North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory argued that his state has suffered a disproportionate amount of backlash for passing laws some see as discriminatory against the LGBT community compared to similar laws passed in Houston, which will host the men's college basketball FInal Four over the weekend. | AP Photo N.C. governor calls backlash over state's new LGBT law hypocritical

The criticism and backlash to North Carolina's new law that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people reeks of hypocrisy in several ways, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said Thursday.

One of them involves this weekend's NCAA Final Four men's basketball championship in Houston, which in addition to the Villanova Wildcats, Oklahoma Sooners and McCrory's home-state Tar Heels, includes the 10th-seeded Syracuse Orange, whose state's Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier this week banned all nonessential, publicly funded travel to North Carolina. (Cuomo issued a similar ban last April when Indiana passed a "religious freedom" measure that did not explicitly prohibit discrimination against LGBT people, lifting it after the law was amended to include that element.)


Voters in the Final Four host city of Houston, McCrory remarked during an interview on "Fox & Friends," last November overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 1, known as the Equal Rights Ordinance, which would have allowed transgender people to use the bathroom of their preference and would have punished noncompliant businesses with fines up to $5,000.

“And there are no protests for boycotts of Houston, Texas, during the Final Four basketball tournament. Nor should there be," McCrory said. "So none of these corporations that are now criticizing North Carolina, they’re all going to be advertising during the NCAA championship, and there’s a lot of corporate and political and media elite hypocrisy about this. It’s really sad."

The Republican North Carolina governor signed the legislation, which prevents cities and counties from passing their own anti-discrimination rules, on March 23.

McCrory slammed Cuomo's travel ban as "demagoguery at its worst," blasting the New York governor for visiting the communist regime of Cuba but telling his own citizens to stay away from another state. “I don’t think New York even has such a law forcing businesses to accept people of one gender to be able to use the restroom and shower facilities in their businesses, so he might need to boycott his own state at this point in time," he remarked.

"First of all, a lot of New Yorkers already moved to North Carolina" and have made the state "their permanent home. I’m sorry, Gov. Cuomo, but that’s a fact," McCrory said, to which co-host Brian Kilmeade, a native New Yorker, agreed. "Maybe it’s because we believe in just common-sense privacy laws, and, by the way, we also are against any types of discrimination, but that doesn’t mean we overturn basic common-sense expectations of privacy that men and women and children expect when they go to a locker room or a restroom or a shower facility. This is ridiculous.”

He added, "We’re not in favor of discrimination, but we do favor common-sense privacy laws just like the city of Houston does. Go Tar Heels. Go Tar Heels."

“Well, I can’t agree with that," Kilmeade remarked. "My son goes to Syracuse.”

The Tar Heels and the Orange tip off in the second game Saturday evening at Houston's NRG Stadium.