NC's bathroom battle is back! (03-26-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] So it's been about a decade, but man, I am so ready for the rematch. I feel like, was it George Foreman who just passed away? And he re-won a title at age like 46, you know, beating some guy, I forget who, that was like 20 years younger than him.

[00:00:53] And it's the comeback of HB2, baby. That's right. We're going to have another bathroom battle. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina introduced a bill this week that would limit bathroom access. This is WRAL, so just keep that in mind. Laura Leslie, Will Duran and Ryan Bissessi. Three reporters on this story.

[00:01:23] So they say the bill would limit bathroom access by transgender people in some state buildings. So it is about bathrooms, but it's more than bathrooms. There are other facilities like prisons. But I think the real problem for the left is the definitions. I think this is going to be the real problem for them.

[00:01:51] I'll explain. I've read the legislation or the proposed legislation. Back to the WRAL story, though. The effort comes nine years after North Carolina's former Republican governor lost his job amid a national backlash. So here's the threat. You Republicans better not do this. You'll end up just like McQuarrie. Right. Although Pat McQuarrie did not just lose because of HB2.

[00:02:18] He barely lost. And it was largely due to I mean, Democrats made this the issue. Yes. But and the media. But I repeat myself. But the real swing that we saw when you compare the vote totals, the real swing was North Mecklenburg. And it was over the toll roads. McCrory had carried the area and then he lost the area in North Meck.

[00:02:43] And Democrats know this, by the way, that's why they targeted the North Meck area with these astroturfed fake groups. With, you know, names like no tolls and stuff like that, they weren't they didn't care about the toll road issue, but they knew voters in North Meck did. And I was not here in Charlotte. I was not on the air in Charlotte.

[00:03:06] I was up in Asheville at the time, but I was following the story to some degree about the toll roads. And, you know, my understanding of it was that. The North Meck people and the North Meck elected officials who had greenlit the project, the toll road to be built by the private company.

[00:03:31] And then they got a whole bunch of backlash because people were like, you should just widen the road and not have toll lanes. And they want, you know, four lanes. They don't want two for the toll road and two non-toll. They want all four for everybody to drive on. They don't want any of the toll lanes.

[00:03:52] And so the, you know, the staging of a project like that takes years and runs through the local development people, the local or the local elected official bodies and stuff that sit on these transportation. I think it was called the. Mecklenburg Union Metropolitan Planning Organization used to be called MUMPO. I don't know if it still is, but you get all these elected people representing, you know, representing different cities.

[00:04:21] And county and state DOT is on there. And so they have these like monthly meetings. I used to go cover the meetings all the time and they would talk about these types of projects and whatever. But again, I didn't follow the course of this project as it made its way through those levels of planning. And it started under Bev Perdue, the Democrat governor. And it's so she was the one. It was her administration that began the process.

[00:04:50] But again, you've got all of these local levels that were all involved in it. And by the time McQuarrie wins election takes over, my understanding was that like the contracts were already done. And the North Meck people were like, you need to break the contract. They were demanding that he scrap the contract at a cost to the state. And if I remember correctly, it was like one or two billion dollars or something. So they just wanted they wanted.

[00:05:19] The state to build the road, not charge any tolls. Oh, and pay like a two billion dollar fee for breaking the contract with this Spanish company. That was my understanding of the issue. I didn't find the North Meck position to be a reasonable one. I did not. But they all turned out against McQuarrie and we got Roy Cooper.

[00:05:42] And I'm sure the folks in eastern North Carolina that had to spend the next eight years living in hotel rooms because of his inability to manage a crisis. I'm sure they're very appreciative of the North Meck swing, as are the people in western North Carolina. Right. That had to deal with Cooper's failure of a response in that disaster.

[00:06:04] As I'm sure the entire state that had to live under King Roy's covid ED or EDs. Is emergency declarations. But what would you think I meant? Anyway. Yeah. So we all suffered for eight years because North Meck didn't want to proceed with the toll roads. That's that's been my read on the situation.

[00:06:32] Now, I'm not interested in going back and litigating it or anything. What's done is done. We are past the Cooper. Rain. But the HB to House Bill to the bathroom bill fight from nine years ago. Was that's the one that the left and the media. But I repeat myself has has attributed McCrory's loss to.

[00:06:56] At least now, W.R.A.L. is saying that it that it's, you know, partially it's partially or it's a little bit. It was part of the reason why he lost. I'm not so sure that's the case. But. Why quibble?

[00:07:16] So the effort comes nine years after North Carolina's former Republican governor lost his job amid a national backlash aimed at the state over a similar GOP backed bathroom law that some residents, businesses, entertainers and athletics groups considered discriminatory against transgender people. But then they all became transphobic, I guess. Is that what happened? Why? Like within nine years, everybody became transphobic.

[00:07:46] Or did it simply take nine years for people to fully recognize what these policies do? See, I was I was in defense of House Bill to House Bill to that was, remember, proposed by our former congressman. But at the time, he was a state representative, Dan Bishop.

[00:08:05] And I talked with Dan Bishop frequently about the HB2 bill when it was being debated and and all of the backlash and everything. So what happened in nine years? Did everybody become transphobic? No, they became educated because to me, this was like my understanding at the time was like this is sort of the first fight over this issue.

[00:08:31] And to me, it was pretty clear that the left was taking advantage of people's politeness, of people not wanting to offend, of people not wanting to be perceived or called discriminatory. And they took advantage of that. And now everybody recognizes that this is the tactic. And it has been.

[00:08:56] And the the the issue comes down to one of competing interests and competing rights. And when you have that friction point, right, somebody is going to, quote, win and somebody is going to lose when they have a competition of the rights of the interests. And that's where you have to craft the law to spell it out and give an explanation, basically, in doing so.

[00:09:23] And to me, the evidence was clear that going down this path for opening up all bathrooms and locker rooms and prisons and everything else that this would do more harm than good to more people. And the argument that. Oh, well, you know, transgenderism is such a tiny little percentage of the population, so therefore it is not a problem.

[00:09:53] That was never the issue for me. That was never. I never found that to be a persuasive argument. It doesn't matter. What matters is you've created this law that allows bad actors to take advantage. And the response from the left was always, well, we can imprison people or find them and arrest them and charge them after the fact.

[00:10:16] The problem there is, though, that you've already allowed for the victimization of citizens of children. You've allowed them to be victimized first. And so then you're going to come and bring a penalty in. Whereas why not try to protect on the front end, thereby removing the possibility or limiting the possibility of the offense occurring in the first place? Very simple.

[00:10:44] To me, this was always a very simple kind of an argument. That's what it comes down to. And it was encapsulated, I thought, in a discussion I had at the time with a state representative named Brian Turner. And I'll tell you about what he said and why I didn't believe him. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why?

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[00:11:57] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. During the HB2 debate up in when I was up in Asheville, the local state representative, Brian Turner, came on my program. We had an hour long debate and discussion about HB2 mainly. And I asked him at one point because he had he has a daughter. And at that point, I want to say she was probably around 12.

[00:12:26] And we were talking about, you know, him as a father. And I threw out this analogy. Or an example to test his his position. And I said, all right, let's say you're you're getting off the plane. And let's say you're at Charlotte Douglas Airport. Right. Getting a layover or whatever. You and your daughter are traveling. You get off the plane and you go in. You guys go to use the restroom. She says she has to use the restroom.

[00:12:56] And she proceeds to walk in the women's room. And you witness me follow her in. Are you going to follow me in? What are you going to do? And he at first did not answer. You know, he tried to talk about, well, you know, this other thing. And we're trying to find someplace else or, you know, that's not really the issue, whatever.

[00:13:23] And I kept dragging him back to this example because I wanted to test what he himself would do. And he finally said that he would call security. I said, I don't believe you. I don't believe that you would call security and then hope that somebody in the airport security apparatus would eventually get to your zone and then get to that bathroom. Meanwhile, your daughter is in there and I followed her in.

[00:13:53] I don't think you would do that. I think you would walk in. But. More importantly, the fact that you would call security proves my point. Which is that we are all the potty police, which is what the left called Pat McQuarrie. And they made all sorts of these vulgar references to the desire of Republicans to inspect everybody's junk.

[00:14:19] No, we do not want to be like a potty police enforcement agency or something. But we in a high trust society are, in fact, everybody, you, me, everyone in public spaces. Right. We're supposed to uphold the norms, the standards. We're supposed to respect those standards because we are living with other people in our society. Right.

[00:14:49] Look, if you want to if you want to whiz off your porch into your front yard, you are free to do so. As long as you're not in the vicinity of anybody else and nobody is seeing you. Right. Like that's the these are the tradeoffs of living out in the sticks with nobody around you versus living in like a high rise apartment. You don't get to do that kind of thing. There are tradeoffs.

[00:15:11] And when when you go to a highly populated or any, you know, populated area, any kind of a public square. There are standards and the community sets those standards. And so this is the House Bill two. And now this new iteration of it, which is called Senate Bill 516 S516.

[00:15:36] This is the the manifestation of the society setting a standard. Nine years. Nine years since HB two. Things have changed. Right. People were not equipped to make these arguments and people were afraid of countering the left wing narratives that were immediately rolled out by Democrats in the media.

[00:16:06] But I repeat myself. The bill, Senate Bill 516, according to WRAL, is not as sweeping as House Bill two was, which banned transgender people from using the bathroom of the gender. They identify as in all city, county and state buildings. Again, this is WRAL.

[00:16:28] So they use the the the left wing narratives, the vocabulary, the gender that they identify with. Right. They still say that there. But we're talking about. Members of the opposite sex. That's what we're talking about. If you are a dude, you do not get to access the women's spaces.

[00:16:52] The new bill would not apply to many government buildings, but it would apply to public schools and prisons, as well as some other institutions that receive government funding, such as domestic violence shelters. Right. So obviously this bill is monstrous. How dare you say I as a man cannot access the domestic violence shelter? What are you guys even doing here?

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[00:18:37] All right, so the new bill that's making its way through the North Carolina legislature, Senate Bill 516. It applies to public schools, prisons, domestic violence shelters. It also stops short, according to WRAL, of a full ban on transgender access into the bathrooms all over. Essentially saying transgender people can only use bathrooms, changing rooms, or sleeping quarters of the gender they identify as if nobody else is present. Right?

[00:19:06] So in other words, it's a women's bathroom and a guy who thinks he's a woman will be allowed to access that room if there's nobody in there. So that you won't be, you know, violating any law. A single or multiple occupancy, restroom, changing facility, or sleeping quarters within a covered facility, not like with a roof, but like a facility that's covered by the law,

[00:19:33] shall only be used by one designated biological sex at one time. The bill also clarifies that trans children who stay with classmates overnight on field trips, lock-ins, or other school activities, have to room with members of their birth gender, not the gender that they identify as.

[00:19:56] Democratic lawmakers decried the bill saying GOP lawmakers need to move on from their focus on transgender people, which this is always one of those talking points. I never understand why people say it. There are literally hundreds of bills that have been filed in the legislative session, hundreds of them by Republicans.

[00:20:21] The idea that this is a, quote, focus, and this is the only focus of Republicans is absurd, number one. Number two, the reason why they have to do this is because you guys focused on this stuff. You guys kept pushing the envelope. You guys kept transgressing. And now that there is pushback, you're like, why are you going to focus on this issue?

[00:20:48] No, it's a response to your focus on the issue. Senator, State Senator Julie Mayfield out of Buncombe County, so Asheville, she said, quote, we need to recognize who people are. Yes, I agree. And that is what we are doing. That is what the law does. It recognizes who people are. It is an immutable, unchangeable characteristic. You are a male, you are a female.

[00:21:18] By the way, do not ask Julie Mayfield anything about economics. She was on the Asheville City Council while I was up there, and she believed that if you provide enough supply, then you'll get the demand. That's what she said during the Nashville City Council meeting, that we have to, like, that's just basic supply and demand. And I'm not an economist.

[00:21:44] I used to run this soundbite all the time where she talked about how she never took an economics class. And it shows. It shows. In 2016, House Bill 2 was passed and signed into law. That law, according to WRAL, prompted PayPal, the online money transfer service, to cancel a $3.5 million global operations center that would have employed 400 people in Charlotte.

[00:22:12] Lionsgate Films moved production for a comedy series pilot from Charlotte to Canada. Other firms threatened to halt expansion plans in the state. The NBA, the NCAA, the ACC all canceled athletic events. And more than 200 CEOs signed a letter calling on state leaders to repeal the law. The law was partially repealed after Democrat Governor Roy Cooper defeated McCrory in 2016.

[00:22:36] Now, what WRAL doesn't mention anywhere in this article is what we learned from a report at the Wall Street Journal at the time, which was that Roy Cooper whipped up the business leader's actions. He made a call to the Salesforce guy who is a big-time lefty mega-donor. Benioff, Steve Benioff, I think is his name. LGBT guy.

[00:23:04] And he then applied pressure and whipped up and rounded up a lot of his pals in the business industry to target North Carolina. And Roy Cooper then threatened his fellow Democrats in the legislature to not work on any kind of amendments or changes to House Bill 2 until after the election because he wanted the issue.

[00:23:30] So he basically, like, helped to organize and foment the targeting of his own state, a boycott of his own state. He was attorney general at the time because it served his political aims, his personal political goals. That's what Roy Cooper does. That's who he is.

[00:23:52] And as soon as he got into office, he then sold out the LGBTQ crowd by signing the partial repeal of House Bill 2. But, like, they did it in phases and whatever. And so, like, the LGBT folks just wanted a straight-up repeal. They wanted it gone. And Roy Cooper ran on a promise to do that. And then as soon as he got in and after Democrats had refused to do any kind of repeal, he told them, you'll have no role in my administration if I win. He told them that.

[00:24:22] Like, he's going to punish you. And we saw over his eight-year tenure, we saw him do that. Go after his fellow Democrats in primaries and the like. So, he won. And then he signed the repeal. And the LGBT crowd was not happy because it wasn't a full repeal. In recent years, though, WRAL says Republicans in North Carolina and other states have taken up a new focus on transgender topics

[00:24:51] as the issue has energized voters in the GOP base. It's not just the GOP base, guys. WRAL. Not just GOP. One of the most effective ads Trump ran that got a lot of people over to his side. Right? Kamala is for they, them. Donald Trump is for you. Right? There were economic reasons. Right? Inflation, taxes, all of that. But this issue? Like, the left went too far.

[00:25:20] And WRAL has a blind spot for that. Because the thing about being on the left is that you can never go too far. They don't think that that's possible. All right. So, spring is here. A time of renewal and celebrations. You've got graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and the special days for mom and dad. Your family's making memories that are going to last a lifetime. But let me ask you. Are all of those treasured moments from days gone by, are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, 8mm films, photos, slides?

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[00:26:44] The number of passing trans people is so much lower than the number of bad actors who would take advantage of the free access to victims. Also, I'm old enough to remember the kid who had a peanut allergy having to eat lunch in the office or hallway instead of banning peanut products for the whole school. Individual rights are important, but you can't inconvenience everybody to accommodate a very small group. Right. Right. This is what I was talking about.

[00:27:14] This this competing interests, the competing rights issue being at the heart of the HB2 debate and transgender access into these safe spaces for women. They are competing. They are competing interests. You cannot allow both. You cannot designate something to be a female only space and then have somebody come along and say there is no such thing as female. Right. So. There has to be a decision made.

[00:27:44] And at first, a lot of people in society said, OK, we'll accommodate. We don't want to be accused of being transphobic. We don't want to be accused of being a bigot. We don't hate these people because that's what we were told we were doing if we said, well, no, maybe we shouldn't allow women or men into like the showers with the women. Because the opportunity there for bad actors to take advantage of the situation is too great.

[00:28:13] And we were called all sorts of names for that. And that's always been, in my mind, the. The heart of the issue. So let's talk to Mike. Hello, Mike. Welcome to the show. Hey, Pete. How are you doing on this wonderful Wednesday? I'm doing all right. How are you? Good deal. Yeah, I'm doing fine.

[00:28:35] I wanted to follow up just because you just talked about just now the opportunity for bad actors to act bad. And one of my first questions, I guess, because I just I don't know. Maybe I'm just not reading enough. How widespread. This problem.

[00:28:56] What problem of transgender women going into women's bathrooms and causing any kind of problem. Maybe I'm just not reading the right things. Correct. That would be correct. You are not. Okay. So can you tell me like maybe five instances in North Carolina where this is? Why just North? Why just North Carolina? How about in the country then? Yeah. Yeah. So I am.

[00:29:26] I regularly come across stories regularly. Like I couldn't even. It's way more than five. I don't keep track of the number for you, Mike. I doubt it would persuade you either way because whatever number I gave you, you would still say is probably not enough. But it does happen all the time. Regularly. Regularly. All the time? Yeah. It goes on in prisons. Guys get sentenced into and then say they're trans and they go into women's prisons and then they offend in the women's prison. That happens regularly.

[00:29:52] It happens regularly where people are arrested and they claim to be trans. And we don't know if they are or not because they can just say they are and they got access into a women's restroom. That happens. It happens regularly, Mike. I come across stories about this. I would say probably once every two weeks if I had to if I had to guess. And these are trans women that just use the bathroom? No, they're dudes.

[00:30:20] Yeah, they're dudes going into women only spaces. When you say they're dudes. Yeah. You know, like, like, let's see, like you in the airport following the daughter hypothetically. No, I'm talking about a human being that has the chromosomes of a male. It is an adult male. That is what a dude is. Okay.

[00:30:43] Well, you understand, of course, that while it's only a very small percentage, maybe one, two or three percent of human beings on this earth do not have your basic male, female. Ah, yes. The old Klinefelter syndrome argument, right? The 0.01 percent or the intersex argument. Is that the one you're going to make here? There are certain ones. I mean, most people either have an XX chromosome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is right.

[00:31:13] So, so, so, Mike, what we're talking about is setting rules for the 99.9 percent of the population that lives in a civil society. Right. And that's what I'm asking. So of those people, how big a problem is this? Why, why are you limiting it only to the intersex? Why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you make it about all, all dudes? Well, there, there are laws in the books now, right? Right. That's after the fact. I already addressed that. This is what I mean.

[00:31:41] You're making, Mike, I already outlined all of these arguments that you're stating at the beginning of the hour. I went through these arguments that the left makes, and I don't, I am not persuaded by any of them. I'm just asking for the, why there's such a need, and more importantly. Why there's such a need is because women-only spaces are, were designed for a certain societal benefit, was to protect women. Okay. Okay.

[00:32:06] And I guess what I'm asking is, how at risk are women from this huge problem that folks on the right seem to be talking about all the time? So should we, so Mike, should we have no, should we have no, should we have no laws against homicide? Because it doesn't really happen a whole lot, really, when you look at the entire population. That's a ridiculous stretch. Why? Why? You're making the numbers argument.

[00:32:33] You're, you're, you're appealing, you're appealing to the frequency as if that gives you some sort of moral standing. And it doesn't. I'm making any moral arguments. I'm talking about practicality. No, no, no. You're, you are making a moral. You're saying that, well, why are you focused on this? Why are we spending time on this? Because the numbers are so small. Right. That's my question. Right. So why have homicide laws? Because there are more homicides than our problems like you're talking about.

[00:33:01] You, so you think, wait, you think homicides occur more often than say sexual offenses? Much more often than problems of transgender women going into women's bathrooms. Yes. I will say that. Yeah. Well, so. Am I wrong? No, no, no. So that's why I said, though, you have a societal impact as well. That when you open up all of the spaces, you give more hunting grounds for the predators.

[00:33:28] And I would prefer not to allow those hunting grounds to be opened up. That's, and again, I went through all of these arguments at the beginning and they're not persuasive. And it's why you guys are losing on this issue. And you will continue to lose on the issue. But I appreciate the call. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here.

[00:33:54] You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.