Last week, North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest spoke with anti-LGBT activist Tony Perkins about the state’s new law banning transgender people from using public restrooms of the gender they identify with and barring cities from instituting LGBT nondiscrimination measures.
The state law, HB2, was enacted in a special session that was called to block a Charlotte measure prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination in places of public accommodation.
Forest, in a March 31 interview with Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, on his “Washington Watch” radio program, said that the state law was actually needed to prevent discrimination, alleging that Charlotte’s protections for LGBT people discriminated against women and children.
“Nobody likes discrimination,” Forest said. “We don’t like discrimination and that’s why we passed an anti-discrimination law, that’s what HB2 was. Nobody likes discrimination, so it’s easy to stand up and say, ‘We don’t like anybody being discriminated against.’ Well, our bill does not discriminate against anybody. In fact, the Charlotte ordinance was amazingly discriminatory against especially women and girls who no longer had the freedom to walk into a restroom and know that they would be safe and secure in that restroom without a man walking in or a pedophile or a predator walking into that bathroom. That’s really discriminatory if you want to talk about discrimination.”
Forest’s allegation that protections for LGBT people will empower child predators has been roundly debunked.
Forest then claimed that the LGBT “lobby” has misrepresented the law because “for them, truth is all relative, there is no absolute truth anymore so they can bend the rules and twist it however they want to to push their agenda.”
