There’s nothing special about these sessions

Five special sessions in one year. Three yielded national embarrassments for North Carolina.

We will blame the Charlotte City Council for getting the ball rolling on the largest embarrassment, but the blame for accelerating it and letting it just keep rolling lies largely with Phil Berger, the president pro tem of the state Senate.

Last week, in the fifth special session of the year, legislators appeared poised to repeal House Bill 2, passed in the year’s first special session.

But Berger snatched House Bill 2 from the jaws of repeal by use of a rarely used parliamentary maneuver that tied the repeal vote to a separate vote to impose a moratorium on municipalities passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances. Repeal had bipartisan support, but unless the second part passed, repeal would not advance.

This was an unnecessary as the action that started the whole thing, Charlotte’s ordinance requiring that transgender individuals be allowed to use the restroom of their choosing.

Just as there has been no epidemic of sexual predators dressing as women to get into women’s rooms either before or since HB2 passed, despite Berger’s incendiary rhetoric, there had been no widespread problem of people stopping others at the door of any restroom to conduct an inquiry into whether their “equipment” matched that particular restroom. Charlotte’s ordinance, therefore, was a solution in search of a nonexistent problem, a liberal exercise in feeling good.

The reaction of Berger and his followers was House Bill 2, not only a solution in search of a nonexistent problem but a catch-all bill of horribles – requiring people who now look like men but were born female to use the women’s room, and requiring people who look like women but were born male to use the men’s room, yes, but so much more, from child labor to court changes. Worst of all, it expressly allowed people to be fired only for being gay, for instance, and expressly allowed hotels or restaurants or anyone else to refuse to serve gay couples.

Berger’s overheated press releases on the bill make it sound like HB2 and only HB2 stands between North Carolina and hell. But HB2 has no enforcement mechanism. It’s completely toothless, so all it really does is make North Carolina a punchline and an object of scorn, a target of boycotts, and a place that corporations see as hostile to their diverse workforces. It has cost this state many conventions, athletic events, business expansions and new businesses while providing none of the protections that Berger professes are needed.

It should have been easy, then, to junk HB2.

But Berger wouldn’t have it.

So our friends and relatives in other states will keep asking what has happened to North Carolina.

And we can expect that we will continue to lose business prospects to Virginia and other states that lack such a discriminatory law.

The greatest lesson from the past year for the General Assembly is this: Swear off special sessions entirely if they aren’t needed to deal with natural disasters or financial catastrophe. In every other case, the current leadership just can’t seem to resist finding ways to make the state look ridiculous.

This story was originally published December 30, 2016 at 4:40 AM with the headline "There’s nothing special about these sessions."