results.
Mr. Berger, one of the most powerful Republicans in the General Assembly, issued a terse statement on Friday, after Mr. Obama spoke in Europe: “Not every father has the luxury of Secret Service agents protecting his daughters’ right to privacy in the girls’ bathroom.” “How social movements change things,” she said, “is by changing the wind, changing the culture.”