Six U.S. senators call on NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to move the All-Star Game from Charlotte because of a law forbidding individuals from using multiple-person bathrooms designated for the opposite sex at government facilities.
“The Act forces transgender individuals to use bathrooms that differ from their gender identity and preempts local governments from passing non-discrimination ordinances protecting members of the LGBT community,” the missive signed by Patrick Leahy, Jeff Merkley, Cory Booker, Mark Kirk, Tammy Baldwin, and Patty Murray reads. “Put plainly, HB2 provides businesses, government contractors, hotels, and other institutions with a license to discriminate, and no city council or county government can do a thing about it. This is just wrong.”
Apart from failing biology, the letter gets history wrong. The senators characterize the North Carolina law “an attempt to bend the arc of the moral universe, in Dr. King’s words, away from justice and equality.” But attributing those words to Martin Luther King, who got them from 19th-century Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker, represents “an attempt to bend the arc of the moral universe away from justice and equality.” Elsewhere, the letter accurately characterizes the position of another great civil-rights icon — the Round Mound of Rebound, Sir Charles Barkley — who has a dream that one day right there in North Carolina little girls in shock and large men in skirts will be able to join hands in the water closet as sisters and sisters, at least in a Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence sort of way.
“We hold no ill-will towards the people of Charlotte,” the Northern senators insist of the host city of the 2017 All-Star Game, “who passed an antidiscrimination measure that HB2 overturned, or towards the people of North Carolina. However, we cannot condone nor stand idly by as North Carolina moves to legalize and institutionalize discrimination against the LGBT community. Nor should the NBA allow its premier annual event to be hosted in such a state.”
But why stop at the separatist symbolism encoded on the restroom door? To paraphrase Dr. King’s words, Governor McCrory, tear down this stall!
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