Hasn’t House Bill 2 done enough damage to the Tar Heel State?

Roy Williams, who publicly is as apolitical as it gets, was asked about controversial HB2 or the “bathroom bill” that moved the home court advantage his team had earned away from Greensboro and put it in Greenville, South Carolina. Basketball aside, ol’ Roy said the law is just dad gum wrong and pondered, “Are we that smarter than 49 other states … that we have a law that no other state has?”

After also losing the ACC Football Championship, the NCAA Soccer final four, the ACC Baseball Tournament and, most glaringly, the NBA All-Star weekend, North Carolina is in jeopardy of not having any of those events back, plus concert artists like activist Bruce Springsteen, for the next six years.

The NCAA released a statement Thursday that categorically said so, when it considers applications for any NCAA championships through 2022. “Absent of any change in the law, our position remains the same regarding hosting current or future events in the state,” the NCAA said. If the law is not repealed in the next week, you think the ACC will stray from what it has already done and not follow the NCAA? Fat chance. While NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says he wants to reschedule his all-star game for Charlotte, that ain’t happening either until HB2 disappears.

I can just see legislators in Raleigh getting their conservative backs up and saying, “The NCAA or ACC can’t tell us what to do.” Well someone ought to if they can’t figure it out for themselves that the law never served any purpose from the beginning in terms of assuring safety for all genders. No incidents in bathrooms were reported before or since the law began with the Charlotte City Council and morphed its way to Raleigh.

Williams is a proud native of North Carolina and, like other home-growns or transplants, is deeply hurt with how his state is being perceived around the country. Not to mention the millions upon millions of dollars of needed revenue we are losing. We have become a joke nationwide over something few people truly understand … and make their own jokes about.

So North Carolina has two choices. Keep the dad gum law and have it further ingrained in our fabric or do the right thing, repeal it and let it fade away into one of the darkest periods in our history.