Bathrooms are battlegrounds in anti-discrimination debate

Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C.

As bathrooms become battlegrounds in the national debate over anti-discrimination laws, a city council’s decision to protect the restroom choices of transgender people in Charlotte, N.C., was cheered Tuesday by rights advocates as a courageous move. But it may not stand for very long.

Gov. Pat McCrory told The Associated Press that the bathroom provision denies privacy rights for people who expect to share restrooms or locker rooms only with people born with the same anatomy.

“It’s an extreme regulation that changes the basic norms of society,” the Republican governor said, adding that he would like the state legislature to pre-empt any local governments from enforcing such ordinances. “I don’t want to have 100 different rules” across the state, he said.

As sweeping changes take hold across America in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage last year, advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have sought to build on that momentum by securing broad protections against discrimination in cities and states nationwide.

Most of the 20 largest U.S. cities now enforce state laws or local ordinances that include allowances for people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, said Cathryn Oakley, an attorney with the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign who helped generate support for Charlotte’s ordinance.

And as conservatives push back, they are increasingly finding that concerns about bathroom encounters resonate more with voters than other aspects of such laws. In Jacksonville, Fla., a council member withdrew a measure similar to Charlotte’s last week after encountering just such pressure.

“We’re currently tracking 192 bills, the vast majority of which are anti-LGBT with major themes being trans bathrooms and rfras [religious freedom restoration acts] focused on marriage,” Mark Daniel Snyder, spokesman for the Equality Federation, a gay-rights group, said in an email.

Charlotte’s ordinance is broader than just bathrooms, prohibiting hotels, for example, from refusing to rent a room to a lesbian couple, City Attorney Robert Hagemann stressed.

“The restroom issue has gotten an awful lot of attention,” Hagemann said. “The primary aspect of what the council did is to prohibit discrimination in public accommodation. That’s not just restrooms.”

A turning point was Houston, whose city council approved an ordinance similar to Charlotte’s. After a campaign that invoked concerns about bathroom safety last year, voters overwhelmingly overturned the ordinance in a referendum.

“The opposition has really run with this inflammatory, discriminatory messaging, and, unfortunately, they have found some traction,” Oakley said.

Transgender advocates, meanwhile, have worried openly that conservatives are using the bathroom issue to drive a wedge between them and other members of the LGBT movement.

Charlotte’s vote drew an overflow crowd on both sides Monday night. The ordinance was approved by a vote of 7-to-4, adding “sexual orientation,” “gender identity” and “marital status” as attributes protected from discrimination when it comes to public accommodations in restaurants, retail stores and other businesses.