@nrdsb4:
Actually, no one is entirely sure why people are straight or gay or bisexual, genetics plays a role (for example, siblings where one child is gay are likely to have another of the chidren be gay, among non identical twins the rate of the other twin being gay if the first one is is quite high, and with identical twins it is even higher…but is not necesarily 100%. It is likely some combination of genetics and pre natal development that interact with each other…but you are correct it is not a choice, it is inate for most.
Transgender people may be the same, the Wachowskis, the folks that brought us “The Matrix” are twins I believe, and both of them have transitioned and are out as trans.
To be honest, one of the things that disturbs me is even if let’s say being gay is a choice, how should that matter? Why should religious belief or personal belief ever be allowed to decide how someone else should live? I find it ironic that some of the most ardent bigots I have come across claim to be patriotic americans, yet cannot quite fathom that the constitution and the words about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are about people being allowed to live as they see fit, our constitution is about individual rights to do that, yet they want to use the law to enforce their bigotry, usually based in religious belief with these kinds of issues. Tom Paine, who in many ways was probably the greatest of the founders, if the most reviled in the end, had the idea that underlies why things like this law are wrong, he talked about tolerance, and said that intolerance and tolerance were basically the same thing. He said that someone who is intolerant doesn’t like the way someone lives, and feels they have the right to stop them, whereas someone who is tolerant doesn’t like the way the person lives, but decides they can live with the other person living around them in peace, tolerates them, and then Paine went on to say that they both have the same problem, that the people think they have the right to judge the other person in the first place. Paine also ardently felt that religion was the biggest threat to a civil democracy there could be, that instead of restraining the lynch mob, they often were the ones egging them on, and that certainly is the case with something like this odious law.
This is a great point, @musicprnt , and one which I think helped determine the marriage equality rulings. In many of those appellate courts, and at SCOTUS, anti-equality counsel was asked to provide examples of harm done to others by gay marriage, and they never in all of those cases could come up with even one example. I think that’s why the bigots moved on to this bogus trans-bathroom situation. Here they could fabricate – yes, make up out of whole cloth – a scenario in which someone could be harmed by someone else’s gender identity.
@musicprnt, yes, biologically determined would probably be more appropriate than genetically determined, at least as a broad statement with our current knowledge.
The NCAA announced on Monday the relocation of seven previously awarded championship events — including NCAA tournament games in Greensboro — from the state of North Carolina during the 2016-17 academic year as a result of the state’s controversial House Bill 2.
and
The seven events that will be relocated are:
► 2016 Division I Women’s Soccer Championship, College Cup (Cary), Dec. 2 and 4.
► 2016 Division III Men’s and Women’s Soccer Championships (Greensboro), Dec. 2 and 3.
► 2017 Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, first/second rounds (Greensboro), March 17 and 19.
► 2017 Division I Women’s Golf Championships, regional (Greenville), May 8-10.
► 2017 Division III Men’s and Women’s Tennis Championships (Cary), May 22-27.
► 2017 Division I Women’s Lacrosse Championship (Cary), May 26 and 28.
► 2017 Division II Baseball Championship (Cary), May 27-June 3.
Let’s hope that the NBA and NFL keep this in mind as well, that if any special events are going to happen in a place with this kind of discrimination, that the leagues show they won’t stand for it. Economic pressure works, and time and again has shown that the social reactionaries don’t represent the US, when the reactionary types try boycotts (against Disney, Ford and others they targeted for being ‘pro gay’) they fail miserably, when it goes the other way, as when Indiana tried their ‘defense of religious liberty act’ ie open season on LGBT people, the potential economic losses forced them to change the law.
@emilybee North Carolinian here. Unfortunately, most of us would support the law just as the majority supported amendment 1 which was regulating that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. We have a urban rural divide. Urban areas are very liberal while rural is very conservative. But, this one, will hurt because college basketball is the one thing we can all agree to love/hate.
@GTalum:
Yep, that is why the constitution has protections and we aren’t a majority rules democracy, the will of the people ends where people’s rights are involved. We also fortunately have other means of redress in society, money is a big one, when laws like this start costing a state money, you suddenly see action. When Indiana passed its idiotic “religious liberty bill”, mostly due to the same urban/rural divide, business leaders made clear to the governor and the politicians who passed the law the consequences, that they feared a backlash (which would have come) and that if the governor signed the bill as written they would work to get him out of office and also work against those in the legislature who supported it.
and yes, I have heard the arguments, it isn’t fair to the fair minded people, it isn’t fair to those who aren’t bigoted, and so forth, but the reality is that without that pain nothing gets done. If the fair minded people (who also tend to be the more urban, educated, well off people who work for the tech companies and banks and so forth) don’t want to be punished, then they need to act, put their money behind their heart, and work towards getting rid of the politicians who did these things. Money talks, and if those corporations and businesses worried about the backlash worked towards throwing out the people who passed this law. BTW, @GTalum, this last paragraph was not aimed at you or anyone in particular. Or if corporations find that things don’t change, then move out of the state, taking the jobs with them, and also that would mean diverting grants and such that would go to the research universities like UNC to schools in places without such a law. NC sells the research triangle and the businesses located there as NC being friendly to business, businesses need to say “no you aren’t” if they have crap like this law.
Well, I said we will have a definitive answer come November on what the majority of N. Carolinians think. I didn’t say what that will be.
But I’m certainly not going to feel sorry that the law is having economic consequences on the State and its citizens. That’s their problem to remedy, not mine.
Maroon 5 was scheduled to perform in NC this past weekend but they cancelled due to HB2.
I was lucky to attend the rescheduled concert last night in Memphis.
You can kind of hope that NC faces what south Africa did, where performers and others refused to play there during the apartheid regime, it does send a message, a powerful one. It will be interesting to see if any groups, sports or otherwise, announces plans to have events in NC because of the ban…
I guess with the NCAA pulling out they had little choice, if the NCAA had kept the course then they could have said “me too” with whatever excuse the NCAA gave, but if they stood their ground they would look very, very bad. People there remain clueless, there is a piece in the NY Times today about the NCAA pullout effect, and it was kind of pathetic. Basically, sob stories about the little kids who wear Duke and NC basketball Jerseys, how much this means to people, and the usual local politicians charging the NCAA with being insensitive to the pain this puts on the local communities for something that was done ‘by the state’…really? So people living in Greensboro and Charlotte and other places aren’t in North Carolina? It isn’t ‘their’ legislature and “their” governor who made and signed the law? The funniest comments were those ripping the NCAA for 'introducing politics to sports", as if this was about a little league baseball game or the like, rather than being major, major businesses that bring in a lot of money to the places holding it. Not to mention, of course, that the whiners who otherwise claim to be sympathetic to opponents of the law, can’t see the obvious, that given the nature of the political situation in North Carolina, it would be unlikely for the political process in the state to solve this issues, if in fact NC politics is dominated, as the whiners complain, by those who passed this law in the first place, then they should know that only outside forces will solve it.
Some are saying “let the courts decide”, but that is kind of funny because those same people are the ones arguing “the courts should not make law, the legislature does”, What the NCAA and performers and businesses who pull out of NC are doing is exactly that, they are putting pressure on the legislature by real economic costs to change, the way economic boycotts in the end helped force change in South Africa. I would much rather that the idiots who supported this law and the idiots who passed it not have the excuse of the courts overruling it, but rather they feel the wrath from the rest of society that their kind of bigotry won’t be tolerated.
If NC cares about their constituents sports dreams so much, its simple they can repeal the law. The entire law. This law is about so much more than bathrooms. It is about being legally able to discriminate against lgbt Americans. NC is spending an enormous amount of money to try and defend the law.
There is absolutely no reason a state needs to legally discriminate against its citizens due to sexual orientation or gender identity esp students in college (and don’t tell me religion). Thank you NCAA and ACC!!
The NC GOP response to the NCAA decision is, well, words fail me. There’s some interesting editorials/opinion pieces out on it with words like “unhinged” and “deranged”.
Here’s one quote from the response: “I wish the NCAA was this concerned about the women who were raped at Baylor.” Wow. Just… wow.
Amazing that is in USA Today, not many years ago it likely would have agreed with the law. This article reminds me of the crap that Phyllis Schafly and the others spread about the ERA, that it would mean men and women sharing restrooms, that it would mean ‘de-masculinizing’ men, would mean women being forced to work outside the home, all kinds of crap that a lot of stupid people actually believed. Also note that the people quoted only go on about the bathroom issue, when the Carolina law in question rolls back any legal protections for LGBT people done locally, it basically says the state legislature only controls that, and as such is a broad based attack on LGBT people in the state, it isn’t just the bathroom issue…
The whole Baylor thing is not deranged, it goes along with the whole idea of this law, that a transgendered woman in the locker room was going to lead to women being sexually assaulted, it is in effect arguing that the NCAA fouled up with Baylor (which it did) with women getting assaulted, and this is another example of the NCAA ‘not protecting women’…
As far as the people saying this goes, Bobby Jindal (of all people) said his party was going to become known as the party of stupid…or as Forrest Gump said, stupid is as stupid does…