Transgender Americans might be interested to learn that in the wake of North Carolina’s HB2-induced tailspin, conservatives have upgraded their threat level to humanity—it’s not just about bathrooms anymore. “Trans Mafia Put North Carolina In A Chokehold,” screamed an alarmist headline on the conservative blog The Federalist, complete with stock photo of a bound prisoner with a gun to his head. Welcome aboard, trans folks—first it was the “gay mafia,” now it’s the “trans mafia” that is overtaking America.
“Aided by media that are both incompetent and often transparently biased,” groused Daniel Payne, “along with a burgeoning corporate culture that has discovered the economic benefits of public moral preening, we have what Stella Morabito aptly terms the ‘LGBT mafia:’ a profoundly illiberal social movement rather single-mindedly determined to stamp out even minor and inconsequential dissent from its orthodoxy. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, it’s getting worse.”
Gosh, it’s just a disaster for conservatives now that “corporate culture” is following the dictates of the once-hallowed free market. Turns out unbridled discrimination is a tough sell these days.
Of course, North Carolina is simply the continuation of a story that first made national headlines a couple years ago, when Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was quickly canned after his monetary support for California’s Proposition 8 became an issue. Conservatives charged that the backlash against Eich was unfair and intolerant, but Mozilla’s board had clearly concluded that they didn’t want the face of bigotry leading their tech-forward Silicon Valley-based company. Public perception had changed, and Eich found himself on the wrong side of it.
Suddenly the free market was the enemy of social conservatives. How dare people vote with their dollars! How dare the market foist its will upon the masses! Even some progressives and LGBT advocates worried that the public flogging had gone too far. All I could think was, how long have LGBTQ Americans been modifying their behavior at work to avoid being on the wrong side of corporate culture? And how many have lost their jobs for far lesser transgressions than supporting a discriminatory bill? While I didn’t wish harm on Eich personally, it was downright refreshing to see the other side finally having to bear the burden of a system that had been threatening us for years.
Not surprisingly, many Republicans still don’t like what the free market is telling them and, in response, they have become enemies of the ideals the GOP has touted for decades—libertarianism, which they seem to have reduced down to the term “common sense” these days. Why? Because religious conservatives were never invested in those ideals. What they are dedicated to is a higher power and the dictates it imposes on people from above.
If social conservatives had been willing to hear it, Eich would have provided a cautionary tale, followed by Indiana’s market blunder nearly a year later. Part of the problem is that social conservatives live in such a bubble, they just can’t see beyond its sphere.
One might have thought, for instance, that North Carolina’s Gov. Pat McCrory and his GOP colleagues would take note of the tens of millions of dollars in revenue that have drained from the state of Indiana based on their “license to discriminate” bill. But no. The fallout from a conservative Midwestern state just wasn’t warning enough for the state’s social conservative bubble heads.
Now McCrory is beside himself, marveling that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—which he calls “one of the most powerful special-interest lobbying groups” in the U.S.—has magically bent the business community to its will. This is yet another belief born of ignorance. The wall McCrory has run up against wasn’t built by HRC, it was erected by an army of very pro-LGBT Millennials—or generation juggernaut, which is currently taking over the ever coveted under-40 marketing sweet spot. They aren’t going anywhere and they’re not getting any more conservative on LGBTQ concerns.
Besides, anyone who has studied this movement knows that if HRC was as powerful as McCrory imagines, we wouldn’t be talking about bathrooms but rather ensuring LGBTQ Americans the freedom that is afforded them within the Constitution.
But McCrory, like Payne, is stupefied that his “common-sense” bathroom bill is wreaking so much havoc on North Carolina’s economy. As Payne wrote:
All this because North Carolina affirmed what everyone believed until the day before yesterday: that we shouldn’t allow grown men into women’s restrooms.
Actually, no, people weren’t really pondering men going into women’s bathrooms until you dreamed it up. What everyone believed is that we are all individually capable of making common-sense choices about which bathroom is the right one to use. That’s a principle that Charlotte’s original ordinance affirmed—entrusting trans people and everyone else to responsibly make their own bathroom choices.
In fact, there’s nothing more libertarian and common sense than allowing people to decide the most appropriate place for them to do the most private and intimate of acts.
By contrast, what McCrory and his cronies did was dictate to everyone where they must do their business, so to speak, and now people are understandably taking their business elsewhere. That’s how the free market works.
Kerry Eleveld’s book about how LGBT activists created a political tipping point during Obama’s presidency is called, Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.