In North Carolina freakout news:
Lionsgate and the A+E network say they won’t film TV shows and movies in North Carolina if the state doesn’t repeal its new LGBT law.
Along with Fox, Miramax and The Weinstein Company, the entertainment producers have voiced opposition to House Bill 2, which replaces local ordinances with a statewide nondiscrimination law that doesn’t include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories.
A production coordinator for Lionsgate told the Associated Press that the company is canceling plans to shoot a comedy show in Charlotte and will instead film in Canada. The production would have involved hiring about 100 workers in North Carolina.
Lionsgate is scheduled to film a remake of the movie “Dirty Dancing” in the Asheville area in the coming months, and it has received a $4 million grant from the N.C. Department of Commerce, which is part of Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration. McCrory signed the bill and has actively defended it.
Lionsgate did not respond to inquiries about Dirty Dancing on Friday.
There’s plenty more. Hollywood is really sticking the shiv in. More:
North Carolina is also losing some conference business from the law. ACPA-College Student Educators International announced Friday that it has canceled a June conference in Charlotte. The Holiday Inn that was hosting the event agreed to move it to one of its hotels in another state.
“The current social and political climate in North Carolina cannot provide a hospitable environment for our members who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender,” executive director Cynthia Love said.
Right. LGBTs have not been treated hospitably in North Carolina, ever. The only difference between now and when that conference was booked is that a local transgender bathroom access law that was not on the books when the conference was scheduled has been revoked by the state. ACPA was willing to come to Charlotte before it had a transgender bathroom policy. And I can understand ACPA’s objections to the state’s housing and employment laws, but that has nothing to do with people coming to town for a conference. Cynthia Love is full of it.
The Obama Administration is making noises like it’s going to cut off billions in federal dollars for schools, highways. And worst of all … no Broadway musicals from a certain composer:
“In the 1970s, I, along with many other writers and artists, participated in a similar action against apartheid in South Africa, and as you know, this eventually proved to be very effective.
“If you are in agreement, you may want to join me in refusing to license our properties to, or permit productions of our work by, theaters and organizations in North Carolina until this heinous legislation is repealed.
“Thank you for considering this.”
[Stephen] Schwartz’s work includes “Pippin,” “Godspell,” “Wicked,” “Working” and “The Magic Show.”
North Carolina is apartheid South Africa?! Oh, get over yourself. These people have worked themselves into a moral panic. It’s like the entire state is the Oberlin campus.
CNN asked Paul Stam, a North Carolina Republican lawmaker behind the bill to address aspects of it, and put the same questions to Candis Cox, a transgender activist:
Stam: “The law did not change the policy on discrimination an appreciable extent between two weeks ago and today. What they’re really complaining about is that we have not become like the 17 other states that have put in special rights for them. … We’re trying to protect the reasonable expectations of privacy of 99.9% of our citizens, who think when they’re going into a restroom or a changing room or a locker room, that they will be private.”
Cox: “This law affects us because it puts us in danger, and it’s open discrimination. It’s no different than the Jim Crow laws that we had here in the South. There are many Americans who are alive today and were alive with some of those laws before we passed the Civil Rights bill. This law is literally the same thing. And if we didn’t find that acceptable, this is not acceptable. It doesn’t matter who it’s towards. Discrimination is not acceptable.”
Because Candis Cox cannot legally use the ladies room owing to the fact that she’s a biological man, North Carolina is a Jim Crow state? The hysteria is jaw-dropping. But it works.
Here’s a piece from the Charlotte Observer explaining what the new North Carolina law does. It overturns local ordinances allowing transgenders access to the toilet of their choice. It does not grant LGBTs protection against being fired for being LGBT, but they never had that in NC, nor do they have it under federal law (is the United States an apartheid nation? A Jim Crow nation?).
Can’t you see this kind of thing coalescing into a national movement of activists, sympathetic politicians, and corporations, to bully any state that passes any RFRA, no matter how mild, into backing down? This movement is premised on the idea that orthodox Christianity is so evil that a state that makes a law showing any respect whatsoever for one of its now-controversial teachings must be treated like a pariah, and made to suffer culturally and economically. I told you they would do this kind of thing. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility: It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you bigots are going to deserve it.
It’s not going to stop here. These bullies know their power, and they aren’t going to tolerate any deviation. Once they get all the religious liberty laws overturned, they’re going to turn on religious schools and other institutions that don’t line up with LGBT orthodoxy. You are a fool if you think it will not.
The other day I wrote to “Prof. Kingsfield,” a professor at an elite law school who is deeply closeted as a Christian, to ask him what he thought about lawyer Andrew Beckwith’s e-mail concerning how law schools and the legal profession are mainstreaming the overturning of all sexual norms. He replied:
The writer’s take is spot-on. The assaults on anti-polygamy laws are already underway, and adult incest is not too far behind. Not sure about bestiality or pedophilia.
The dispiriting thing is that the same people who understand how changes to one part of a fragile ecosystem can poison the whole cycle of life can’t see the same thing at work with our kids and the complex ecosystem that forms their worldviews and senses of self. Look: churches themselves will always have the First Amendment right to teach and preach. The law can’t force us to change our beliefs, though the world can berate and belittle us. But the law can make it difficult to transmit those beliefs to our children and posterity. Even though we can teach the truth, if we don’t have schools that are free to hire like-minded teachers, exclude teachers who do not live out the teachings of the church, distinguish the sexes in the bathrooms, etc., our kids will grow up confused relativists. That’s why battles over school choice, homeschooling, religious liberty in hiring and firing teachers and admitting students, etc. are crucial, maybe the heart of the coming legal fights. And as your Fifth Columnist post shows, far too many churches themselves are riven even if nominally orthodox in their paper doctrines.
What we have to do, as part of the Ben Op, is find ways to band together: consolidate into healthy congregations and parishes; channel our donations to healthy schools and charities, and be ready for the termination of governmental support and even tax exemptions; and build strong families, friendships, and communities. The law can only do so much in America to penalize these things directly (though it will make entering various professions and businesses increasingly hard). But the barriers to education and formation, coupled with the lukewarmness of so many people in the pews and the many clergy and faithful who will increasingly flout church teachings, will become harder.
Above all, there’s one thing that your discussion hasn’t focused on thus far. We have to stop caring about what the world and the media think. They will call us bigoted no matter how loving, winsome, and fair-minded we are–see the actual Ryan Anderson vs the caricature of him, or the actual Doug Laycock vs. the activists’ efforts to subpoena his email and phone records. We have to figure out how not to care. And that will require far more withdrawal from mainstream media than most people can stomach.
Is there a way to develop alternative media, or might it be healthier for all of us to treat withdrawal as a kind of dieting or fasting? All I know is that ingesting the New York Times’ worldview over a long period of time gradually builds toxins if one is not primarily exposed to other outlets. I think it means reading a lot more older books and fewer modern ones, and finding healthy examples of flourishing Ben Op communities, from the G.K. Chesterton scuola to the monasteries both here and abroad, as in Norcia. This also does involve the local church just being what it is called to be–but remarkably few people seem to realize how much more they should be than most are.
We also have to remind ourselves that what we are facing directly doesn’t even deserve the name persecution compared to what happened under the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or Communism. We musn’t wallow in pity or feel sorry for ourselves, or lash out in pointless rage. But the threat is more insidious because the opposition isn’t head-on or violent. It is the seductive lie that tolerance of vice is supremely good, and judgmentalism is the supreme evil. If we are not discerning about the lines between good and evil, virtue and sin, and cannot speak boldly at least within our communities about them, we are lost in a generation or two.
This is real. It’s happening right now.