Clash of the bully pulpits: in the debate over house bill 2, opinions diverge on who is the intimidator.

• Author: Hood, John
• Position: FREE+CLEAR

I am reliably informed that when I was about 4 years old, I got really mad about spiders. My father was helping me read a book on the subject. When I learned that some large spiders kill and eat smaller ones, I became indignant and said, "When I grow up, I'm going to do something about those big spiders!"

It turns out that resentment toward bullies is a natural impulse. Anthropologists and psychologists believe that during most of human prehistory, when our ancestors lived in bands of 50 to 150 people, there were good reasons to develop language, division of labor and other cooperative skills. It maximized their abilities to take down game, protect against predators and survive natural disasters. But ceding some authority to leaders to accomplish these ends created other risks: that those leaders would exercise their power to enrich themselves, and that the link between work effort and reward would weaken as shirkers got more than they deserved and workers got mad about it.

In response, humans developed other moral intuitions along with a healthy respect for legitimate authority and loyalty. One response was a tendency to value freedom over oppression--that is, to identify bullies and work cooperatively with other members of the community to restrain or overthrow them. "Individuals who failed to detect signs of domination and respond to them with righteous and group-unifying anger," wrote psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, "faced the prospect of reduced access to food, mates and all the other things that make individuals (and their genes) successful in a Darwinian sense."

Haidt's point is that while people often construct elaborate explanations for their views, their disagreements derive mainly from their basic moral intuitions. Some of us place a high priority on freedom, while others prioritize authority, loyalty or other concerns such as protecting people from harm. Even more problematic, you and I may both rate freedom highly but perceive very different kinds of bullies as being the primary threat to it.

Which brings me to House Bill 2. The Republican-controlled General Assembly enacted it last year in response to a Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance that lawmakers strongly disagreed with and feared would set a precedent, particularly regarding access to bathrooms, showers and locker rooms on both public and private property. Next, the Obama administration issued a "guidance letter"...