Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) in upstate New York has a solid baseball team this season. In fact, according to player Kyle Bestle, “[W]e have a real shot at going to the national championship.”
Making the finals is for any group of young talented athletes a fitting reward for long hours of practice, teamwork, and dedication. It is dream come true.
But for HVCC, it is not to be this year. Why? Is it because of a player injury? An unfortunate outcome in the qualifying tournament?
Not quite.
The team will not be going to nationals, ultimately because of a widely misconstrued law passed in a state half a country away. As J.E. Dyer has noted, North Carolina’s much-in-the-news HB2 does not make it illegal for a male to the use the ladies room or vice versa. Rather, it prevents a “trans” person from suing a Tarheel State establishment for failing to acknowledge his “trans-ness.”
Oblivious to the actual letter of the law, liberals, including the president of the United States, have decided to mete out punishment to the citizens and government of North Carolina.
In the case of New York, the vengeance comes from on high, from the office of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has issued a ban on non-essential travel to North Carolina.
The Rensselaer County GOP posted a statement to Facebook saying it’s “sad to see the Hudson Valley Community College men’s baseball team caught up in an unnecessary political controversy.”
New York State Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin posted a reaction on Facebook that revealed Cuomo’s hypocrisy:
In response to public outrage over this senseless prohibition, the governor’s office issued a statement noting that the ban on non-essential travel would not apply to HVCC, saying community colleges are not state entities. The school, however, is using Cuomo’s ban as an excuse to keep the team out of nationals.
But like the governor, the college is also guilty of a double standard: Despite HVCC’s supposed solidarity with the transgender community, administrators had no qualms about taking a recent 10-day trip to China, stopping in “four major Chinese cities.” Someone may want to inform these world travelers that LGBT discrimination in China is far worse than what is imagined to exist in North Carolina. Via AFP:
The Communist government only decriminalised homosexuality in 1997, and listed it as a mental illness for another four years.
More recently tolerance has grown in larger Chinese cities, but conservative attitudes remain deeply engrained [sic] and workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians was common.
Cross-posted in somewhat altered form at the Mental Recession
