As much as you're paying attention to what actually happened - PayPal hops on the corporate self-righteousness/pandering bandwagon by welching on a commitment it made to expand in the state mere weeks ago - pay attention to how USA Today approaches the story, particularly the words it uses:
PayPal is canceling its planned North Carolina expansion due to the state's new anti-gay law, just two weeks after making the initial announcement.
On March 18, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory announced that San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal would build a new global operations center in Charlotte, N.C. The center would have employed 400 people.
At the time, PayPal's senior vice president of global operations John McCabe said, "with its strong ties to the financial community and technology savvy talent pool, Charlotte is an ideal fit for this new operations center.”
Then on March 23 North Carolina passed a sweeping law that prevents cities and counties from passing rules preventing discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
On Tuesday, PayPal CEO and president Dan Schulman announced that the electronic payment company was withdrawing its plans to build an operations center in the state because the new law perpetuates discrimination and violates the values and principles that he said are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture.
One thing I've noticed with these stories is that the media quickly co-opts the language of the activists, and USA Today has certainly done so here. To describe this is an "anti-gay law," especially in what's supposed to be a straight news story, is really pushing credulity. The law does two things: First, it says that when you're using a public bathroom, you have to use the bathroom that corresponds to your gender at the time of your birth. Does the rationale for this really need to be explained? People in public restrooms - particularly women in ladies' rooms - don't want someone of the opposite sex just wandering in and claiming they "identify" as something other than what they actually are. It's astonishing to me that we've reached the point as a society where this is controversial.
Second, the state law supercedes any local laws that may be passed to the contrary, which is done strictly to ensure there is uniformity throughout the state. This is what USA Today tries to present as something that "prevents cities and counties from passing rules preventing discrimination against gays," etc. No it doesn't. It simply says that people throughout North Carolina will be protected in public bathrooms from having to deal with miscreants who misrepresent their gender. If you want to pass a law in your city against discrimination in housing or whatever else, have at it.
But as has happened in other states, the facts scarcely matter. As soon as gay activists get wind of the law and crank up the outrage routine, the usual corporations get on board and start the threats. Before PayPal, we were hearing the same thing from Facebook, Apple and Google. These companies do this because they don't want to be on the wrong side of the protesters either, and because it usually gets them good PR to pull these stunts ostensibly in the service of "equality" or whatever they try to say it is.
This is the same thing that happened in Indiana and Georgia. The people who want to turn public bathrooms into a free-for-all can't possibly win their argument on the merits, so they don't even try. Instead, they issue threats. They pretend that the law that was passed is akin to Jim Crow laws or something, and they threaten boycotts, travel bans and so forth as if we were dealing with Nazi Germany. And these are the same people who claim it's counterproductive to keep a travel ban in place concerning Cuba.
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It is happening again. And this is going to become even more common. The secular left is pushing gay marriage specifically because it forces the issue with respect to so many people's religious rights, and when lawmakers try to make moves to protect religious rights, they're going to continue to have these massive conniption fits with the help of useful idiot corporations like PayPal. That's what you have to do when you can't win the argument on the merits. You have to get your media friends to use misleading language while getting your corporate friends to exact punishments against the last pro-faith holdouts.
They've got it down to a science and it works every time, so why should they stop?
