Patricia Hunt

My home state of North Carolina has been much in the news. The Republican governor and state legislature passed a law that dealt with, among other things, who can use which bathrooms and whether a locality can pass a higher minimum wage than prevails elsewhere.

I have read a lot of the coverage, both national and local, and I think maybe the larger story is being missed. Liberals cheered when Bruce Springsteen canceled his Greensboro appearance, PayPal decided not to move to North Carolina, and national corporations slammed the state. That will show them. No, it will not. This reaction actually makes many of them happy.

What people miss is how many social changes have taken place in the lifetimes of the people of the South. This is not just an urban vs. small towns and rural areas cultural conflict. It is more.

What is at stake is who will have to defend their culture, and who will not. When I was growing up, white North Carolinians did not have to defend segregation. The people who were called upon to explain themselves were those who supported integration. Segregation was the taken-for-granted reality. Then white Southerners were forced to integrate schools and swimming pools, restaurants and hotels, but perhaps just as galling, they were forced to defend themselves to people who did not share their preferred way of life.

Of no legal import but enormous cultural import was food. In the world of my childhood, one did not have to defend a diet of deep fried everything, pies and cakes, a meat-based diet. If you wanted to eat other kinds of food, you could do so, but you had to explain why you were doing it. A Mediterranean diet? Wouldn’t that be for Italians? Pass the ham biscuits. Then everything changed. You could eat a steady diet of beef, pork and fried chicken, but you had to defend doing it.

You didn’t have to know about wine. Houses of those who drank needed only to have a good bottles of Scotch and bourbon. Period. No one expected you to have anything else on hand. Refrigerators were small, and beer takes up room. Then everything changed. Wine needs to be available. And beer.

People smoked in hospital rooms. Enough said.

School days opened with a “devotional” and maybe a prayer. No need to explain or defend. Religion was Protestant unless otherwise specified. No need to explain or defend that either.

People were assumed to be straight, not gay, bisexual or transgendered. You could be something else, maybe, but you were on the defensive. You had to justify your existence. Or move. To New York. And they did.

And then there is legal abortion and divorce and changing roles or women.

So the latest dust-up in North Carolina has more to do with who has to defend themselves and whose reality can be taken for granted without apology. Conservative white Southerners have seen almost every piece of their culture move from the no-apology, no-defense category to the other side of the ledger. And many do not like it.

So when laws are passed to regulate bathroom use, I don’t think they are really about bathrooms. They are efforts to make culture that now requires defense and explanation move back into the no-defense zone. And they are efforts to tell people who think otherwise to stay in New York or wherever they might be and leave North Carolina conservatives to run things as they like. PayPal not coming? Good. Yankee go home.

The social conservatives may win a battle but they are losing the war and have been since World War II opened up every part of America to a larger world bigger than local cultures. In fact no matter who we are or where in the world we live, all of us are going to be called upon to defend our economic structures, religions or lack thereof, cultural assumptions and practices more than ever before. No one is going to get by with defining a taken-for-granted reality.

It is going to be painful, but I hope what emerges will be better than what any one culture ever had to offer.

Email the writer at phunt@mbc.edu.