Month: April 2017

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN WHO SEXUALLY HARASS

The sexual harassment geezerhood is finally enduring some tough days, though hardly tough enough. From Bill Cosby to Bill O’Reilly, these dirty old men have the mental acuity of that Japanese soldier who spent 29 years on an island in the Pacific refusing to accept that World War II had ended. How else do you explain a guy like O’Reilly, 26 years after the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode, allegedly telling a subordinate that he’d like to rub her vagina with a falafel?

Headlines over the last six months have clearly established that you are never too old for sexual predation. Roger Ailes, the 76-year-old former Fox News CEO, faced sexual harassment accusations from more than 20 women who had worked for him. The initial case had been filed by former Fox Anchor Gretchen Carlson. She settled for $20 million. Ailes lost his job, but walked away with $40 million. O’Reilly, Fox’s 67-year-old star commentator, bit the dust a few days ago, on the heels of a New York Times investigation showing that the company had paid out $13 million to settle sexual harassment suits against him. Fox finally fired him and gave him $25 million. See the mathematical pattern here? Under Fox’s “Fair & Balanced” notion of distributive justice, there is approximately twice as much money distributed to the harassers than there is to the harassed.

Then there’s Cosby, 79, allegedly the Golden Arches of sexual abuse, with – at last count – 58 women drugged and violated. With an estimated net worth of $400 million, the former comedian has assembled a top notch legal and PR team to help him issue repeated denials, just as Ailes and O’Reilly have done. It remains to be seen how well his money was spent. Jury selection begins May 22 in a Norristown, PA court where Cosby faces sexual assault charges.

There is, of course, one prominent septuagenarian in this aging pack of sexual predators who has lost neither fame nor employment from extending his reach beyond the bounds of decency. That would be Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America. According to statisticians who track these things, the commander in chief has been accused of sexual assault and/or harassment by 15 women since 1980. A number of those suits remain active.

You might think that dodging the sexual assault bullet, at least for now, would prompt Trump to keep his distance from less fortunate fellow perpetrators. Just the opposite. Trump has served as a highly placed sexual harassment consultant to all of them. For example, drawing on his own approach of castigating, insulting and threatening to sue his accusers, the Donald was dumbfounded that Cosby was using a passive, reticent defense. Here’s what he told the E Channel: “. . . he should say something because he is being accused of terrible things,” Trump said. “And to have absolutely no comment ― I think he’s getting very bad advice from a PR standpoint.”

The president’s role with Ailes and O’Reilly was more breathtaking. He participated in meetings and conference calls with Ailes leading to the $40 million buyout. Early in the O’Reilly quagmire, after numerous sexual harassment accusations surfaced, President Trump declared that O’Reilly “is a good person,” He told the New York Times, “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.” As president, Trump leads the executive branch, including the agency that handles sexual harassment cases, making his comments a most extraordinary verbal pardon.

Given his coziness with Fox News and its former accused sex offenders, Trump has managed to make one positive and deliciously ironic contribution to the battle against sexual harassment. His behavior is being held out as an example of what not to do in the workplace. According to the Hollywood Reporter, 21st Century Fox, parent of Fox News, is using the infamous Trump “grab-them-by-the-pussy” Access Hollywood tape in human resource training on sexual harassment. In the 2005 recording, Trump is heard boasting that he gets by forcing himself on women because he is famous. Although the revelation didn’t keep Trump from being elected, HR trainers hope the president’s abhorrent conduct will be a reminder for employees on how not to behave.

As much as I’d like to believe that the well-financed fall of two Fox giants represents a cultural sea change for sexual harassment victims, I’m afraid such an assessment is far off the mark. Experts in this field say most people who experience sexual harassment at work don’t come forward out of fear, of losing their jobs, not being believed, how they will look to their family and friends. Gretchen Carlson, a former Miss America making seven figures as a top on-air performer says she kept silent for years out of fear. Think of what it must be like for a minimum wage bank teller or grocery clerk.

Sexual harassment at work is an offense of power. It’s about powerful men (mostly) taking what they want because they can. The revelations about Ailes and O’Reilly didn’t just pop up. Fox spent years and millions of dollars quietly settling litigation with nondisclosure clauses. The company’s business plan was to pay whatever it had to for the sexual harassment by men they saw as profit centers. The strategy was jettisoned only when the harassment costs grew more expensive, including the loss of 50-some advertisers and a possible disruption of Fox Cochairman Rupert Murdoch’s plan to purchase a lucrative British satellite television operation.

And therein lies the lesson from this whole sordid affair. The eradication of sexual harassment will come only when offending employers are hit hard in the pocketbook, much harder than they are now. CEOs would have a quick come-to-Jesus moment on this issue if the EEOC had the authority to levy eight or nine figure fines, on top of punitive damages. Don’t count on that happening anytime soon, not with an unabashed sexual harasser in the White House.

A MURDER ON FACEBOOK CASTS LIGHT ON TECHNOLOGY’S DARK SIDE

“Facebook Murder” blared from the headlines a few days back. I took it as an extreme approach to unfriending and was all set to delete my sarcastic political memes. Figured my life depended on it. Turns out this was far more serious than un-liking a post. A guy in Cleveland actually filmed himself murdering a man, a random victim, and quickly uploaded the video to Facebook. The murderer killed himself a few days later, apparently off camera.

Although we seem to be building an immunity to shock and dismay, the reaction to this murder broadcast was close to apoplectic. “No More Snuff Videos on Facebook,” demanded the Boston Globe. “Facebook Helps Violence Go Viral,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What Could be Worse than Murder on Facebook?” asked Inc.com. Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist, said this of the episode: “Facebook’s existential crisis arrived with a vengeance this week.”

Really? So this is where we draw the line? This is where Facebook turns evil, when a guy kills somebody in cold blood and turns it into social media content? Death and violence are no strangers to Facebook. Earlier this year, a two-year-old boy’s death was streamed live there. He’d been riding in a car with his aunt and her boyfriend when a driver cut them off, left his vehicle and started shooting. The aunt filmed it for Facebook Live. Four teenagers filmed themselves on the same platform while torturing a mentally disabled man. Just last month, several men live streamed their sexual assault of a teenage girl while dozens watched on Facebook.

None of those cases provoked the wrath that followed Steve Stephens’ Easter Sunday murder of Robert Goodwin Sr., his handpicked snuff film victim. Rape, torture and a dead child fly under the radar, but this first made-for-Facebook murder was apparently a step too far over the line of outrage. Facebook is sympathetic and insists it moves as quickly as it can to delete offending content when users complain, but that the process can take hours. Amazingly, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan. It is called Artificial Intelligence. He says it will take many years to fully develop, but he envisions software sophisticated enough to distinguish between acceptable and deplorable content. Imagine that: an AI program to tell the difference between right and wrong, between a cute kitty video and a murder in progress.

Remember the days when technology was cool because it gave us more control over our lives? Think of that first time you sat smugly on the couch and changed the channel with the push of a remote button. If you weren’t up for a long diatribe on the wonders of supply side economics from your Republican brother-in-law, you could let the answering machine deal with him. And if you didn’t have the slightest idea what supply side economics was all about, along came Google. The technology was there to serve us. It was, in a sense, an extension of ourselves. We retained control.

That’s no longer the case. We now have social media networks so large and complicated that the only way they can be stopped from publishing vile, offensive content is to create a whole new layer of technology through Artificial Intelligence. When was it, exactly, that we, as a people, ceded control to technology? More importantly, how do we get it back?

This is about a lot more than one deranged man staging a murder on Facebook. A huge fact of our new technological life is that people are being constantly hurt and traumatized over social media with seemingly no remedy in sight, save a promise of AI and not-yet-invented software. Hundreds of kids kill themselves every year after being bombarded with cyber messages telling them they are too fat, or ugly, or dumb, or worthless. Over and over.

A sidebar of the Facebook killer story, one that got very little attention because it represented business as usual, involved the killer’s former girlfriend. Before Stephens pulled the trigger, he demanded, at gunpoint, that his victim pronounce the woman’s name for the video production. It was Joy Lane. Although she had nothing to do with this murder, Lane was quickly persecuted by the tapping of angry fingers on thousands of keypads. The messages: “Moral: don’t date Joy Lane.” “Joy Lane deserves to feel horrible.” “He killed people because of a fat bitch.”

Twitter hashtags emerged quickly. One was #JoyLane Massacre. “No disrespect but if somebody had to die it should’ve been Joy Lane,” read one of the tweets. Over on YouTube, there was an “Original Song About Stephens Ex-Girlfriend”. Lyrics: “Hell yeah I’m sick, psychotic deranged/And it’s all over a bitch named Joy Lane.”

This kind of stuff happens all the time. It breaks people and destroys lives. It has become the new normal. Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter last year after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti unplugged from all social media after receiving a rape threat against her five-year-old daughter. Until Reddit finally banned it, there was a discussion group with 150,000 subscribers called “Fat People Hate”. Users would find pictures of overweight people, mostly women, attach mean captions and post them on the target’s Facebook Page.

Other than a complete social media withdrawal, there is no quick and easy answer to this problem. For starters we need to think seriously about our relationship with technology. It has given us so much, but it is quickly evolving beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to shape it in ways that will enhance, rather than denigrate, the quality of our lives. How we and future generations respond to this dilemma will determine whether technology is an instrument that adds value to our civilization, or one that manages to suck all the humanity out of it. If we don’t find a way to control technology, it will end up controlling us. That’s one horror film that should never be made.

BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR AS SEASON 1 OF TRUMP’S REALITY SHOW DRAWS TO A CLOSE

As the 100-day presidential gestation ritual draws to a close, nothing could be finer than a good old shit-kicking bombing in Syria. “Absolutely beautiful,” said MSNBC’s Brian Williams as he watched video of the missile attack. At CNN, Fareed Zakaria fawned over the man who calls his station the headquarters of “fake news”, declaring that those 59 cruise missiles finally made Trump a real president. Had The Donald known that before the election, he could have bombed California, won the popular vote and looked presidential.

The post-inauguration story line, although bizarrely compelling and borderline fantastical, has been mostly horizontal. Trump says crazy stuff that bears no resemblance to reality, signs executive orders in the presence of white men wearing drab suits, tweets up a storm, and then gets up the next day and does it all over again, rinse and repeat. The narrative has been lacking in significant curvature. There is no arc there, no story routing that takes the protagonist from exposition, upward in rising action, then a climax, a descent through falling action and, eventually, resolution. It happens on “House of Cards” all the time. We saw it frequently with former president Obama. He evolved from an inexperienced junior senator who wrestled his party’s nomination away from an entrenched heavyweight, into a progressive visionary with superhero powers, and then, once elected, fell all the way down to mere mortal status, unable to get his agenda past the Republicans. Finally, Obama disengaged from those ashes and moved the country leftward with style and grace. Those are the kinds of arcs that keep contented smiles on the faces of political writers. The ideology is irrelevant; it’s the ebb and flow of the story line that matters.

Alas, Trump is to conventional story telling what reality television is to a dramatic series. Most of the Trump Land characters – especially the star – are marginally interesting, but lack both cohesive motivation and growth potential. The dialogue is less scintillating than what you might overhear in a dentist’s office. The actions of the various players seem almost unrelated to each other. Still, this reality show of a presidency produces some terrific bits.

Nothing from Beckett’s or Ionesco’s best absurdist works could top Trump’s recent chocolate cake scene. In case you missed it, the commander in chief was dining with Chinese President Xi Xinping at Mar a Largo when the missiles hit Syria. It was the dessert course. Trump, in a later retelling to a Fox News reporter, described the offering on the plates of these two world leaders as “the most beautiful piece(s) of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.” He went on, in great detail, like he was doing a Martha Stewart guest shot. Here is Trump telling the story: “I said (to President Xi) we’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this. And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.” Whoops. The president – ours, not China’s – misspoke. It was Syria he had bombed, not Iraq. But the cake really was chocolate. And beautiful. That much, Trump got right.

So here’s where we are as this presidency’s Hundred Day Clock ticks down: 59 missiles dropped on Syria (not Iraq), the unfortunately named “mother of all bombs” dropped on Afghanistan, and U.S. warships stationed in the Korean Peninsula. Well, make that now headed to the Korean Peninsula. As North Korea paraded its collection of phallic-shaped artillery, teasing the West with its emerging nuclear capabilities, the White House announced it had dispatched warships to the area and was all done with “strategic patience”. (In reality, neither of those words – strategic or patience – has ever had a home in the Trump White House.) Turns out, according to today’s breaking news, that the warships were 3,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula, taking part in exercises with the Australian navy, even though Trump insisted they were right there on North Korea’s heels, as leverage against nuclear chicanery. Another whoops moment.

If you squint hard enough, you can almost see a conventional story arc here. Trump’s inaugural speech painted a picture of a new America First, isolationist administration. Ninety days later, he’s ready to bomb everything except the chocolate cake. His secretary of state, however, insists nothing has changed and that the president is as anti-interventionist as ever.

Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence pulled the format back to reality TV level, sounding very much like a professional wrestler, name-dropping the Syrian and Afghanistan bombings in warning North Korea not to mess with his tag team partner, the Trumper. In the other corner, is that country’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, a NBA fanatic with his own strongman track record that includes the execution of his uncle and extended family. Think how much safer we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis with Kennedy and Khrushchev at the table. The current showdown is so alarming, Russia and China are trying to calm both sides down.

Back in the ‘60s, during my formative years of high school debate, the national subject was nuclear disarmament. I remember arguing that the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction was limited to sane, rational leaders and meant nothing to crazy despots. I can still hear the shrieky, pubescent voice of my opponent in one tournament, all dolled up in his private boys’ school uniform, as he tore into my argument. “Preposterous and speculative,” he insisted. “I demand that the affirmative team point to one modern national leader who would ever be reckless with nuclear power.” Well, smarty pants, it’s taken me 50 years to answer your question. See that orange tinted man shoveling chocolate cake into his mouth? That would be Exhibit A. And that short Korean guy with a bad haircut, holding a Dennis Rodman bobble head doll? Exhibit B.

There is only one thing we can count on right now. This reality show will not end with a rose.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL REVISITED

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.

LONG OVERDUE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF ITS PRIESTS

I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.

In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.

That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.

Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.

As I read the story, I couldn’t figure out what the controversy was about. The bill struck me as one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie issues that should have unanimous support. Yet, until this year, the measure couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Ten inches into the story, the mystery was solved: “Wilson’s bill had been strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.” It passed this time with the Church’s blessing, only after Wilson amended it so that it would not apply to prior victims. The new law extends the age limit for filing child molestation suits from 25 to 38 only for those going forward. The Church managed to block all of its past victims from filing suit.

Christians will spend this coming week celebrating the resurrection of their savior, the original advocate for restorative justice, a preacher who told his followers to be peacemakers and reconcilers in order to transform brokenness and effect healing. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders are expending political capital to deny victims of its despicable sexual assault debacle access to the only forum that offers even a modicum of healing. Like it did in the beginning, and has ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been anything but Christ-like when it comes to the thousands of children raped and assaulted by its priests.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t paid a price for its sins. According to one estimate, the scandal has cost U.S. Catholics nearly $4 billion. Bankruptcy has been declared in 13 dioceses. Some of the largest losses came in states that lifted, at least temporarily, the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits. That’s why the Church is trying to block further litigation by spending millions of dollars on legislative lobbying in heavily Catholic states like New York and Pennsylvania. From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand the desire to stop the bleeding. Clearly, barricading the courthouse door in order to turn off the spigot of compensatory and punitive damages helps the Church’s bottom line. But for a religious organization in the business of absolution, the strategy is far more Machiavellian than Christian.

Granted, tort law is not a perfect venue for closure. But, thanks to the Church’s earlier choices, it is the only place offering Catholic molestation victims a shot at justice. In the early 1980s, when the tip of the scandalous iceberg was first noticed, a group of priests, led by Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, drafted a manual for dealing with the problem. It called for immediate ministering to the victims, paying for their therapy and counseling, rooting out the offending priests and the bishops who covered for them, all as a way of saying this should never happen again. Their proposal was rejected by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. The Church thought it would be better off taking its chances with the courts and confidential settlement agreements. Billions of dollars later, it learned how foolish that decision was. As Fr. Doyle told the National Catholic Reporter, “The civil law arena has been the only path whereby victims and survivors could pursue justice with hope of success because the courts and the American legal world represent a power that cannot be controlled or compromised by the institutional church.”

Thousands of broken men and women, sexually assaulted by priests during their childhood, have carried their tortuous psychic and emotional wounds into old age. The courts are their only chance of being heard and at least partially healed. That could cost the Church another billion, a heavy cross to bear. Then again, it is worth noting, particularly during Holy Week, bearing a heavy cross is not foreign territory to Christians.

LET’S BUILD A WALL AROUND NORTH CAROLINA TO PROTECT THE REST OF US

True to my stereotypical Minnesota-Scandinavian roots, I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t spend much time wallowing in anger. But North Carolina is really pissing me off. (Stop now, sports trolls; I’m not talking about the Final Four). This is about the Final One Hundred and Seventy, the idiots who make up the state’s general assembly. Wait, my math is wrong. Make it 171 Tar Heel bozos, 170 in the general assembly, and the poorest excuse for a “reform” governor since the likes of George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

There are, to be sure, some kind, intelligent, even wonderful people in North Carolina. They just don’t get elected to public office. The result is a disastrous déjà vu of barbarically fascist legislation and a human rights record that rivals Syria’s.

Just a year ago, then-Governor Pat McCrory courageously ventured out on a political limb in order to strip away the dignity and basic rights of LGBT people. The general assembly passed, and a smiling governor signed, what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The law’s original intent was to make transgender folks use a public restroom based on their birth certificates. That meant, for example, that a 35-year-old buxom woman with long flowing blond hair, in a clinging dress and stiletto heels, must hobble into a men’s room if she was identified as a male at birth. Stunned commentators at the time envisioned a genitalia monitor for every stall. But the law was even more abhorrent. Fully transitioned lady and man parts didn’t matter; toilet venue was based solely on whether the M or F box was checked at birth.

Of course, North Carolina lawmakers never think small when it comes to obnoxiousness. Disgusted with renegade liberals on the Charlotte City Council, and their audacity to pass an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification, the legislation expanded to retroactively revoke the authority of cities to ban discrimination. It was much more than a bathroom bill. It was a mandate to discriminate against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

The rest of the world reacted in horror, spurring economic boycotts by corporations, entertainers and athletic groups. According to one estimate, good old North Carolina homophobia and transphobia were on track to cost the state $3.7 billion over a span of 12 years. That quickly translated into political problems. Most of the state’s voters could have lived with the discrimination, but they had no hankering to pay that kind of money for it. McCrory, the Republican governor who championed the law, was defeated in November by Democrat Roy Cooper, who promised to get the measure repealed.

In a hyper-technical sense, Cooper, and a new session of the state’s general assembly, pulled off that repeal last week. And then simultaneously replaced it with an equally atrocious law. Up against a NCAA deadline to either dump the law or face a continued boycott, the state’s lawmakers pulled a quick sleight of hand by ditching one bad law and adopting another. As a result, there is now a moratorium on any anti-discrimination protections for LGBT folks through 2020. The new law prohibits cities and counties from banning such discrimination.

Governor Cooper, the Democrat elected on the promise of cleaning this mess up, sheepishly issued this baffling understatement: the “compromise was not a perfect deal or my preferred solution.” No shit, Sherlock. He runs for governor as a savior for human rights and then signs a bill banning them for more than three years. That’s no compromise. It’s a complete capitulation to right wing nut jobs who want it all: an end to the boycotts and continued discrimination.

It obviously never occurred to the governor that he was bargaining from a position of strength. He didn’t win the election because of his opponent’s anti-gay-and-trans views. He won because the state got hit hard economically over the legislation. The NBA pulled its all-star game out of Charlotte. The NCAA canceled games and threatened to withhold years of events from the state. Numerous corporations pulled back on plans to build or expand in North Carolina. Hundreds of entertainers refused to perform there, including: Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Cyndi Lauper, Maroon 5 and Itzhak Perlman. This was a fight, brilliantly guided by the Human Rights Campaign, that cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars and greatly diminished the quality of North Carolina life.

A governor committed to human rights for all would have vetoed the sham repeal and, if overridden, let the boycott continue. Obviously, the majority of assembly members need to feel more heat before they can see the wisdom in doing the right thing. Hopefully, the NCAA, the NBA and other corporate and entertainment forces will continue to stay clear of this state until that happens.

This is what it is like in Donald Trump’s America where the federal government leaves human rights up to the states. Protection from discrimination should not be legislated by zip code. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of Trump putting state’s rights above human rights. Just this year, legislators in 16 states have filed two dozen bills to scale back legal protections for transgender people. Nonsense has a way of spreading, making the continued boycott even more essential.

North Carolina lawmakers are not apt to see the error of their ways without pressure. After all, this is the only state in the country with a law that prohibits cotton growers from using elephants to plow their fields. Of course, the state was fine with purchased black people doing the same thing, and even fought a war to keep those slaves in the cotton fields. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of elephants’ rights, but humans need them too.