NC Governor Cooper Proclaims June Pride Month

Raleigh -- PRESS RELEASE Jun 16, 2020 North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper's Office: Governor Roy Cooper has declared this

month as LGBTQ Pride Month in North Carolina to honor the state’s LGBTQ+ communities and their fight for equality.

"Pride Month is a time to both celebrate progress and increase our efforts in LGBTQ equality," Gov. Cooper said. "The U.S. Supreme Court got it right prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace. Now comes the hard work of turning these legal protections into a reality of equality."

Pride Month commemorates the riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, marking the start of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. 

June is also the month the United States Supreme Court decisions ruled on several landmark cases upholding equality, including striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 and Obergefell v. Hodges, which affirmed same-sex couples’ right to marry in the United States in 2015. 

In August 2019, Governor Cooper signed Executive Order No. 97 to help protect LGBTQ+ children in North Carolina from conversion therapy. The Order made North Carolina the first state in the South to ban state funding for conversion therapy. 

In January of 2019, the North Carolina DMV made it easier for transgender people to change their identified sex on driver’s licenses and state IDs. The updated form allows authorization from physicians, physician’s assistants, psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed therapists, counselors, case workers or social workers. Previously, changes in transgender identity could only be authorized by a surgeon who performed sex reassignment surgery. 

The Governor also issued Executive Order No. 24, which created a Commission on Inclusion and established policies to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity for state employees, in October 2017.

Read the full Pride Month proclamation.

Read Executive Order No. 24 and Executive Order No. 97. https://files.nc.gov/governor/documents/files/LGBTQ-Pride-Month.pdf