With anti-LGBT laws successfully passing and advancing across the South, one state lawmaker wants to be part of the trend.
South Carolina state Sen. Lee Bright (R) has introduced S. 1203, a bill that borrows language directly from North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law. Not quite as sweeping as the North Carolina law, Bright’s bill only hones in on discriminating against transgender people’s bathroom use.
S. 1203 would do three things: it would ban municipalities from establishing protections that would allow transgender people to use bathrooms, it would ban any state building from allowing transgender people to access sex-designated restrooms, and it would ban schools from allowing transgender people to access sex-designated restrooms.
Bright, whose conservative credentials include believing that schools should teach students how to shoot guns and that South Carolina should try seceding again, put his antipathy for transgender people on grand display when he introduced the bill Wednesday. “Apparently PayPal has shown its support for pedophiles by wanting them to go into bathrooms,” he said, referring to the online payment service abandoning plans for a global operations center in North Carolina. “Men and women sharing bathrooms in public places is just beyond me.”
“I’ve about had enough of this,” he continued. “I mean, years ago we kept talking about tolerance, tolerance, and tolerance. And now they want men who claim to be women to be able to go into the bathroom with children. And you got corporations who say this is OK.”
Gov. Nikki Haley (R) actually disagreed that there was any need for such a bill. “In South Carolina, we are blessed because we don’t have to mandate respect or kindness or responsibility in this state,” she said. “I don’t know of any example that we’ve had a problem.”
Not only have North Carolina and Mississippi passed anti-LGBT laws, legislation in Tennessee is also on the move. The House there has resurrected a bill targeting transgender students, and Gov. Bill Haslam (R) is considering signing a bill that would allow therapists to reject clients on the basis of their religious beliefs.