Five years later, Democratic lawmakers still fighting to erase HB2, promote LGBT rights

Democratic House and Senate lawmakers introduced a package of bills Tuesday they say will extend greater dignity and equality to LGBT people across North Carolina.

Posted 6:03 p.m. Mar 30, 2021 — Updated 1:36 p.m. Mar 31, 2021

Sloane Heffernan

, WRAL anchor/reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — Democratic House and Senate lawmakers introduced a package of bills Tuesday they say will extend greater dignity and equality to LGBT people across North Carolina.

"These four bills won’t fix all of the problems and obstacles that our communities face, but they are a start," Kendra Johnson, executive director of advocacy group Equality North Carolina, said during a news conference.

Companion bills in the House and the Senate are dubbed the “Equality for All Act,” which would establish comprehensive statewide nondiscrimination protections in housing, employment and schools for all LGBT people.

"It affirms what we already know, that no one should live in fear of discrimination and that everyone in North Carolina deserves basic human rights," said Rep. Vernetta Alston, D-Durham. "This legislation will move North Carolina forward and help us build a state where LGBTQ people are respected and protected, no matter where they live."

A second set of companion bills form the “Mental Health Protection Act,” which would prohibit conversion therapy, or the practice of trying to change an individual's sexual orientation.

"We know that conversion therapy causes a lifetime of harm and often results in teen suicide," Said Sen. Natasha Marcus, D-Mecklenburg.

House Bill 449 would ban the so-called “gay or trans panic defense," which people have used to justify violent acts following unwanted same-sex sexual advances.

"The gay/trans panic defense is an abhorrent legal loophole that allows folks to attack, harm and even murder someone based on their own personal homophobia or transphobia,” said Rep. John Autry, D-Mecklenburg.

House Bill 2 (2016) Coverage

House Bill 451 would repeal legislation passed in 2017 to replace the notorious House Bill 2, which restricted transgender access to public bathrooms and barred cities and counties from adopting local nondiscrimination ordinances for several years.

"For too long, LGBTQ North Carolinians have lived under the shadow of archaic and outdated laws that impact everyone in our community, but most directly those of us that live at the intersections of multiple lenses of oppression," Johnson said.

"This package of bills confronts the attempted erasure of LGBTQ minors, ensures everyone can live in public as their authentic self and catches our laws up to where we really are as a state," agreed Allison Scott, director of impact and innovation for advocacy group Campaign for Southern Equality.

Statistics from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law show that North Carolina was home to about 63,000 LGBT people in 2020.

The bills are unlikely to go anywhere in the Republican-controlled legislature, however. Previous attempts to eliminate the last vestiges of House Bill 2 and ban conversion therapy have never gotten a committee hearing.

Just last week, several GOP House members filed legislation to prevent transgender girls from competing on girls athletic teams in high school and college.

Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition, said the package of Democratic-backed bills would infringe on people's religious liberties.

"Disagreement is not discrimination, yet these bills target those whose views the LGBT groups don’t like rather than respecting a diversity of beliefs. These bills would ostracize and marginalize people who hold decent and honorable beliefs about marriage, sex and gender," Fitzgerald said in a statement.

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