In 2016, North Carolina legislators took a rather common sense step of passing a privacy law that prohibits males and females from using public bathrooms designated for the other sex. Hysterics ensued. Nearly one hundred business leaders decided to flex their economic muscle, threatening the state with a boycott that could ruin their economy. These businesses included Marriott, Pfizer, Apple, Airbnb, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Salesforce, Levi Strauss, as well as the largest company in North Carolina: Bank of America.

In a letter to Governor Pat McCrory, the leaders wrote:

Discrimination is wrong, and we believe it has no place in North Carolina or anywhere in our country. As companies that pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming to all, we strongly urge you and the leadership of North Carolina's legislature to repeal this law in the upcoming legislative session.... This is not a direction in which states move when they are seeking to provide successful, thriving hubs for business and economic development... We believe that HB 2 will make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit and retain the nation's best and brightest workers and attract the most talented students from across the country."

That sounded like a threat, no? At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the state and the business leaders' letter was also promoted by the Human Rights Campaign and Equality NC. Guess what? North Carolina didn't cave, and the bullying and intimidation tactics just fizzled out. The Washington Times reports that North Carolina has been doing just fine, thank you:

Tourism has thrived: Hotel occupancy, room rates and demand for rooms set records in 2016, according to the year-end hotel lodging report issued last week by VisitNC, part of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina.

Meanwhile, North Carolina ranked fourth in the nation for attracting and expanding businesses with the arrival of 289 major projects, and seventh in projects per capita — the same as in 2015, according to Site Selection magazine, which released its 2016 rankings in the March edition.

North Carolina finished first for drawing corporate facilities in the eight-state South Atlantic region, said Site Selection, which uses figures tracked by the Conway Projects Database.

And in November, both Forbes and Site Selection magazine ranked North Carolina the No. 2 state for business climate.

Of course, the liberals are claiming their boycott did have some negative effect, but they also claim that little girls should be forced to go to the bathroom with grown men who claim to suffer from gender dysphoria. You can't really trust anything they say, now, can you?

The Times reports, "Also unscathed was the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, which registered at 5.3 percent in January 2016 and 5.3 percent in January 2017, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics." I guess libs will have to try harder next time to punish the hard working families of North Carolina into accepting their version of "tolerance."

Sometimes the best way to deal with bullying is to just ignore it.