He’s an affable governor from a conservative pro-business state who swung into damage control within hours of signing a plainly discriminatory bill that overrode local LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances. He fervently sought to correct misinformation. He went on national TV and puzzled at all the fuss. He felt misunderstood, blamed the media, and utterly failed to see his own missteps. And finally, after he demonstrated week after week of willful ignorance about the cause of his state’s undoing, the local media began writing his political obituary:
When you have to "clarify" a horribly damaging piece of legislation that you raced to sign, when you dodge a question on national TV about whether discrimination is legal in your state, when you deal your state a crushing economic blow, when you seem incapable of understanding the role you have played in creating this mess -- well, that makes clear that you are not in the right job.
That governor is Mike Pence of Indiana, though it all sounds shockingly reminiscent of what we’re witnessing right now with Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina. With perhaps one difference: Mike Pence was not up for re-election last year after he signed Indiana’s discriminatory “religious freedom” bill and the state started hemorrhaging jobs. Instead of losing his governor’s seat, Pence’s 2016 presidential ambitions went down the drain.
And while McCrory’s obit hasn’t been written yet, even he is starting to see the writing on the wall.
“Society is changing quickly and anybody who gets in the way is in trouble. And I might be in trouble,” he admitted Tuesday on a Charlotte radio show.
But for that one moment of clarity, McCrory still marveled at just how he wound up in this situation.
“Sadly, in our nation if you have disagreement and you’re on the wrong side of that disagreement, according to the thought police, you’re dispensed of. You’re exiled,” he said. “I’ve even had some people call me, ‘Please don’t, governor, don’t show up to this event because I have people who disagree with you and we don’t want it.”
Let’s just ponder that for a moment. If your friends started calling you up to say, hey, please don’t make an appearance, if they started crossing you off the guest list—wouldn’t that give you pause? Perhaps a moment of reflection would be in order, no?
And yet in that same interview, McCrory defiantly declared, “We haven’t embarrassed North Carolina.”
If McCrory still has any doubts that even in red states voters aren’t all that thrilled with prioritizing religious zealotry over jobs, Ted Cruz’s spectacular exit from the 2016 presidential race this week should put them to rest.
Cruz gave a national platform to McCrory’s message about enacting “common sense” bathroom measures to protect women and children from “perverts.” And the very same Hoosier voters who had elected a socially conservative governor in the vein of Cruz just three years earlier said: No way. They had seen that rodeo before and once was enough. After Cruz wholeheartedly embraced the rhetoric that McCrory is still advancing, he suffered a nearly 17-point trouncing in Indiana Tuesday before suspending his campaign that evening.
In fact, Cruz’s resounding defeat and the reality that his trans-phobic scare tactics utterly failed to move Republican voters was emblematic of a week that could be seen as a turning point in the toilet wars.
It began with a conservative Dallas suburb resoundingly rejecting an anti-LGBT bathroom ordinance sponsored by its mayor. On Tuesday, the Washington Post’s David Weigel declared Cruz’s demise an “electoral victory” for transgender rights after Cruz tried to make the race “a referendum on their movement.” The next day in Alabama, the Oxford City Council rushed to repeal a bathroom ordinance before it could be signed by the mayor.
But none of this happened in a vacuum. Oxford council members worried that the initiative might put them in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. It wasn’t a hypothetical: Not only did a federal appeals court recently side with a transgender student in a Title IX legal challenge, the Department of Justice informed Gov. McCrory that same day that it concluded his HB2 law falls afoul of federal law.
And on top of all these steps forward, an LGBT group debuted an ad this week that could be the beginning of the end of the conservative bathroom crusade. We are finally beginning to employ some of the lessons learned from fighting the marriage referenda. This ad humanizes, educates, and creates a path to greater understanding of transgender Americans. It gives viewers permission to feel uncertain while learning about transgender issues, and then again to move past those reservations. Turns out transgender individuals are simply human—nothing more, nothing less.
It’s a message McCrory still hasn’t gotten as he continues to fundraise off the devious “protect our women” trope. He quickly dismissed the Justice Department determination as “overreach,” without a hint of irony about rushing to sign a bill that unilaterally obliterated all pro-LGBT ordinances statewide.
On Friday, McCrory gushed over a projected budget surplus of $330 million.
“This confirms that tax reform, coupled with pro-growth economic policies and responsible budgeting have positioned our state as a leader in economic opportunity and competitiveness…”
Go ahead and cling to those “pro-growth economic policies” for dear life, governor. And feel free to update us once you’ve factored in that potential $861 million revenue loss in federal education funding.