Last week, the U.S. Justice Department said the law amounts to illegal sex discrimination against transgender people and gave Gov. Pat McCrory until Monday to say he would refuse to enforce it.
In unusually forceful language, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said North Carolina’s law requiring transgender people to use the public restroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate amounts to “state-sponsored discrimination” and is aimed at “a problem that doesn’t exist.”
A potentially epic clash over transgender rights took shape Monday when the U.S. Justice Department sued North Carolina over the state’s new bathroom law.
She said it serves only to “harm innocent Americans.”
Billions of dollars in state aid for North Carolina — and a potentially landmark decision regarding the reach of the nation’s civil rights laws — are at stake in the dispute, which in recent weeks has triggered boycotts and cancellations aimed at getting the state to repeal the measure that took effect in March.
McCrory instead doubled down by filing a federal lawsuit Monday arguing that the North Carolina law is a “commonsense privacy policy” and that the Justice Department’s position is “baseless and blatant overreach.”
“This is not a North Carolina issue. It is now a national issue,” said McCrory, a Republican who is up for re-election in November, declared at a news conference.
The governor accused the Obama administration of unilaterally rewriting federal civil rights law to protect transgender people’s access to bathrooms, locker rooms and showers across the country. (AP)
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