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Just moments ago, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, asking a federal court to agree that the state’s “bathroom law” is not discriminatory. In the complaint, McCrory alleges the federal government is guilty of “baseless and blatant overreach.”
McCrory was required to respond to the Justice Department’s request that he abandon the state’s “bathroom bill” by today. McCrory says he asked for an extension to respond, but was told he could only get more time if he publicly called the bathroom law discriminatory.
In a letter last week, Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, stated that North Carolina’s law violates federal civil rights law. HB2 bans transgender people from using bathrooms that don’t match the gender on their birth certificates.
In a statement this morning, McCrory says, “The Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law and set restroom policies for public and private employers across the country, not just North Carolina. This is now a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level.”
