DURHAM, N.C. -- Church and civil-rights leaders in North Carolina say there's plenty else to worry about in the contentious law on transgender people's bathroom use.
The Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act not only reverses a Charlotte ordinance that had extended some rights to gay and transgender people, but it also prevents city and county governments from setting a minimum-wage standard for private employers and limits how people can sue over discrimination in state court. And it contains a provision that allows remaining parts of the law to stand if others are struck down in court.
Those provisions, opponents say, are attempts to roll back rights and have been tucked into a bill that has a very different public face.
"This is really a devious bill that harms workers under the guise of regulating bathrooms," said Harold Lloyd, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law.
Activists say the totality of the law disproportionately affects blacks, women and immigrants along with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and is reminiscent of the policies of the segregation era. The law's opponents are crisscrossing the state, often invoking the civil-rights battles that took place in North Carolina and throughout the South in the 1950s and 60s.
Activists and groups including the state NAACP are now working to talk about the additional components with conservative voters who agree with the law because of deeply held religious beliefs or live in more-conservative parts of the state.
"This is not about bathrooms. It's about whether or not you can codify hate and discrimination into the laws of the state," said the Rev. William Barber II, who leads the North Carolina NAACP and is also fighting the state over its voter-identification law.
Barber and other opponents said the law, which was introduced, debated, passed and signed in a single day in March, was put forward to help Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and GOP legislators hang on to their seats in the November election. McCrory is in a tight race with Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, who has denounced the law and said he wouldn't defend it.
"This is about November. It's about wedge issues, and it's about sexual and racial fears," Barber said.
A spokesman for McCrory did not return requests for comment, nor did the bill's sponsors. The governor took action to try to blunt the backlash, banning discrimination in state personnel decisions and calling for the Legislature to enact a law reversing the provision that makes it difficult to sue for discrimination in state court.
In places like rural Kinston, a city where the population is about 68 percent black, many said they agreed with the transgender bathroom part of the law for moral or religious reasons but said they knew little about the minimum-wage and employment-discrimination provisions.
"If you're going to lose millions of dollars and affect everyone in this state, maybe it ain't right," said John Houston, a 70-year-old pastor from Kinston, who said he shares McCrory's belief that a law is needed to make people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate.
Barber went to western North Carolina earlier this month to talk about the issue, and he plans to have what he calls a "Moral Monday" protest in Raleigh this week. Barber said he tries to present the totality of the law and that people typically disagree with it once they learn more about the other provisions.
At least one legislator who voted for the law said he didn't realize all that the law encompassed.
North Carolina state Rep. George Graham Jr., a Democrat who represents Lenoir County, where Kinston is located, told the Raleigh News and Observer that he didn't know until after the vote that the legislation dealt with issues of minimum wage and discrimination suits.
State Sen. Daniel T. Blue Jr., a Democrat, said "those are two of the major things that are antithetical to what the state's history has been about and its evolution over the last 50 years."
A lawsuit filed last week by the Justice Department contests only the parts of the North Carolina law that the agency said discriminates against gay and transgender people. The Justice Department did not respond to a request seeking comment.
A Section on 05/15/2016