There’s a new twist in the ongoing battle over North Carolina’s bathroom privacy law and it might set the stage for a long needed escalation to the top of the legal food chain. Seemingly without any prompting or normal flow of court activity, Loretta Lynch and the Department of Justice have decided to leap into the question and issue an “order” to the governor of North Carolina. He’s being told to walk away from the recently passed law… or else.

The federal government took on North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill” Wednesday, giving the governor until Monday to pledge that he will walk away from the law, which Justice Department officials said violates civil rights.

The state risks losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding if Gov. Pat McCrory (R) defies the warning and maintains his support for the measure, which requires transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates…

The Justice Department’s evaluation that it considers the law a violation of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act and its ban on discrimination based on sex came in a letter from Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division.

This story was first picked up in the Charlotte Observer and leaves a number of lingering questions hanging in the air. First among these is what prompted the White House to dive into the process before there was even a formal challenge at the state and local level which might be appealed. Is this some sort of pressing emergency which would result in a catastrophe absent federal intervention? Hardly. It does, however, offer the Obama administration the chance to give the appearance of “doing something” on a topic which generates a lot of heat among the liberal base in an election year.

But as this confrontation moves forward, an even more pressing question should get the attention it deserves. Even if we were to assume that this law somehow ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act, precisely what “rights” are being denied here and which “class” of citizens is being denied these rights? We would need to begin by declaring that using the bathroom in a public facility is a “right” along the same lines as voting, religion, free speech and all the rest, but even if we did,nobody is being denied the use of a bathroom. If they were I would have signed on in opposition to the bill myself. Second in line is the question of privacy, which liberals seem to be all in favor of unless it stands in the way of the SJW agenda. We’re going to need the courts to weigh in definitively as to whether or not we’ve really reached the point of insanity where the government will deny the traditional expectation of women and young girls being able to use the restroom without a man walking in on them.

And finally – perhaps most importantly – escalating this to the federal level may finally allow us to ask the courts if they actually place any value on science as they frequently claim to when it’s convenient. Are we going to codify a practice of simply allowing people to redefine medical science based on how they feel and rewrite our laws in response? If so, we should soon enjoy a society where people claiming a case of clinical lycanthropy will be legally allowed to rip out the throats of citizens because, hey… that’s just what werewolves do.

For their part, the state is thus far standing firm against the threats coming from Loretta Lynch’s office. (Boston Herald)

Giving no indication of yielding to pressure, North Carolina’s Republican leaders called a federal warning about the legality of the state’s new law limiting LGBT anti-discrimination rules a broad overreach by the government.

Gov. Pat McCrory and top state legislators were determining what steps to take after the U.S. Justice Department said in a letter Wednesday that the state law violated federal civil rights laws and threatened possible litigation.

“This is no longer just a North Carolina issue, because this conclusion by the Department of Justice impacts every state,” McCrory said.

The stupidity surrounding this entire argument is staggering, but we unfortunately seem to be living in a time when the courts must be called in to decide every demand from the You Will Be Made To Care battalion of the SJW. It’s sad, but unless there is a resurgence of common sense around the electorate you can expect more and more of this nonsense to clog up the courts for years to come.