US Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Department of Justice’s suit to stop North Carolina’s bathroom bill with a speech that the Washington Post said stunned LGBT advocates.
Lynch compared the bathroom bill to the South’s Jim Crow laws - and rightly so, says The Fix’s Janell Ross, with the bill’s “direct contradiction to the U.S. Constitution” and its attempt to roll back social and legal changes and retreat from progress made toward equality.
In no uncertain terms, Lynch passionately denounced House Bill 2 as a violation of federal civil rights laws. However, she explained in her announcement, the DOJ decided to go forward with its lawsuit only after NC authorities failed to certify that the bill would not be implemented and instead chose to sue the DOJ.
The federal civil rights countersuit names as defendants Governor Pat McCrory, the State of North Carolina, The University of North Carolina and the NC Department of Public Safety and seeks a statewide bar of HB 2 and an order declaring the bill’s restroom restriction "impermissibly discriminatory.”
Never before has the LBGT community “heard the government come to their defense so unequivocally and so eloquently,” said the Post.
Sign this petition to thank Attorney General Lynch for so appropriately and passionately challenging NC’s discriminatory law.
Dear Attorney General Lynch,
As the author of a book about the devastating effects of the rhetoric that brought Jim Crow to North Carolina and its long and cruel reign in the South, I agree that the rhetoric supporting House Bill 2 harks back to those dark, backward days and am therefore writing to thank you for your stand against this discriminatory law..
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