North Carolina's Toilet Business

Seems Meme Worthy

So the NBA decided to do the obvious and correct thing by choosing not to run its All Star Game in a state where elected state officials decide to solve a non-existent bathroom crisis by frightening transgender people into never, well, using the bathroom outside of their own home. Which basically means never leaving their home. Nice people!

This makes for an ever-increasing unforced financial error for the state, who passed the law while promising the numbed citizens that it wouldn't cost anything to be scummy to marginalized people.

But, um, well, Not So Much.

(By the way, if you are on the other side of this issue? Please find an actual instance of a transgendered person doing real harm in the way that this law is purported to fix. I'll wait here. And then find, while barely trying, all of the "correct" gender people in bathrooms that have done bad things to kids. They tend to wear priest outfits. But I digress.)

And while I find the move laudable and obvious and useful, especially for a league that has to play more on an international stage than something like retrograde North Carolina state politics... well, if the state wants to double down on dumb, would the Association just choose to move the franchise already?

It's not as if they haven't abandoned Charlotte before, or that there aren't other markets (Seattle! Las Vegas! San Diego! Oakland once the Warriors move to San Francisco! Europe! Asia! Et Cetera!) that would be well and truly willing to steal the team and put it in a far more attractive city for free agents, national television ratings, and so on. Even if the franchise didn't have one of the worst GMs in NBA history in the can do no right Michael Jordan, there's really no overwhelming reason why the NBA needs to be in this state. It's not as if they've got any great geographic rivals, or a history of being more interesting to the locals than a half dozen college hoop teams.

So, if Adam Silver and his increasingly proactive ways wants to keep up the pressure on North Carolina now that the hammer has been dropped, he needs to let people know that the ante can keep rising.

Oh, and by the way? NBA stars can do their part as well, by just refusing to play road games there. The Spurs' recent tactic of treating nationally broadcast games as reasons to trot out the JV works here, especially if they call their shot in advance. (And yes, I know that on some level, meathead Charlotte fan will be fine with this, since it means the likelihood of a win has gone up, but hoop is not just about wins. If it were, Silver wouldn't have engineered the end of Sam Hinkie and the forced march to mediocrity that the Sixers are engaging in right now, either.)

Your move, Stephen Curry and your single trip to Charlotte per year...