Mississippi lawmakers may be getting credit for passing the nation’s most explicit anti-LGBT bill, but North Carolina lawmakers clearly found a way to screw everyone, not just LGBTQ workers, with their heinous new law, HB2. As Nina Martin notes:
Tucked inside is language that strips North Carolina workers of the ability to sue under a state anti-discrimination law, a right that has been upheld in court since 1985. "If you were fired because of your race, fired because of your gender, fired because of your religion," said Allan Freyer, head of the Workers’ Rights Project at the North Carolina Justice Center in Raleigh, "you no longer have a basic remedy."
That has left people like NC resident Angel Carey, currently suing her former employer on grounds of age and disability discrimination, without the legal footing to make their claim.
“I don’t understand,” said Angel Carey, a discrimination plaintiff, as she brushed away tears. “Someone is going to have to explain it to me so that I can understand. I don’t…”
Carey's lawyers will now have to press her case through the federal courts since North Carolina's nondiscrimination policy gives workers no recourse.
Though HB2 didn't altogether expunge NC's bias policy—which bars discrimination on the basis of race, sex, age, religion, or disability—GOP lawmakers took away the policy's enforcement mechanism by adding this simple sentence: "[No] person may bring any civil action based upon the public policy expressed herein." Conservative lawmakers were likely influenced by the sound thinking of this intellectual giant.
Bruce Clarke, CEO of Raleigh-based Capital Associated Industries, an employers’ association with more than 1,200 members, contended eliminating the right to sue was "a technical correction" that brings “clarity to a confusing area of workplace law” and takes North Carolina’s anti-discrimination statute "back to its original intent." He said most employment discrimination cases lack merit and don’t belong in the "mosh pit" of state court. "They're people that are mad, they've had their feelings hurt, they believe they were treated unfairly in some way … I view them like divorces," he said.
Oh, yes, workers who have lost their livelihoods are just pissy divorcées. It’s still true that the bulk of North Carolina’s law is aimed at targeting LGBTQ Americans for discrimination, but GOP lawmakers added a little something for everybody. First, the GOP came for the queers, then they came for everyone who didn't have money, power, and privilege.