A Los Angeles high school on Friday opened the first gender-neutral restroom in the nation's second-largest school district, in a move geared toward accommodating transgender students. Santee Education Complex converted a second-floor girls' restroom after the campus Gay Straight Alliance gathered some 700 signatures on a petition calling for the change.
Senator Ted Cruz came out in favor of a North Carolina law prohibiting biological males from using the restrooms, showers, and changing facilities of the opposite biological sex during a town hall meeting in Buffalo Thursday night. "As the father of daughters, I’m not terribly excited about men being able to go alone into a bathroom with my daughters," he said. "And I think that is a perfectly reasonable determination for the people to make."
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed an executive order Wednesday that critics say will open the floodgates for discrimination lawsuits to be filed against businesses and will prevent people of faith from freely exercising their religion. The order adds "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" alongside such immutable characteristics as race, sex, and national origin in the state’s anti-discrimination policy. All firms that accept state contracts must adopt a similar policy.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed an Executive Order on Tuesday reaffirming what he says maintains "common sense gender-specific restroom and locker room facilities in government buildings and schools." However, he also promised to seek legislation in the short session that would reinstate the right to sue the state for discrimination, which was eliminated under HB2. In addition, McCrory said he is expanding the state's Equal Employment Opportunity policy to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has said that she doesn't think a bill requiring public restrooms be gender-specific is necessary. "When we look at our situation, we’re not hearing of anybody’s religious liberties that are being violated," Haley said. But the bill’s sponsor, State Senator Lee Bright, considers the matter a public-safety issue. "Years ago, we kept talking about tolerance, tolerance, tolerance,” Bright said on the legislative floor. "And now they want men who claim to be women to go in the bathroom with children."
Deutsche Bank is freezing plans to create 250 new jobs at its Cary, North Carolina, location after the state passed a law blocking Charlotte's nondiscrimination ordinance. The ordinance would have opened up women's bathrooms to men and vice versa. "We're proud of our operations and employees in Cary and regret that as a result of this legislation we are unwilling to include North Carolina in our U.S. expansion plans for now," CEO John Cryan said.
About 700 supporters of the new North Carolina law blocking Charlotte's nondiscrimination ordinance spread across the Capitol lawn Monday. Speakers repeatedly urged the crowd to applaud Gov. Pat McCrory, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, legislative leaders and supportive lawmakers. They also had sharp rebukes for PayPal, the online payments company that canceled its plans to expand in Charlotte; for Bruce Springsteen, who canceled a Greensboro concert in protest; and for the businesses that have publicly opposed the law.
Norway’s Lutheran Church voted on Monday in favor of redefining marriage to include same-sex unions, becoming the latest of a small but growing number of "churches" worldwide to do so. In a vote at the annual conference of the Norwegian Lutheran Church on Monday, 88 of the 115 delegates voted to redefine marriage. Both the French Protestant Church and the U.S. Presbyterian Church took similar action last year.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday he probably wouldn't have signed HB2, a new North Carolina law that blocked Charlotte's nondiscrimination ordinance. "I wouldn’t have signed that law from everything I know; I haven’t studied it," the GOP presidential candidate said. "You just got to see what the laws are and what the proposals are and why you need to write a law. Why do we have to write a law every time we turn around in this country? Can’t we figure out just how to get along a little bit better and respect one another? I mean, that’s where I think we ought to be. Everybody chill out."
In a papal document on Friday, Pope Francis urged the Roman Catholic Church to “reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence.” But the pope stopped short of pushing for a total redefinition of marriage. “De facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage,” he said.
A federal appeals court on Thursday stated unambiguously that Puerto Rico’s marriage law is unconstitutional, throwing a federal judge off a case after the judge had ruled that the law was still in effect. in March, U.S. District Court Judge Juan Pérez-Giménez ruled in favor of the law, arguing that the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling did not apply to a territory like Puerto Rico.
Already fractured Republicans in Indiana are facing a new fight over whether to keep language defining marriage in the state party's platform. Activists who fought lawmakers’ attempts to ban same-sex unions now want to strike wording that describes marriage as "between a man and a woman" from the state GOP's policy statement. A similar debate is brewing on the national level. "The job of the party is to win elections," political organizer Megan Robertson said. “We need to bring more people into the party, not alienate them.”
Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant has signed a religious freedom bill, also known as House Bill 1523. The bill prevents state and local government agencies from taking action against state employees, individuals, organizations and private associations that deny service based on religious beliefs. However, the bill does not prevent civil lawsuits based on claims of discrimination.
Atlanta's Mayor has joined a growing list of municipal officials and company heads voicing opposing to North Carolina's new law that blocked Charlotte's non-discrimation ordinance. If the NC General Assembly had not intervened, the ordinance would have obliterated all gender guidelines for bathroom usage. “As a result of Governor Pat McCrory’s decision to sign discriminatory and unnecessary legislation into law, effective today I am directing all City departments to stop non-essential, publicly-funded employee travel to the State of North Carolina," Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said on Monday.
PayPal has announced it will no longer be expanding to Charlotte after lawmakers in North Carolina passed House Bill 2, repealing Charlotte’s non-discrimination ordinance. “The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture," PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said. "As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte.”
In a situation reminiscent of last year’s religious freedom fight in Indiana, and the more recent one last week in Georgia, powerful politicians and CEOs across America are pressuring North Carolina to overturn its new law protecting privacy in restrooms and similar facilities. More than 120 "major" CEOs, including mega-billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Kellogg’s John Bryant, have signed a letter opposing the law, which was delivered to the governor by the Human Rights Campaign. The companies include Google, Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, Levi & Straus, Twitter, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo.
The highest court in Massachusetts is being asked to decide a dispute over parental rights between the mother of two children and her former same-sex partner. Julie Gallagher, the biological parent, says she alone should have the right to make legal decisions for her children, ages 4 and 7. However, Gallagher's former partner, Karen Partanen, wants to be declared a full legal parent. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments Tuesday.
A federal judge purported to strike down a Mississippi ban on adoptions by same-sex couples Thursday, labeling the 16-year-old law as unconstitutional. In his ruling, he cited the Supreme Court's decision last year that purported to redefine marriage nationwide. Jordan's ruling comes as Mississippi lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow businesses and religious groups to decide for themselves who they should do business with.
A federal judge has allowed a lawsuit to proceed that alleges an Idaho city's anti-discrimination policy violates the religious rights of wedding chapel owners. However, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush severely limited the scope of the lawsuit in his ruling on Friday. Hitching Post owners Don and Lynn Knapp shut down their business for a week in 2014 out of fear of being prosecuted for refusing to host homosexual ceremonies. Now, the Knapps are suing Coeur d'Alene, arguing the city caused their economic loss.
Bank of America, which has its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., announced late Tuesday on Twitter that its leadership was joining over 80 chief executives, including Timothy D. Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in objecting to North Carolina's new bathroom law. In addition, the governors of New York, Washington and Vermont have issued bans on most official state travel to North Carolina, as have the mayors of San Francisco, Seattle and New York.
A Christian couple in rural Illinois say they will never host same-sex "marriages" or civil unions at their bed and breakfast, after being forced to pay $80,000 in damages to a same-sex couple they turned away in 2011. Jim and Beth Walder, the owners of TimberCreek B&B, issued a statement that says, in part, "We cannot host a same-sex wedding even though fines and penalties have been imposed by the Illinois Human Rights Commission. Our policy will not be changing."
An Illinois inn that refused to allow a same-sex couple hold their civil union ceremony on the property was fined more than $80,000 by the Illinois Human Rights Commission on Tuesday. An administrative law judge with the commission ordered TimberCreek Bed & Breakfast to pay $15,000 each to Todd Wathen and Mark Wathen for "emotional distress." TimberCreek, located about 100 miles south of Chicago, must also pay $50,000 in attorneys' fees and $1,218.35 in costs.
Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore issued a joint statement Monday in response to a lawsuit filed by the national ACLU and other far-left groups. Part of the statement said: "This lawsuit takes this debate out of the hands of voters and instead attempts to argue with a straight face that there is a previously undiscovered 'right' in the U.S. Constitution for men to use women's bathrooms and locker rooms – but we are confident the court will find the General Assembly acted properly in accordance with existing state and federal law."
Kayla Moore, the founder of the Foundation for Moral Law and wife of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, issued a harsh condemnation of the Georgia governor's decision to veto a religious freedom bill. She said, "[W]hen Georgia's governor caves to the radical gay agenda by vetoing a bill that does nothing more than protect the religious freedom of those who have sincere religious objections to same-sex marriage, we must ask whose interests he truly represents: the people of Georgia or those of the corporations who showed themselves as enemies of religious freedom and traditional values."
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory on Monday dismissed criticism of a controversial new law blocking Charlotte's bathroom ordinance as "political theater" that he says is concocted by left-wing activists, accusing them of a "calculated smear campaign" that included threatening local businesses to oppose the measure. In an interview with NBC News, McCrory said he would not heed calls to repeal the law.