North Carolina's Governor McCrory is latest conservative to completely confuse what "small government" means.

Conservatives sometimes truly do say the damndest things. For instance, North Carolina’s Governor and Urination/Defecation Zoning Czar Pat McCrory (R) recently called the public outcry over a bill he signed into law “political theater” when in point of fact the law itself is nothing more than political theater. The law at the center of the controversy is like similar laws passed in red states recently that seek to bar transgender people from using the restroom intended for the gender they identify with. All over this great nation, conservatives are waking up with a terrible feeling — they just don’t know where all transgender poops and pees are going.

Oh, the horror!

As reported by The Huffington Post, McCrory appeared on NBC and declared that the attention his state’s codified bigotry is getting is really just inconsequential blathering from political operatives.

“This national political campaign directed toward North Carolina, I think, is well-coordinated and more political theater than reality,” McCrory told NBC News. (source)

To translate for Governor Where Are You Pissing Next, the comfort and mental health of transgender people in his state are just the dalliances of people unthethered to reality. Mr. McCrory is sure that his insertion of the government between transgender North Carolinians and their toilet of choice isn’t overreach, it’s protecting children and innocent, unsuspecting women from pervy men who will just put their finger in the air and declare themselves a woman, solely for the purpose of getting anything from a cheap thrill to being able to commit sexual assault.

Except, anybody can already barge into any public restroom they want to, if the door’s not locked. Considering there is no evidence anywhere that offering transgender people access to the bathroom they feel most comfortable in will lead to an uptick in sexual assaults, this seems like voter fraud to me. It’s something that conservatives are dead-convinced is rampant no matter how much of a dearth of evidence to back up their claims that might exist.

In fact, the reality is that by the sheer numbers of it, there are way more people that still identify with their biological gender than not, so what would this law do extra to prevent a cisgendered person from committing a sexual assault in a bathroom? The answer? Nothing. This law does nothing except make it clear that Republicans in the state don’t value transgender people’s feelings or emotions. They’ll give you all kinds of reasons from Jesus to nature as to why, but the simple, unavoidable truth is that to Republicans in the Palmetto State, it’s better to expand your government to the point that it cares where people take a dump than it is to simply presume transgender people want to use the bathroom that they feel most comfortable in for the same reasons we all do — because pissing and shitting is a private thing that has no business being regulated by the government at all.





Governor McCrory should be ashamed of himself. He’s just the latest in a long line of social conservatives who will ignore every single infrastructural problem in their state to focus on culture war bullshit. And yet, the conservatives in this country never really win the culture war. They lost the fight over slavery. They lost the fight over women’s suffrage. They lost the fight over abortion and gay rights. Sure, their state governments can pass Draconian and abusive discriminatory laws, but they get struck down because despite their arguments to the contrary, we live in the 21st century, over a century after the Reconstruction Acts made these kinds of laws illegal.

Tell me, Governor, if you know these laws will be struck down eventually anyway, who’s really the one engaging in pointless political theater?

So to the people of North Carolina — when you’re asked to pony up the legal fees that your governor will almost certainly rack up defending this clearly unconstitutional law, you have only yourselves to blame. You still have time to call him, write him, and hit him up on Facebook. You can push your legislators to strike this law from the books. Or you can pretend all of us on the outside who are boycotting your state are doing so because of “political theater.”

It’s your call, but if you don’t make the right one, it’s all on you and your dopey politicians who think the government has any business regulating where people do theirs.