Legislature misses chance to erase a scar

Pardon us if we sound like a broken record, but House Bill 2 is an abominable piece of legislation and it needs to be repealed — yesterday.

Really, it should have been repealed the day before yesterday when state legislators gathered for their fifth special session of the year, including the one they called to pass HB2 back in March.

Back then the Republican leadership, oblivious to the repercussions their actions were bound to create, marched ahead with the law to bar transgender people from the bathrooms that they had been using. And losing our beloved ACC tournament isn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it is spelled out in an open letter posted Wednesday and published here on today’s opinion page. It’s from a Greenville teen to Gov.-elect Roy Cooper and members of the General Assembly. In it, Skye Thomson explains how House Bill 2 created an open season of hate on kids like him.

“So many trans kids like my son have been irreparably damaged by this hateful bill,” his mother, Deborah Thomson, said in a news release publicizing the letter. “Bullying, open hate, shouted slurs — that is what my son has had to live through since HB2 was passed. It has to stop, it has to end now. ...”

Skye doesn’t appeal for a perfect solution, his mother said, just an open and honest dialogue with Cooper and elected leaders — a similar request to Gov. Pat McCrory failed.

That’s too bad. People who have a chance to meet teens and adults like Skye might realize they have nothing to fear about sharing a bathroom with them. We might not even notice. We probably didn’t notice.

We probably wouldn’t worry about locker rooms and showers either. Get to know a few transgender people and we might learn a thing or two about privacy and discretion.

How can a newspaper that endorsed Pat McCrory and Donald Trump take such a strong stance against this bill? We endorsed McCrory because the state’s economy improved under his tenure, and we endorsed Trump because the Affordable Care Act and other Democratic policies have been hard on businesses like ours.

However, such endorsements don’t mean we are going to stand for discriminatory policies put in to place by them or anybody else, regardless of their party.

And as for the child molesters and rapists who supposedly would have carte blanche to enter bathrooms under the veil of any law extending protections to the LGBTQ community, there are plenty of rules on the books to deal with people of such nefarious intent, and we would certainly support strengthening them if necessary.