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Countersuits Over North Carolina’s Bias Law

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North Carolina Governor Sues Justice Department

Gov. Pat McCrory said he was challenging the department’s “blatant overreach” in concluding that the state’s law limiting bathroom access for transgender people violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Gov. Pat McCrory said he was challenging the department’s “blatant overreach” in concluding that the state’s law limiting bathroom access for transgender people violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.CreditCredit...Ray Whitehouse for The New York Times

RALEIGH, N.C. — The nation’s clash over the rights of transgender people escalated sharply on Monday as Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina and the Justice Department sued each other, testing the boundaries of federal civil rights laws in a dispute over public restroom access.

Days after the Justice Department demanded that North Carolina back away from a new state law restricting access to restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms, Mr. McCrory, in a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court here, accused the department of “a baseless and blatant overreach” stemming from a “radical reinterpretation” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The state General Assembly’s Republican leaders filed a similar suit against the Justice Department.

“Ultimately, I think it’s time for the U.S. Congress to bring clarity to our national anti-discrimination provisions,” Mr. McCrory, a Republican who is running for re-election this year, told reporters here. “Right now, the Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law.”

Hours later, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said no clarification was needed, and she asserted that federal civil rights laws barring discrimination on the basis of sex prohibit laws like the one in North Carolina.

“They created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security,” she said at a news conference in Washington. “None of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not.”

Straying from her usual understated, lawyerly tone, Ms. Lynch, a North Carolina native, grew impassioned as she likened the fight to earlier battles over Jim Crow laws and laws against same-sex marriage.

“This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress,” she said. Addressing transgender people, she added: “We see you. We stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, filed in a different federal court in the state, argued that North Carolina’s law, which prohibits people from using public restrooms that do not correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificates, compels “public agencies to follow a facially discriminatory policy.”

Even before the Justice Department challenged the law in court, the federal government had been examining how it could pressure North Carolina. Last month, federal agencies acknowledged that they were studying whether the law affected North Carolina’s eligibility for aid from Washington that helps pay for schools, highways and housing.

Mr. McCrory’s suit was assigned to Judge Terrence W. Boyle, an appointee of President George W. Bush and a former aide to Jesse Helms, the longtime conservative Republican senator from North Carolina. The Federal District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, where the Justice Department filed its case, did not immediately assign a judge to handle the proceedings there.

The law has drawn scorn from businesses like PayPal and the N.B.A., has led to calls for a boycott of North Carolina, and has prompted some companies and entertainers to reverse plans to do business in the state. It even found its way into the presidential race, becoming a frequent theme of the final weeks of the campaign of Senator Ted Cruz, who said, “Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls.”

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Monday described the North Carolina law as “meanspirited,” and said it would harm the state’s economy.

But the economic arguments are familiar ones in North Carolina, and they have failed to prevent both sides from moving the clash into the courts. The litigation will test the expansive view the Obama administration has taken of civil rights law, arguing that it bars discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, even if the wording of the law does not address those issues explicitly.

“It is, in some ways, bringing to a head a lot of developments that have been happening over the last several years,” said Douglas NeJaime, the faculty director of the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which studies gender identity law. “What’s become clear is that the issue around bathroom access has really been tightly caught up in the culture wars.”

The North Carolina measure, which Mr. McCrory signed into law on March 23, was approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly during a one-day special session. Commonly referred to as House Bill 2, the law was prompted by the City of Charlotte’s adoption of an ordinance barring discrimination against gay or transgender people, and specifically allowing people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that conform to their gender identity.

On Monday, Mr. McCrory repeated his belief that Charlotte, the state’s largest city, had provoked the turmoil here, saying, “The governor did not seek out this issue.”

The litigation placed new attention on the dispute between Charlotte, a relatively liberal city where Mr. McCrory was mayor for 14 years, and conservative Republicans, often from rural areas, who dominate the legislature. It further presses the governor, who ran for office as a moderate, into an unexpected role, as a conservative warrior on social issues, months before voters decide if he deserves a second term.

Mr. McCrory’s lawsuit left little doubt about his view of a Justice Department that Republicans here regard with open contempt. The department, the lawsuit said, was engaged in “an attempt to unilaterally rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the courts.”

Mr. McCrory and other Republicans said the law’s bathroom access provision was a bulwark against sexual assault, as Mr. Cruz suggested. But critics, many of whom have demanded a full repeal, said that transgender people had been using the bathroom of their choice for years without others noticing, and that it had not been a problem. In fact, the risk of assault, they said, would be to a person who appears to be a woman and identifies as a woman and is forced to use the men’s room.

In a letter to Mr. McCrory last week, Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, said the North Carolina statute violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination. In the Justice Department suit, which named the University of North Carolina as a defendant, the federal government also alleged violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

When she wrote to Mr. McCrory, Ms. Gupta gave the governor until Monday to tell federal officials whether he would “remedy these violations.”

After her letter, there were signals that Republicans here, influenced by the prospect of losing federal funds and facing an economic backlash, were considering softening the law and its effects.

But on Monday, it became clear that the prospects for a quick reconciliation had vanished.

Alan Blinder reported from Raleigh, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, and Eric Lichtblau from Washington. Gardiner Harris contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: North Carolina and U.S. Duel on Access Law. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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