infinite9: That's right. FORMER and not sitting. Is it any worse than when Hillary Clinton praised late-US Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia? He was apart of the KKK and yet he did not get any heat from it just because he was apart of the Democratic Party.

It's all politics. People give Duke crap not because he is former KKK but because of his stances on "diversity" and international financial interests. Just look at how those same people praise Nelson Mandela despite the crap he helped organize with the ANC (necklacing, bombings, slaughter of innocent blacks) and how he joined in songs calling for the murder of white Afrikaaners.

hedwards: Once past into law there's the judicial route of getting it declared unconstitutional as there is no constitutional right to discriminate against people outside of a few special areas. For example, Churches can't be forced to hire Jews as priests. And synagogues can't be forced to hire Muslims as rabbis.

The other is to damage their economy through boycotts to the point where they give up on the whole idea.

But, even without it being set aside, those kinds of discriminatory behavior will remain illegal under federal law. Unfortunately, there are fewer federal courts and the cost of taking a case there is higher than it would be at the state or county levels.

DivisionByZero.620: I can't figure out why so many people are turning into "social justice warriors" over this.

Disclaimer:
For the purposes of this discussion, I will leave politics and religion out of this post.
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There are good reasons for this new North Carolina law that have nothing to do with politics or religion/morality. The argument (leaving the "conservative morality vs liberal social justice" argument out of it) is fundamentally between peoples' right to be safe in the appropriate bathroom versus people who prefer to identify as a different gender choosing their bathrooms.

One massive argument in this debate that will never go away: There are plenty of people (mostly women) who are concerned that men will falsely pose as "transgender" as an excuse to enter womens' bathrooms and creep.

Now consider the principle of the rights of the majority versus the rights of the minority. If people who identify as transgender are allowed to pick any bathroom, then the rights of women (50% of the population) to appropriate privacy in the bathroom are being thrown under the bus to serve the transgender lobby. Transgenders are only a thin sliver of the population, probably somewhere between .001% and .01%. Are you seriously going to advocate endangering half of the population just so that .001% to .01% can feel more comfortable?

Allowing people to arbitrarily choose a bathroom makes it difficult to own a business. Suppose you're a business owner or manager in a "transgender-friendly" state like California, New York, or Massachusetts. One day, a panicked woman comes to the counter to complain about a man in the womens' bathroom being a creep. As the manager/owner/boss, it's your job to investigate the complaint. You confront the creep, and he claims to be a transgender (and it's a psychological condition so you have no way of actually verifying it short of an fMRI scan). You are now left with an unpalatable and unwinnable choice: You could boot the creep out of the womens' bathroom or out of your shop and risk getting sued for "discrimination", or you could let the creep stay while the negative reviews against your business pile up.

As the old saying goes: "Never wish for anything, you just might get it."

The governor and legislature in North Carolina are just doing their job - keeping their constituents safe. It isn't about discrimination, it's a matter of public safety (or at least potential public safety) for half of the population.
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States also have the right to be different. One of the original founding principles in the U.S. was that any matter that isn't best served with federal regulations should be delegated to the states. This gives the people a choice (to vote with their feet). Instead of bashing down the law that North Carolina voted for through their elected governor and representatives, the transgenders (and the big businesses aligned with the transgender lobby) should just move to a state that favors them. Meanwhile, religious small business owners tired of being oppressed for their religious convictions could move to North Carolina. Let the conservatives move to conservative states and let the liberals move to liberal states. That way, everyone's happy and enjoying their rights in states aligned with their mindset.

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FYI: it appears that the governor of Georgia caved in to big business interests and the transgender lobby, vetoing a similar bill in his state. Time for women concerned about their safety to move from Georgia to North Carolina.

paladin181: Be careful. The next argument coming your way is the strawman that you're painting all transgender (or any transgender person) as a degenerate who wants to harm (other) women.

hedwards: Probably not, the issue here is that the previous poster is reinforcing the feminist idea that all men are potential rapists and that men and women have to be in separate restrooms for the safety of women.

Arguments like the one you responded to are why I support making all restrooms unisex. Women as a group need to just grow up and realize that stranger rape in this context is rare.

As much as I dislike the way in which transpeople are being used as a weapon against masculine men, I have to side with trans people about how ludicrous these arguments are.

DivisionByZero.620: States also have the right to be different.

hedwards: I see you're doubling down on the propaganda. Women being raped by strangers is highly unusual. And women being raped by strangers in restrooms is downright rare. I'm sure there's a few cases every year, but it's definitely not something that happens often enough to worry about.

paladin181: That was supposed to be huge sarcasm, Hedwards. I don't think that at all. Sorry for the loss of tone in the post.

RWarehall: Frankly, I'd be better off staying out of this whole thing but I'll add one comment...

It's a little odd that the basis of this whole issue seems to be a group of people arguing for more rights than the rest of the population gets. The fact that if a man or a woman can get arrested for entering the wrong bathroom, yet another group is claiming they should have the right to enter any bathroom of their choosing at any time...

To me, the simplest solution is a push that allows a change of gender (sex) on one's official ID. Only then would this be an issue of equal rights. All people would have the right to a single sex's bathroom and transgendered individuals would have the right to enter the bathrooms they want as long as they have gone through the official legal process to change their sex.

RWarehall: Frankly, I'd be better off staying out of this whole thing but I'll add one comment...