RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina’s Republican leaders are showing no signs of backing down from their new bathroom rules despite the US Justice Department’s declaration that they violate federal civil rights laws and could cost the state dearly in lost education funding.
Governor Pat McCrory called the Justice Department’s threat — which gives the state and its university system until the close of business Monday to change the law or face the consequences in court — a broad overreach of federal authority.
‘‘This is no longer just a North Carolina issue, because this conclusion by the Department of Justice impacts every state,’’ McCrory said.
The law, which requires transgender people to use public bathrooms conforming to the sex on their birth certificate and limits protections for LGBT people, has been broadly condemned by gay rights groups, businesses, sports leagues, and entertainers, some of whom have relocated offices or canceled events in the state. Several other states have proposed similar laws limiting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender protections in recent months.
‘‘I thought it was a very common-sense rule, but the federal government is now saying those are discriminatory practices,’’ McCrory said during a Wednesday evening forum with the state’s chamber of commerce in Raleigh.
McCrory and House Speaker Tim Moore, who helped pass the law the governor signed in March, said separately they would be examining the state’s options.
Moore told reporters the letter to McCrory was an attempt by President Obama’s administration to push a ‘‘radical left agenda’’ in his final months in office.
‘‘Basic concepts — common sense about privacy and expectations of privacy — are getting thrown out the window by what the Obama administration is trying to do in this,’’ Moore said.
The Justice Department said the North Carolina law violates federal Civil Rights Act protections barring workplace and student discrimination based on sex. Various federal agencies have further defined these protections as extending to transgender people, declaring that it violates the law to prevent people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
‘‘The state is engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination against transgender state employees and both you, in your official capacity, and the state are engaging in a pattern or practice of resistance’’ of their rights, Justice Department Civil Rights Division leader Vanita Gupta wrote to Gov. McCrory.
Gupta also notified the 17-campus University of North Carolina system that the state law violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in education based on sex. That could lead to North Carolina losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal school funding.
McCrory and GOP legislators ‘‘were warned about these dire consequences, but they ignored the law and the North Carolinians it would harm and passed the bill anyway,’’ said a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, which helped filed the lawsuit. The statement called for a full repeal of the law.
It has not been uncommon during Obama’s administration for the Justice Department to weigh in on hot-button civil rights issues. The letters to North Carolina don’t have the force of law, but they put the state on notice that its actions are being watched.
The Justice Department’s intervention could affect similar laws passed in other states.
Mississippi’s House Bill 1523, which becomes law July 1, says government and business workers can deny services to people by citing their own religious beliefs that marriage should only be between a man and a woman and that a person’s gender is set at birth and is unchangeable.
