First, the basics, most of which you already know: on February 22, Charlotte’s city council passed a nondiscrimination ordinance that included sexual orientation and gender identitythe first such bill in the state, though not the country. Already, nineteen states and more than two hundred cities have passed similar legislation.

But those other cities don’t have to deal with the North Carolina General Assembly. Immediately, Republican leaders labeled Charlotte’s ordinance a “bathroom bill” that would allow men into women’s restrooms. There were murmurs about a special session. Emails obtained by the INDY between Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest’s office and legislative leaders show that Forest’s office was talking about a special session as early as February 25; a week later, Forest formally asked legislators to convene one.

Before the bill was introduced at the start of the one-day special session on March 23, almost nobody knew what it actually contained. A draft version circulated the night before, but multiple Democratic legislators say they first saw the bill when the session was called to order at ten a.m.

In less than twelve hours, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Actknown colloquially by its bill number, HB 2passed the House (with eleven Democrats and all but one Republican supporting it); passed the Senate unanimously, as the entire Democratic Senate caucus walked out in protest; and was signed by Governor McCrory before most people in North Carolina, let alone the rest of the country, knew what was in it.

The end result is perhaps best understood as two interwoven halves. The first was the LGBTQ piece that generated so much controversy. The second catered to the pro-business crowd, gutting the ability of local governments to set higher minimum wages and eliminating workers’ ability to sue in state court over discrimination claims. (The legislature repealed that last provision in the short session that ended earlier this month.)

Together, these aspects of the bill sought to unify the business and social-conservative wings of the state party in an election yearand, critics argue, to use the pretext of bathroom panic to ram through controversial longtime policy goals.

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The first and most notorious piece of the bill deals with “public facilities”bathrooms, showers, and the likeand essentially bars people in schools or government buildings from using the bathroom of the gender that isn’t listed on their birth certificate.

“If you can’t use the restroom that makes sense for you, it becomes much harder to go to school, work, or participate in the public marketplace,” says Sarah McBride, spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. “Opponents utilize restrooms to stoke fear and take advantage of people’s vulnerability, but it’s important for the marginalized community.”

In McBride’s view, the bathrooms were a bogeyman; the protections the Charlotte ordinance offered went way beyond the question of where someone can pee.

“It provided protections for public accommodations more broadly. [Bathrooms] are such a small portion of what ‘public accommodations’ include,” McBride says. “It includes shops, restaurants. The Charlotte ordinance banned discrimination so, for example, someone couldn’t be kicked out of a restaurant for holding hands with the person they love. It wasn’t just about bathrooms.”

The ordinance expanded protections for LGBTQ people outside of public accommodations as well. It declared that neither city contractors nor private businesses could discriminate. While Charlotte was the first North Carolina city to pass a bill that specifically protected transgender individuals, seventeen other local governments had nondiscrimination statutes that included sexual orientation. HB 2 preempted all of them.

In their place came a sterile statewide nondiscrimination law that doesn’t do much to actually stop discriminationnot just discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but also race, religion, or sex.

For example, the Orange County civil rights ordinance laid out procedures for people who have been discriminated against in housing, employment, or public accommodations to pursue criminal and civil legal options. HB 2 lays out no such procedure but overrides those stronger local ordinances, meaning that even a progressive city like Durham is forced to hire an anti-LGBTQ contractor if that contractor submitted the lowest reasonable bid for a taxpayer-funded project.

“For decades, we’ve allowed municipalities to put into place nondiscrimination ordinances, which haven’t been challenged in decades,” says N.C. Justice Center executive director Rick Glazier, a former state representative. “Now, all of a sudden, it’s unconstitutional.”

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HB 2 wasn’t the General Assembly’s first move to restrict local governments from, well, governing. In fact, it’s more the continuation of a trend pioneered by tobacco and gun-rights lobbyists decades ago (see “The 30 Years That Brought Us HB 2,” page 10).

Under the guise of wanting to make state law consistent, the General Assembly eliminated municipalities’ ability to require their contractors to do anything other than have the lowest reasonable bid on the project. This includes having living-wage standards or requiring contractors not to discriminate.

“For decades, we’ve been hearing the conservatives push smaller government and local power,” says Eric Fink, a law professor at Elon University. “In the past decade or so, progressives have wised up to this and have focused on the city and county level to try to move issues forward, like the Charlotte ordinance and local wage ordinances.”

Given the labor movement’s success at raising the minimum wage in Oregon, California, New York, Seattle, and elsewhere, this was an existential threat to some business-minded conservatives. “The success in Seattle [in 2014] was a watershed moment, and that’s a threat to this ideology,” Fink says. “So you just prevent it. You outlaw it.”

The General Assembly used HB 2 to do just that, by voiding “any requirement upon an employer pertaining to compensation of employees, such as the wage levels of employees, hours of labor, payment earned wages, benefits, leave, or well-being of minors in the workforce.” As Wake Forest law professor Harold Lloyd pointed out in a Huffington Post piece in May, the bill even prohibits local governments from “taking care of child labor problems.”

As originally conceived, HB 2 also wiped out what’s known as a “cause of action” clause, which has allowed employees to sue their employers for workplace discrimination in state court since 1977. It’s important to note that this move targeted more than just LGBTQ people; even those who think they’ve been fired or otherwise discriminated against on the basis of race or religion had no recourse in state court, only federal court. Mississippi is the only other state with a similar law. Federal courts, Fink explains, are usually more favorable to employers, because the filing fee in federal court can be higher and federal legal battles are usually more protracted.

But in the waning days of the short session, lawmakers had second thoughts about this provision. In March, McCrory said he didn’t want italthough he didn’t hate it enough to not sign HB 2and social-conservative groups like N.C. Values Coalition weren’t concerned about it. With huge margins, the House and Senate reversed coursethough lawmakers capped the statute of limitations for such claims at one year, not three years, as was the case before HB 2.

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The backlash to HB 2 was swift and came from all sides. Between boycotts from artists, corporations, sports leagues, other cities, states, and even some countries, the Center for American Progress estimated in April that more than $500 million could be in jeopardy. Since that report, the boycotts have continued to grow. Meanwhile, N.C. Justice Center analyst Patrick McHugh estimates that if the state loses federal funding over HB 2an unlikely but not impossible eventualitysome fifty-three thousand jobs and $2.4 billion in wages could be lost.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit shortly after the special session, arguing that restricting transgender people from using the bathroom consistent with their gender identity violated Title IX; the Obama administration agreed in a directive issued to public schools in May; and in June, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district followed the Obama administration’s directive.

In April, McCrory attempted to stymie criticism of HB 2 with an executive order adding sexual orientation and gender identity to existing protections for state employees. But that’s all his executive order didand it wasn’t enough to quiet critics, who say the five-page law that passed in twelve hours has done irreparable harm to the state’s reputation.

“North Carolina was once thought of as the face of the New South, and now it’s looking very much like the discriminatory face of the Old South,” Glazier says. “It’s going to take a long time for that image to fade from national consciousness. The damage is severe and growing.”

This article appeared in print with the headline “HB 2: A Primer”