Attorney General Leslie Rutledge filed notice today that her office would appeal the Washington County Circuit Court ruling that Fayetteville’s non-discrimination ordinance didn’t violate the state law aimed at preventing local non-discrimination laws.
To be clear: She did not HAVE to appeal this finding. The judge ruled that the state law does not apply to this local ordinance because the law exempts ordinances aimed at protecting classes of people specifically protected in state law. Various laws, though not the broad civil rights statute, do cover gender and sexual orientation discrimination. To appeal, she had to make the considered decision that the legislature intended to enforce legal discrimination against certain classes of people and she endorses that view no matter what statutes or Constitution might say.
She could have chosen, as the North Carolina attorney general recently did, to decline to defend a discriminatory state law that violates the U.S. Constitution, which she took an oath to uphold.
But Rutledge is a Republican. And it is party policy to discriminate against various minorities, particularly sexual ones. Because isn’t this a Christian country? And isn’t this what Jesus would do?