No doubt you’ve heard the NCAA announced yesterday it was pulling championship games from North Carolina in response to HB2.
As a result, Greensboro will lose first and second round Division I basketball tournament games as well as the Division III men’s and women’s soccer championships. As you can probably imagine, the hometown N&R is apoplectic —-starting with the the sports world’s nursemaid, columnist Ed Hardin:
This might indeed be the beginning of a mistake for the NCAA. This might be something it doesn’t want to get involved in. Again, there are far worse states for civil liberties than North Carolina.
But we’re a state that loves sports. We’re a state that considers basketball and soccer and baseball and golf to be part of our identity. We’ve hosted a men’s postseason basketball tournament, ACC or NCAA, every year since 1985, but we won’t in 2017.
This is a blow to our way of life. This is a slap in the face of a state that has long been a model of progressive ideas.
McCrory has made a fool of himself and made us all pay for his foolish ignorance. The best thing we can do now is hope for the best when the new sites are awarded and hope our governor has already rolled off the cliff by himself.
N&R front-pager does a little subtle editorializing in its interview with Mayor Nancy Vaughan:
“The bigger issue isn’t so much what’s going to happen this year,” Mayor Nancy Vaughan said. “We are in the process of bidding for future tournaments. This could put us out of the running for the next four years (through the 2021-22 school year). We could end up with a long drought.”
Vaughan paused. Then the daughter of Fred Barakat, a Guilford County Sports Hall of Famer and longtime ACC assistant commissioner for basketball, continued.
“And then the concern is: Does the ACC follow suit? Do they relocate their tournaments? It absolutely is a real possibility. We’re talking about a variety of different sports.”
Let’s be clear here—since Ed Hardin is so concerned about civil liberties, then what about the civil liberties of the property owners in Charlotte that would have subjected to the city ordinance that got all this started? JLF’s Roy Cordato really nailed the issue when he wrote:
In a free society based on property rights and free markets, as all free societies must be, a privately owned business would have the right to decide whether or not it wants separate bathrooms strictly for men and women biologically defined, bathrooms for men and women subjectively or psychologically defined, completely gender neutral bathrooms with no labels on the doors, or no bathrooms at all.
And private property—gee— is only the foundation of a free society. In my mind, this issue illustrates how far we’ve strayed in this once still wonderful country of ours.
