The backlash was immense with many companies and the NBA pulling support out of North Carolina. They "lost over $400 million in investments and jobs." [1]
As a result the governor that advocated this bill lost his election that year.
But no, Obama didn't "just decided" to "stick his nose" in the bathroom debates. The Republicans decided to take up a new culture war because attacking gay people after they were allowed to marry was no longer socially acceptable. The President responded because it was a stupid law put forth to attack vulnerable people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_...
You can interpret what I wrote as you like, but I'd appreciate it if your quotes were accurate.
One person's divisive, minority issue is another's fight for the fundamental right to be treated equally under the law.
I'm not so sure. It kinda seems required sometimes if you're going to keep your coalition together. For instance, there are some people who are part of the Democratic Party base, who of all the issues out there, care the most about gender and bathrooms (I know some of them). Their stridency has inflected a good fraction of the rest of the party.
Unless you are an empire and want to oppress the majority…
No? A coalition is A + B + C + ... ~= 50.1%, you might need that vocal minority to make the math work. And those factions won't agree on everything, so there will be intra-coalition tension, but they know they have to work together to get what they each want. However, there are limits, so if the coalition totally abandons C's issues (or even just severely de-prioritizes them), then C will leave.
I think prioritisation is half the problem in politics, everyone thinks that their issues ought to be a priority and it's very hard to have a centralised authority wade in and decide that for people without looking at best out of touch and at worst actively malicious. It's a big reason I'm a fan of liberalism (in the British rather than American sense) and subsidiarity, central planning in my opinion usually leads to poorer results because the people on the ground in a given situation tend to make better and more informed decisions than someone sitting at a desk in London with many degrees of seperation from the situation at hand. The solution I think is to make government as local as possible so that different places can have different priorities without breaking things for other people.
I believe that politics ought to be as decentralised as practically possible and political abstractions are employed only when absolutely necessary (ie it'd be a bit silly to ask Ceredigion County Council to run its own nuclear energy programme). Not only does this reduce tensions between ideologically diverse areas, it also frees up what remains of the central government's power to focus on long-term globally important issues rather than flitting about with the issues of the day. We need to dispense with this "winner takes all" approach to politics where the most powerful ideological minority can lord it over everyone else for five years at a time and instead adopt a much more "each to their own" approach in my opinion.
The two big barriers to this approach are a) politicians that currently rule the roost of a highly centralised system would be loathe to give up their power - it's very rare that powerful people have the moral fibre to selflessly abandon power and influence for the greater good of humanity and b) current local government infrastructure is pretty atrocious, it's often made up of ridiculous retirees with nothing better to do than exercise their instincts for petty tyranny.
Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.?
But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility.
Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren't set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled:
1. men
2. women
3. don't know
4. don't care
which seemed to satisfy everyone.