It saddens me that the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) decided to pull its championship games out of North Carolina because of House Bill 2 (HB2), better known as the bathroom bill.
It’s incredible that a bill that says males will use the men’s restroom and women will use the women’s restroom is considered so discriminatory by the ACC that it doesn’t want to be associated with a state that has such a law.
Like a lot of native North Carolinians, I grew up as an ACC fan. I actually grew up singing the Carolina fight song and then went to Duke. When I applied to colleges I didn’t consider applying to a non-ACC school, and while at Duke I enjoyed competing as an athlete in the ACC.
Two of my grandparents met at Carolina, so my ACC roots go back to long before the ACC even existed.
As a kid growing up in Greensboro, there weren’t many acceptable excuses for missing school, but it was allowed – no questions asked – if you somehow came up with ACC Basketball Tournament tickets.
Now the ACC has decided that it no longer wants to be an organization for college athletics, it wants to be a political organization and is attempting to change the state law in North Carolina by throwing its political weight around.
I wasn’t surprised at the actions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which is an organization that became politicized long ago, but I thought the ACC was better than that. I held the ACC to a higher standard.
What law that the ACC doesn’t like is next? I suppose that is for the liberals, or more specifically the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) lobby to decide. Whatever it is, the LGBT lobby knows how to push the ACC’s buttons. And you can rest assured this won’t be last time those buttons are pushed.
If the ACC wants to play in the political arena, the very least it could do is be consistent. If we are supposed to have gender neutral bathrooms and locker rooms, which is the ordinance that Charlotte passed that brought about HB2, then the ACC should have gender neutral bathrooms and locker rooms at all its member schools, and gender neutral athletics.
There is no legal definition of transgender. If someone says they are transgender then the rest of the world is supposed to accept that person’s new gender, and if we question someone’s gender identity then we are bigots. So the NCAA and the ACC should declare that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman and let them compete on women’s teams.
Isn’t it also discriminatory to require that someone born as a man who identifies as a woman to have hormone therapy to compete as a woman? Is it their belief that they are a woman what makes them a woman or the hormones? We are told it is their belief. If that is the case, then it is discriminatory for the ACC not to allow anyone who believes they are a woman to compete on women’s teams, but the ACC and the NCAA won’t allow that.
The good news is that it doesn’t appear the state legislature is going to give in to blackmail. The representatives and senators are answerable to their constituents, not to the ACC or the LGBT lobby, and so far the legislators have given no indication they are going to cave in to the LGBT lobby like the ACC has.
