Former Arizona GOP governor Jan Brewer has now weighed in on North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law, which bans transgender people from using public rest rooms that correspond with their gender identity. She agrees with Donald Trump’s comments earlier this week opposing the law — comments that came under attack from Ted Cruz, who supports the law — and said it was “kind of bizarre” that we’re talking about bathrooms "in presidential elections.”
In an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress, Brewer said she hadn’t followed the news about the bill and Gov. Pat McCrory’s signing of it, but listened to Trump's statements opposing the bill. Brewer has endorsed Trump for the GOP nomination for the presidency.
“I will tell you, we did have a bill in the legislature when I was governor regarding the use of bathrooms,” Brewer recalled, referring to a bill introduced in 2013 by GOP state representative John Kavanagh that similarly sought to regulate public rest room use by transgender people. “It never got to my desk. I didn’t hear a lot of debate about. But according to the Arizona legislature, they didn’t think it was worthy, whatever was in it, to send up to the governor’s office.”
She then addressed a "religious liberty" bill she vetoed in 2014 that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, also similar to the North Carolina law, and which received enormous media attention at the time and condemnation from corporations including Marriott, Apple, American Airlines and the NFL.
“Well, it was discrimination,” she said. “It was total discrimination, bill 1062. Once it got out of the legislature and came to my desk, the world exploded. Like I said in my veto message, it became more divisive than we could ever imagine if I’d signed it.”
Regarding Trump’s comments on North Carolina and McCrory’s actions in signing the anti-LGBT bill into law, Brewer said: “It’s hard for me to sit on the outside, not knowing the details, and make a comment on it, but it would seem that what Donald said makes sense… What I heard him say was basically that it seems to be working fine the way it is right now. I don’t know if they’ve had extraordinary issues with bathrooms [in North Carolina]. To be honest, I find it kind of bizarre that we’re talking about bathrooms in presidential elections.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.