So in this week’s entry under the thread-title heading, the North Carolina legislature called itself into an emergency session this week to be sure they could vote on an absolutely vital bill of supreme importance to the health and wellbeing of the State herself–local anti-discrimination legislation!
Spurred by the city of Charlotte scribing some insidious legislation intended to–dear readers, you may wish to avert your eyes–protect the interests of transgendered folk, the brave legislators of this state have convened to ensure that no municipality shall write laws that would require better treatment of any such “special interest group” than the state as a whole does. Gloriously, it will also stop grim-faced, freedom-hating Communists from raising the minimum wage in any city higher than the state’s perfectly satisfactory floor!
Now we can all work together to ensure that LGBT miscreants in liberal havens like Raleigh, Boone, and Asheville are treated just the same as they are in the vast impoverished farmlands of the east and north of the state: like literal human trash!
–This message brought to you buy the guy desperately pushing himself through a distance ed program in CS to earn enough to escape North Carolina for good
Okay, in fairness, the American South does provide the world delicious breakfast food, BBQ, blues, and beautiful women. So it’s not 100% terrible in every possible way.
Everyone I’ve ever met from the deep south (all of them in the northeast or in california), has been enthusiastic in declaring they would never ever return. But most of the people I know from places like Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, etc. like it where they are and would never consider leaving.
Louisiana born and raised here. I’m kind of ambivalent about it. Lots of things I miss - the food, the festivals, the way people love to have a good time and laugh at almost everything. I do not miss the heat and humidity.
As some very passionate folks on twitter have pointed out, I’m not sure I’d call this a problem restricted to “the south”. Plenty of states and jurisdictions in the north–Michigan, Wisconsin, Utah, South Dakota–all have managed to pass some pretty odious legislation.
I remember hearing an interview with an old man in Baton Rouge I think, talking about how people there are fine with the heat and humidity for decades until at last they just crack and can’t take it any more and move up north.
We didn’t have A/C when I was little. It was an old house, and my father could never bring himself to cut it up and add A/C. He felt it would ruin the character of the place. So on those hot nights, we’d just migrate to the porch. It wasn’t exactly comfortable sleeping, but it was better than staying inside.
Birmingham, AL recently tried to raise their minimum wage to $10/hr. The AL state legislature quickly moved to forbid that (local control! except when we don’t like it.) The AL governor meanwhile gave pay raises to his inner circle, some as high as $75,000. Georgia is poised to pass a so-called ‘religious freedom’ bill that will allow discrimination of the LGBT community (Disney, NFL among others threatening to boycott the state in response.) But South Dakota governor vetoed a similar trans bill after talking with the ACLU.
We could probably have a Red States are Hell thread with all the crap those states want to pass.
I’m guessing this has more to do with economics than with culture. I have a hard time thinking people are moving to, say, Georgia or North Carolina for the political climate or because they think these areas are more religious or something.
And yeah, there are a lot of states, throughout the country, with odious laws. But there is a whole hell of a lot of evangelical xenophobic homophobia and other wonderful things concentrated south of the Mason-Dixon.
