When the Texas legislature's special session came to a close Tuesday, so did GOP Lt. Gov Dan Patrick's crusade to prohibit transgender individuals from using public restrooms. The bathroom bill, which Patrick tried to force into consideration by holding other legislation hostage, was ultimately blocked by a Republican House speaker who sided with trans activists, law enforcement officials and the state's business community. The Texas Tribune writes:
Transgender women, men and children from across Texas descended on the Capitol to testify about how the proposal — which would ban local policies that ensured transgender individuals’ right to use public and school restrooms that match their gender identity — could endanger their lives. The business community rallied against the legislation too, giving House Speaker Joe Straus cover as he refused to negotiate with Patrick on bathroom restrictions. [...]
With the national debate over North Carolina's bathroom still lingering, he was backed up by top business executives, including the heads of dozens of Fortune 500 companies, who worried that Texas could invite the same economic blows the Tar Heel State faced after passing a similar bill, including canceled corporate expansions and sports tournaments.
They called [Republican Gov. Greg] Abbott to express their displeasure and launched a flurry of letters warning about the harm that laws deemed discriminatory toward the LGBT community could cause.
Abbott, who was eager to sign the bill, hasn't ruled out calling a second special session, but at this point it's hard to imagine the effort could gain the support of Straus, or even other Republicans. It actually lost momentum during the first special session.
Support for the House bill seemed to drop as the special session began. Eighty Republicans had signed on as co-authors during the regular session — proponents of the bill regularly touted that number as they criticized Straus for keeping the bathroom bill from getting a House vote — but in the special session the number of co-authors dropped to 60.
“Some people were listening,” Lou Weaver, transgender programs coordinator for Equality Texas, said of the drop in co-authors. “Whether it was to the trans communities, to our allies, to our advocates, the business community, faith leaders — whatever the case may be, they did switch.”
Time, as it were, was a friend to the LGBTQ community in this case. This discriminatory effort will likely rear its ugly head again—as long as politicians and conservative groups can use the issue to line their coffers, they surely will.
But the more information people have, the more likely these bathroom bills are to die. In that sense, the long struggle and unprecedented fallout we witnessed after North Carolina Republicans jammed through their bigoted bathroom bill has been a blessing. The North Carolina GOP became the poster child for scoring foolish political points at the expense of the state’s voters.
That said, hopefully, North Carolina lawmakers won't do us any more favors.