We knew the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) would meet this week and discuss whether or not they should pull events from locations in North Carolina, but it wasn't clear if they would actually do so. Now we know.
The ACC has followed the NCAA and NBA and pulled the ACC championship game from Charlotte, North Carolina.
The ACC game, which was to be played Dec. 3 at Bank of America Stadium, had been expected to draw tens of thousands of fans and millions in economic impact to the city. Charlotte’s visitor arm estimates the 2015 game here had a total economic impact of $32.4 million.
This is especially significant and symbolic because the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor McCrory passed the "bathroom bill" HB2 in response to the city of Charlotte passing their own city ordinance to prohibit discrimination. Moreover, unlike the NCAA and NBA, the ACC is based in North Carolina.
In their announcement, the ACC said the law is "inconsistent" with the values of the conference. Charlotte's city ordinance would have protected and preserved those values if the legislature and Governor McCrory had not overruled the city for no substantive reason.
There still isn't a single documented case in the entire country of a transgender person assaulting someone in the bathroom. Not one. The state legislature and Governor McCrory passed a bill to confront a non-existent threat and created their own economic and public relations disaster in the process.
More importantly, transgender and gay individuals in North Carolina are subject to state-sanctioned discrimination. HB2 did not only criminalize transgender bathroom use, it also prohibited cities from passing non-discrimination ordinances for all LGBTQ individuals.