North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said Wednesday that "I had no interest" in transgender bathrooms — blaming state Democrats for raising the matter and ripping Attorney General Loretta Lynch for likening it to the Civil Rights Movement.
"We didn't think there was a problem at all until the Democrats brought this up in Charlotte, North Carolina," McCrory, 59, a first-term Republican, told Jake Tapper on CNN. "We didn't need a bathroom law. We never have asked for a bathroom law.
"The Republicans have never discussed this. I've never discussed it in a campaign," he added. "It's the Democrats and the far left that have brought up this issue of needing bathroom laws."
McCrory signed a law in March requiring transgender people to use the public restroom matching the sex on their birth certificate. The ordinance only applies to schools, universities, government buildings and highway rest stops, he said.
Lynch said Monday that the Justice Department would sue North Carolina over the law, calling it a violation of the U.S. Civil Rights Act.
The governor filed his own lawsuit, asking a federal judge to clarify the law.
North Carolina officials,
the attorney general said, "created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions."
McCrory slammed Lynch's comments to Tapper on Wednesday, calling them "a political statement instead of a legal statement.
"It's an insult toward our state and 10 million people that has no relevance to this issue regarding whether a gender-identity individual or a boy can go into a girls restroom," he said. "To correlate that to the civil rights marches in the '50s and '60s is totally irresponsible of our chief legal officer of the United States of America."
He said that his lawsuit asks the courts "to give clarification on what's right and we'll follow the law."
"This was an argument that we didn't need to have in this country or in our state," McCrory later said. "But this is an agenda by the far left — and for some reason, the national media is saying the far right brought this up.
"I had no interest in this subject."
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