CARI CHAMPION (HOST): What's your reaction to the decision to move the NCAA tournament games out of North Carolina?
LZ GRANDERSON: Well it's consistent with what the NCAA policies have been. Over the past five-to-10 years, they've been working with LGBT organizations to try to make sure that the NCAA was fair and inclusive for everyone, including LGBT student athletes, and so this is consistent with who the NCAA is.
CHAMPION: OK, so if it's consistent with who the NCAA is, do you think that schools such as Duke -- and North Carolina -- which are in North Carolina, will have some type of reaction to this? What will be their response?
GRANDERSON: Well their response has been in support of what the NCAA has decided to do. It's important to remember that this bill is not just about who gets to use the restroom and where, and that's the reason why the communications director's comments are so disingenuous, because there's other aspects to this bill that complicates it and is clearly discriminatory. For instance, I'm an openly gay man. In North Carolina, it is now legal for a DMV officer to not issue me a driver's license because they may not agree with me being openly gay. That's the extent of which this law goes. It's not just about “bathroom bill,” which we have gravitate towards, but it makes it legal for government officials to discriminate against LGBT people.
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They focused in very cleverly on the bathroom issue and making it about whether or not women feel safe in the bathroom. And I'm a sports fan, you're a sports fan, we've all been in sports arenas, in which we've seen women come out of men's restrooms because the lines in women's restrooms are too long, right?
CHAMPION: I've done it, yeah.
GRANDERSON: Right? No one's gotten raped, in fact, this is the law that was created not because there was a rash of rapes that were happening in public restrooms, but because local government did not support what the Department of Education issued two-and-a-half years ago in regard to transgender students.
