Since North Carolina is now a haven for legally sanctioned LGBT discrimination, it’s about to become a living hell for anyone who doesn’t fit the bill. Which is why Bruce Springsteen just announced that he’s canceling this Sunday’s concert in Greensboro, saying that he wants to “show solidarity for those freedom fighters [working against the bill].”
At a press conference yesterday, North Carolina Governor Pat McCory said he felt “blindsided” by a question about the implications of the “religious freedom” bill he signed last week. If he felt blindsided, imagine how the LGBT citizens of his state that have been freshly stripped of their rights feel!
Trans people are not a threat, but they are threatened. There are no recorded incidents of trans people attacking cisgender people in bathrooms. In fact, trans people experience hate violence at rates disproportionate to their cisgender counterparts, and sometimes these anti-trans attacks occur in bathrooms. It’s counterintuitive for someone who presents as female to use a restroom designated for males (and vice versa), and all the proof of the resulting absurdity you need is captured in the picture above, which transgender woman Kelly Lauren posted on Facebook in November in response to the public’s voting down of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance: “Houston, do you REALLY want me in the same restroom as your husband or boyfriend?”
The battle over abortion rights continues in North Carolina, where state law now requires doctors to send the ultrasounds of women seeking abortions to state officials. Depending on whom you talk to, this is either a gross intimidation tactic by the state or a necessary practice to verify that clinics are complying with a previously enacted state law that bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
After police knocked on the door of his Pennsylvania motel room, a murder suspect from North Carolina, thinking the jig was up, shot himself on Saturday afternoon. The police, however, were there to arrest someone else altogether.
A judge in North Carolina’s Wayne County Superior Court is accused of abusing his power by asking a known FBI agent to snoop on his family members’ text messages. Judge Arnold Ogden Jones offered the agent two cases of beer in exchange for a disk full of texts, according to the federal indictment against him.
Remember when Ben Carson said, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that” and some people were like, “Haha, what a dope—hasn’t that guy ever heard of the Constitution, which explicitly states ‘no religious test’ will ever be applied to anyone running for public office in these United States?”
This is how a proposal is supposed to go in Southport, N.C.: You head down to that fish bar by the water Saturday night, and take a walk on the dock with your girlfriend. “Hey, is that your mom?” she wonders, “What’s she doing here?” She turns around and you’re already on one knee, deftly whipping out the box containing your future fiancée’s engagement ring. Smooth. Flawless. But that’s not how it went for Matthew Picca, age 25.
