IGF CultureWatch

The GOP-dominated state legislature in North Carolina failed to repeal the “bathroom bill”—HB2—which requires use of public restrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex rather than gender identity, even though the Charlotte City Council, reportedly as part of a deal, voted to repeal part of its anti-discrimination ordinance prohibiting discrimination in the use of restroom/locker room facilities on the basis of gender identity.

Passage of the Charlotte ordinance triggered state Republicans to pass HB2, leading to a national outcry by LGBT advocates and their corporate allies, who announced various boycotts.

Many GOP legislators were pushed hard by religious right activists to maintain HB2 without revision. On the other hand, some supported a compromise that would have repealed the state law but also put in place what the Washington Post described as “a six-month moratorium on cities passing nondiscrimination ordinances to protect gay and transgender people.” The Washington Times described it as “an amendment that would have prohibited local municipalities from permitting opposite-sex restroom access until a long-term, statewide compromise could be reached—an add-on that helped kill the repeal bill.”

Democratic legislators, following pressure from activists, rejected that compromise, even though their votes, with enough willing Republicans, would have been able to put across a repeal measure containing the amendment.

“It’s clear today that the GOP leadership’s cruelty towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and particularly transgender North Carolinians knows no bounds,” an overheated Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “For our part, we will continue to fight to defeat all of HB2 and protect North Carolinians no matter what it takes.” In other words, no compromise.

There was distrust all round:

North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger, a Republican, said the unwillingness to accept the amendment on the part of Senate Democrats is evidence that Charlotte would have reneged on the compromise and reintroduced its ordinance after the repeal.

A six-month cooling off period doesn’t seem so unreasonable. But as I’ve said before (because it’s true), a great many LGBT-rights activists and social conservative activists have an interest in not settling culture war issues, thereby maintaining the enraged polarization that is so good for partisan political mobilization and fundraising.

Posted at the Christianity Today site is Fairness for All: Evangelicals Explore Truce on LGBT and Religious Rights. It reports on efforts by some in the evangelical community (which includes those whose politics lean liberal) to support federal legislation modeled on a Utah compromise bill that the state enacted last year. Going national, the aim is to “bring together religious liberty defenders and LGBT activists to lay out federal legislation to secure rights for both.”

There’s bad news, however:

…several prominent religious liberty advocates—including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention—that opposed the Utah compromise model aren’t on board with Fairness for All either. … [and] much of the momentum around LGBT advocacy also resists such compromise.

But there’s good news, too:

Even without a specific proposal to parse, evangelical leaders are doubling down on the need for deeper discussion, as well as outreach to government partners and LGBT groups.

It’s a nice thought but a tough sell. As I’ve said before, the idea of letting President Trump sign a federal LGBT rights bill, especially one with (gasp) religious exemptions, would be anathema to the Human Rights Campaign and other Democratic party auxiliaries.

And so the (culture) war wages on. And a decision in Illinois is just more grist for the mill: Christian-owned bed and breakfast must host gay weddings, state panel finds.

Proposed legislation that would exempt religious nonprofit organizations from an Obama executive order requiring government contractors to follow LGBT nondiscrimination policies is on hold, but the ACLU and its allies are gearing up for battle on behalf of forcing Catholic charities to facilitate adoptions by same-sex couples because, you know, Jim Crow.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

“What you’ve seen since the election is people see this as a line-in-the-sand moment,” said Ian Thompson, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is an opportunity to really say, ‘No, we’re not going to allow our taxpayer dollars to be used to fund discrimination and target vulnerable communities across the country.’ ”

Supporters say the exemptions are needed to protect religious groups who help the government through their work with veterans, refugees, the homeless and others. In some cases, religious groups may be the only ones offering those services, they say.

A more-constructive progressive/LGBT movement would see the value of allowing exemptions for religious nonprofits in that the advocates would still get 95% of what they want—the government on record outlawing sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by contractors—while showing some flexibility for services provided by faith-based groups. But no dice.

It’s possible soon-to-be-president Trump will rescind the order and/or replace it with a version that includes an exemption for religious groups. If he does so, or if he doesn’t and Congress moves ahead with its measure, progressive activists will fight it tooth and nail, because all or nothing serves their mobilization/fundraising agenda.

That’s also why activists will never allow any LGBT anti-discrimination bill to move forward if it includes exemptions for faith-based groups, even though Trump might be willing to sign such a measure. But having Trump sign an LGBT anti-discrimination law would be progressives’ worst nightmare, and they will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, writes:

Our laws can promote freedom from discrimination alongside freedom of religion. An extreme approach that believes one side wins only if the other side loses, that would veto any affirmation of existing protections, will produce nothing but discord and resentment. What we need instead is compromise and good faith, on both sides.

Sound a lot like what Jonathan Rauch has been saying.

I’ll note that this was written as the GOP took the presidency and maintained its majorities in the Senate and House, so no, it’s not an argument being made from political weakness.

[Added: I understand the response “Sure, now they want to compromise,” but activists have stated for 20 years that their goal was to pass sexual orientation (and, more recently, gender identity) nondiscrimination protections, and now there’s a GOP president who might actually support and sign a reasonable bill. So staunch opposition to religious exemptions and requiring that the existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act (signed by Bill Clinton) be excluded from applying to any such measure—as the Human Rights Campaign and others are demanding—is not a strategy that seeks to accomplish anything except to maintain the political standoff so useful in fundraising appeals.]

A win-win compromise—LGBT legal protections with reasonable and traditional exemptions for religious belief, especially among small, independent service providers—would be in the best interest of everyone except for activists whose power and prestige is based on perpetuating the culture wars.

Buzzfeed takes a look at the growing split among LGBT activists groups about whether to pursue the achievable—additional state and perhaps federal legislation outlawing employment and housing discrimination against LGBT individuals—or oppose such legislation unless it also covers public accommodations, which would extend to everything from Christian bakers who don’t want to put two grooms atop a wedding cake to private businesses that want restrooms restricted to biological genders.

Reports Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden:

One key player is the Gill Foundation…. Gill and several groups that receive its grants, including Freedom for All Americans and the National Center for Transgender Equality, contend this sort of compromise may be their only shot of winning civil rights for millions of LGBT people at the state level in the next decade, even if those gains are incomplete. Leaders of those organizations say they can return to these legislatures in the future to finish the job of passing public accommodations when the issue becomes more palatable.

But groups across the field, including the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign, have argued the short-term gain approach could amount to entering a box canyon. It may take years to pass laws that provide public protections in the future — if ever. And leaving them out may even send a message that discrimination in public is acceptable.

The ACLU sent a blunt letter to Pennsylvania lawmakers and organizations on June 10 detailing their objections to the compromise bill.

I think anti-discrimination laws are often misused and that applying local ordinances on public accommodations to persecute small business owners who, as a matter of their religious convictions, decline to provide creative services to same-sex weddings is gruesomely authoritarian. But I can accept workplace and housing statutes, and apparently so can a lot of transgendered people. As Buzzfeed notes:

In Ohio, LGBT activists shut down a bill this session that left out transgender people. However, Grant Stancliff, a spokesperson for Equality Ohio, told BuzzFeed News that a bill that includes transgender people, yet leaves out public accommodations, may be an appealing compromise to some activists.

“We have heard from transgender people that the biggest wound is in housing and employment,” he said. “So if we were able to secure that, the material benefit for a lot of people’s lives would be pretty big.”

One has to wonder how much of the “no compromise” intransigence is principled opposition on the all-or-nothing front, and how much is based on knowing that not passing anti-discrimination legislation at all is more likely to keep the base fired up and shelling out the bucks.

More. For more than two decades the Human Rights Campaign has failed to pass its signature legislative goal, which for most of that time was the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and is now the Equality Act. This includes periods with both a Democratic president and Democratic congress (under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), and periods with a Republican congress but enough GOP support to push ENDA through. What happened? Every time the measure was poised to pass, activist groups would insert some new provision that would lose majority support (adding transgender protections most prominently, and now the expansion to include public accommodations). Or, as with ENDA under Harry Reid’s Senate and Nancy Pelosi’s House, the Democrats would strangely fail to move the bill out of committee, with nary a protest from HRC—until Republicans were back in charge.

In a Washington Blade column, Mark Lee points out that Gay groups taking on gun issues could backfire:

Do gay activists and organizations run the risk of fracturing equality efforts and the continuing support among constituents for their work by engaging on other political issues, especially when many potential topics enjoy much less than universal, or even broad, support?

Well, yes. But they see their mission as enlisting LGBT brigades to fight for the progressive agenda.

Also on the activists front, the Washington Post reports that LGBT-friendly Asheville feels the impact of the ‘bathroom bill’ boycotts. Gay-owned and gay-friendly businesses in North Carolina are feeling the pain in places that are overwhelmingly liberal like Asheville, and in Charlotte where the transgender-inclusive bill was passed (triggering the state legislature to overturn it and decree that for public schools and government buildings people must use restrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates—leading to the calls to boycott businesses in the state).

If you’re gay or gay-supportive, it’s probably the gay and gay-supportive businesses for whom you’d be a likely customer. Those are the ones you’re now being told to boycott so as to punish North Carolina, in a collective-guilt sense.

Activism can be necessary and productive in the fight for civil rights and equality before the law. It can also be, and increasingly seems to be, about signaling self-righteousness and political correctness.

Relatedly, Cathy Young on feminist male-bashing:

Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity. Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.

This gender antagonism does nothing to advance the unfinished business of equality. If anything, the fixation on men behaving badly is a distraction from more fundamental issues, such as changes in the workplace to promote work-life balance.

It’s all about one-upping each other on the ideological purity scale.

More. Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a sit-in during the city’s Pride march, halting the procession for 30 minutes before organizers signed a list of demands, including “A commitment to increase representation among Pride Toronto staffing/hiring, prioritizing black trans women” among others, and, more ominously, “Removal of police floats in the pride marches/parades.”

Global News reports that despite the pledge to “purge the parade of police marchers,” that “Officers will still be present to enforce security at future parades.”

Via The Star, “Police also wouldn’t be allowed to have booths at future Pride celebrations, if the demands are met.” Inclusion!

Furthermore. Via Walter Olson:

If you thought blackmailing gays was a thing of the past, you didn’t reckon with BLM. … It so typifies 2016 that the ones to shut down a gay pride parade would be on the Left, and that no one would tell them off.

And from James Kirchick:

Gay groups honored Black Lives Matter with prominent roles at their pride events, and Black Lives Matter returned the favor by hijacking those events to further their own anti-cop agendas. Condemning the police as an inherently racist, homophobic institution is not only false and counterproductive, it denigrates the many LGBT officers whose participation in these festivities would be annulled if the activists got their way.

Take back Gay Pride from the left-progressive haters, in NYC and Toronto!