This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

North Carolina and the federal government mustered for a legal showdown on Monday, in the battle over bathrooms and civil rights for LGBT people in the state.

The state filed a lawsuit in the morning, claiming federal intervention was a “baseless and blatant overreach” of its power, and disputed the federal interpretation of civil rights laws.

The suit came hours before a US justice department deadline for North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, to scrap the law, which bans transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match the gender on their birth certificates.

Monday afternoon as the deadline passed, the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, announced the justice department had filed suit against North Carolina over the law. Lynch said the law amounts to “state-sponsored discrimination” and has caused transgender people to suffer “emotional harm, mental anguish, distress, humiliation and indignity”.

Vanita Gupta, head of the justice department’s civil rights division, said “calling the law a ‘bathroom bill’ trivializes what this is really about”.

“HB 2 translates into discrimination in the real world. The complaint we filed today speaks to public employees who feel afraid and stigmatized on the job. It speaks to students who feel like their campus treats them differently because of who they are. It speaks to sports fans who feel forced to choose between their gender identity and their identity as a Tar Heel. And it speaks to all of us who have ever been made to feel inferior – like somehow we just don’t belong in our community, like somehow we just don’t fit in.”

Earlier, McCrory, a Republican, gave a brief public address on the subject.

“The US government gave us a mere three business days,” he said, calling the question of bathroom rights “a new, complex and emotional issue of how to balance the expectations of privacy and equality”.

He specifically levelled charges at Barack Obama, for overreaching executive power in “setting bathroom and locker room policies”. Instead, he said: “We believe a court, rather than a federal agency, should tell us.”

McCrory spoke as the federal government’s deadline slipped past. Asked about possible repercussions, the governor’s general counsel, Bob Stephens, said: “Well, we’ll see. But this is our response. So we’ve met the deadline.”

The fight over House Bill 2 has divided North Carolina’s population, which is evenly split between conservatives and liberals.



“Our position all along has been that HB2 should be repealed,” Larry Di Rita, a spokesman for Bank of America, told the Guardian on Monday afternoon. The bank is one of the largest and most powerful companies in North Carolina.

“We’ve heard from our customers and clients on this, and the consensus is that it would be better if it were repealed.

“We had encouraged a dialogue between local and state governments, but now it seems it will have to be resolved at the federal level.”

In its complaint, the state wrote: “This is an attempt to unilaterally rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws.

“The overwhelming weight of legal authority,” the lawsuit argues, “recognizes that transgender status is not a protected class under Title VII.”

McCrory and other state officials have been under pressure since the justice department warned last week that the law passed in March violates civil rights protections against sex discrimination on the job and in education for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

North Carolina’s defiance could put funding at risk for the state’s university system and lead to a protracted legal battle. A federal lawsuit against the state is possible, the justice department said.

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“It’s the federal government being a bully. It’s making law,” McCrory said on Fox News Sunday. The justice department was “trying to define gender identity, and there is no clear identification or definition of gender identity”.



McCrory has called the law a commonsense measure, designed to protect the privacy of people who use bathrooms and locker rooms and expect all people inside the facilities to be of the same gender. On Sunday, McCrory said he was not aware of any North Carolina cases of transgender people using their gender identity to access a restroom and molest someone, a fear frequently cited by the law’s supporters as the main reason for its passage.

While McCrory agreed that the justice department could warn of consequences if North Carolina established separate bathrooms for white and black people, he said the agency had gone too far in contending that transgender people enjoy similar civil rights protections.

“We can definitely define the race of people. It’s very hard to define transgender or gender identity,” he said. He added that he had made a request for more time to respond to the justice department but that was denied.

The governor has become the public face of the law, which has been the subject of fierce criticism by gay rights groups, corporate executives and entertainers. North Carolina has already paid a price, with some businesses scaling back investments in the state and associations canceling conventions.

The 17-campus University of North Carolina system risks losing more than $1.4bn in federal funds if it does not comply. Another $800m in federally backed loans for students who attend the public universities also would be at risk if it is found that enforcing the law violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on sex.

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The justice department’s lawsuit alleges the law also violates Title VII, which bars employment discrimination.

Republican lawmakers who run the general assembly have no plans to repeal the law.

The senate leader, Phil Berger of Eden, said last week he was frustrated because “we have a federal administration that is so determined to push a radical social agenda that they would threaten” federal funding. “I just think the people should be frustrated and people should be angry.”

Margaret Spellings, president of the University of North Carolina, has said that while the university system is obligated to follow the law, it does not endorse it. Spellings said later she hoped legislators would change the law, which could discourage promising faculty and students from coming to system campuses. McCrory said the system’s governing board would not get together until Tuesday.

The law also prevents local governments from passing rules giving protections to LGBT people while using public accommodations such as restaurants and stores. It was designed to block an ordinance by the city council in Charlotte, where lawmakers tried to enact anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people.

Meanwhile in Jackson, Mississippi, the ACLU filed suit against the state in the US district court over House Bill 1523, which was passed by the Republican-majority legislature and signed by the GOP governor, Phil Bryant, and is set to become law on 1 July.

The suit was filed in response to last summer’s supreme court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Supporters say the law – which allows workers to cite their own religious objections to same-sex marriage to deny services – will protect people’s religious belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Opponents say it violates the equal-protection guarantee of the constitution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report