Texas GOP Lawmakers Vow to Pass North Carolina-Style Anti-LGBT Legislation Next Year

Rabidly Anti-LGBT State Rep. Matt Shaheen: ‘If a Company Like Target Wants to Leave, I’ll Help Them Pack and Leave’

Despite severe economic backlash over North Carolina’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2, Republican Texas state lawmakers are vowing to pass similar legislation when they convene in January. 

GOP state Rep. Matt Shaheen told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for a story published Sunday, that he plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit cities, counties and school districts from allowing transgender people to use restrooms based on their gender identity.

“We’re taking that ability away,” Shaheen said. “We should leave that power where it should reside, at the state and federal level. I think this is such a silly topic. At the end of the day, this is about common sense and decency.”

Shaheen told the Star-Telegram he’s unconcerned about potential economic backlash over such a hateful, discriminatory bill. HB2, of course, has cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars, including the loss of the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. 

“We are the 12th-largest economy in the world,” Shaheen said of Texas. “If a company like Target wants to leave, I’ll help them pack and leave. But the Texas economy is going to do fine.”

Such rhetoric is hardly surprising from Shaheen, who serves as a deacon at the notoriously anti-LGBT Prestonwood Baptist Church, and who first got elected to public office by attacking his opponent for voting to hire a gay man. On a side note, I contacted Shaheen about anti-LGBT legislation a few weeks ago, but he refused comment: 

It’s unclear just how far Shaheen’s bill will go, but his suggestion that it would drive Target out of Texas indicates it could even extend to private businesses, which would amount to an extreme example of the type of government overreach that Republicans so frequently rail against. Shaheen has also previously said he supports the removal of race- and sex-based protections from local nondiscrimination ordinances: 

But Shaheen is hardly alone in his zeal to pander to his right-wing base by persecuting marginalized communities. GOP Rep. Bill Zedler, who once tried to ban LGBT resource centers on state university campuses, told the Star-Telegram that the issue of trans restroom use “raises concerns mainly because anytime you want to make it where someone who self-identifies as a man … can now go into the woman’s restroom, I believe it puts small children at risk as well as … inconveniencing 99, 98 percent of the population so a very small percent of the population can supposedly feel comfortable.”

And GOP state Rep. Matt Krause, who once worked as an attorney for the Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT hate group, reportedly plans to introduce “religious freedom” legislation along the lines of Mississippi’s House Bill 1523, which was recently struck down as unconstitutional. This is despite the fact that Krause’s district includes Arlington’s AT&T Stadium, a perennial contender to host major sporting events whose organizers would undoubtedly look elsewhere if a such a bill were to pass. 

Texas lawmakers, who meet only every two years, filed the most anti-LGBT legislation in the history of any state in 2015, only to have the mark shattered by Oklahoma this year. Based on early indications, it wouldn’t be out of the question for the Texas Legislature to recapture the dubious record in 2017, when it gathers in Austin for the first time since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell.  

EARLIER:

Second Texas City Responds to Target by Targeting Transgender People With Hateful ‘Bathroom Bill’