The Athletic Coast Conference announced on Sept. 14 that they would be moving all of this season’s neutral-site championship games out of North Carolina.
The championships affected by this decision are football, women’s soccer, both men’s women’s swimming and diving, women’s basketball, men’s and women’s tennis, women’s golf, men’s golf and baseball.
These events have been pulled because of the HB2 law passed in North Carolina that does not allow for local governments to pass laws that protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination. The law also states that transgender people must use the bathroom correlating to the gender they were born.
The ACC released a statement that said, “The ACC Council of Presidents reaffirmed our collective commitment to uphold the values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination. We believe North Carolina House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values, and as a result, we will relocate all neutral site championships for the 2016-2017 academic year.”
It was the right move on the part of the ACC to change the location for their championship games. This law has been getting national attention and for a good reason. It is a law that should not be in place and it was smart of not only the ACC, but all the organizations that have pulled events out of North Carolina to protest the law. Sports play a major role in today’s society so for a Division one, power five conference to pull title games out of sites they have played at for decades is a big deal. Not only that, North Carolina is the birthplace of the ACC conference and four of the 15 schools that are a part of it are based in North Carolina. This shows how seriously the ACC is taking the matter and it is good to see an organization like this taking charge against an injustice like this one.
By relocating these events, it puts pressure on the state government to bring up this issue again. Losing out on events such as the ACC football championship, NCAA tournaments games, the NBA All-Star game, and many more. hurts the economy of the big cities that were supposed to host these events. The cities of Greensboro and Charlotte are the ones most affected by these decisions as it takes jobs and revenue out of the cities, hurting the local economy in the process.
With that in mind hopefully the state government takes another look at HB2 and gets rid of it. The main problem with the bill was that it opened the LGBTQ community up to be discriminated against. As far as the bathroom part of that law goes it is a touchy subject and I can understand both points of view.
On one side it can be seen as a safety issue and on the other people should be able to use the bathroom according to what they may feel they are. My thoughts are that transgender people should be able to use the bathroom to which they feel they are. It’s not the transgender people’s fault they feel the way they do. A law preventing trans-genders from going into the bathroom they feel comfortable in won’t stop people that really want to go into a bathroom and do something evil.
The ACC did the right thing by moving its championships. Being a conference so deeply rooted in North Carolina, it is a big message from the conference to make a change of this magnitude and send a political message like this.
