Obama AG Loretta Lynch sues North Carolina over bathrooms, compares law to Jim Crow

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit today stating that North Carolina has violated federal civil rights laws by overturning ordinances mandating that transgender people can use the restroom and shower facilities of the opposite biological sex. Privacy advocates are shocked by the move of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who also made the comparison to Jim Crow laws and segregation.

“This is not the first time we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress to our nation,” said Lynch in a press conference. “We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in the fierce arguments against Brown v. the Board of Education” – the 1954 Supreme Court decision that overturned segregation. “And we saw it in the state bans on same-sex unions that were intended to spike any hope that one day gays and lesbians might be afforded the right to marry.”

“It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restaurants, water fountains, and public accommodations, keeping people out,” she said.

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“This is about a great deal more than bathrooms,” Lynch continued. “It’s about the Founding ideals that have led this country, haltingly but inexorably, in the direction of fairness, inclusion, and equality for all Americans.”

Addressing “the transgender community” directly, Lynch, a North Carolina native, said, “Please know that history is on your side.”

Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, agreed the lawsuit is about principles of the highest order.

“I want to make one thing clear,” Gupta said. “Calling H.B. 2 a ‘bathroom bill’ trivializes what this is all about.”

It was Gupta who wrote the letter to North Carolina officials last Wednesday saying that the state must agree not to enforce the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (H.B. 2) or risk today’s retribution.

Departments of Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) threatened late last week to withhold funds totaling at least $3 billion if the state did not comply with the Obama administration’s transgender move.

“The federal government is threatening North Carolina for lawfully enacting common-sense legislation that simply protects people’s privacy and respects the right of private businesses to set their own policies,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Kellie Fiedore.

The ADF has filed suit on behalf of families in Palatine, Illinois, after the school district yielded to the Obama administration’s pressure to change its restroom and locker room policies.

“The administration’s lawless attack on H.B. 2, and its threat to economically harm the state by withholding millions of federal dollars, is the latest attempt to coerce conformity with the administration’s political agenda,” she said.

“Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t march on Selma so that grown men and boys could march into girls changing rooms,” said Traditional Values Coalition President Andrea Lafferty. “No legislature passed this interpretation, no executive signed this into law. The Obama administration is interpreting this law by regulatory fiat.”

King’s niece, Alveda King, wrote in her book King Rules that, if he were alive today, Martin Luther King Jr. would fight to preserve marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman.

Girl Scouts opened their arms to the transgender community and now Oregon allows taxpayer fund surgeries for children, starting at age 15, without parental consent