The Charlotte Observer reports:

The former president of Charlotte’s LGBT Chamber of Commerce has resigned after he came under fire from a conservative group, which noted that he is on a sex offender list and questioned his role in supporting the city’s expanded nondiscrimination ordinance.

Chad Sevearance-Turner had been the president of the chamber, which supported the newly expanded ordinance that gives legal protection for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals.

At a City Council meeting Feb. 8, Mayor Jennifer Roberts cited a survey that showed discrimination was a real problem for the LGBT community. During the meeting, she said the survey was conducted by the LGBT Chamber.

That prompted questions from the N.C. Values Coalition, which opposes the new LGBT protections in the ordinance.

Tami Fitzgerald, who leads the Raleigh-based coalition, first mentioned Sevearance-Turner’s record at a Feb. 8 news conference outside the Government Center, which Sevearance-Turner attended. On Feb. 18, the coalition issued a news release further questioning the chamber’s role in the survey.

Because of his record, “any supposed evidence provided by the group is discredited,” she wrote.

[…]Sevearance-Turner was arrested in 1998, when he was 20, and charged in Cherokee County, S.C., with a “lewd act, committing or attempting a lewd act upon a child under 16.”

A 2000 story in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal said Sevearance-Turner had been a youth minister at a church in Gaffney. A jury there found him guilty of fondling a 15-year-old teenage church member while the boy slept.

Charlotte’s bathroom ordinance was overturned by the state. And North Carolina now requires people with male equipment to use the male washroom, and people with female equipment to use the female washroom.

National Review explains the problems with this sex-offender-designed law.

Here’s one:

The Left likes to pull out the statistic that no transgender individual has ever assaulted someone in a restroom, locker room, etc. That’s great. Good for the transgendered: There are no transgender rapists. But there are plenty of other kinds who would not hesitate to take advantage of this situation.

Under the Charlotte ordinance, transgender people weren’t the only ones allowed to use the restroom of the opposite sex. Anyone could. All he had to do was assert that his true gender wasn’t his biological gender. “Transgender” is a tricky word; it’s not like “transsexual,” which refers to someone who has had an operation or taken large doses of hormones. “Transgender” means simply experimentation with the stereotypes of the opposite biological gender. So a clever (or not so clever) rapist could smear on some lipstick, call himself transgender, and waltz right into a locker room full of half-dressed teenage girls.

People have already taken advantage of these kinds of laws to put other people in compromising situations. In February, after the city of Seattle passed an ordinance similar to Charlotte’s, a man (not transgender) entered a girls’ locker room twice in one day. His goal? To “test” the limits of the new rule. An advocate of the ordinance said that the ordinance itself wasn’t a problem; the man was “just taking advantage of a loophole.”

People like Sevearance-Turner are backed up by some of our largest companies, as the leftist Washington Post noted:

Companies and organizations like American Airlines, Wells Fargo, Apple, Microsoft, Dow Chemical and the NCAA — many of which have a significant presence in North Carolina — have strongly opposed North Carolina’s law.

Now that we know that a convicted sex offender crafted the law, we understand what those big companies think about the safety of children compared to the desires of selfish adults. Given the choice between the sex offender agenda and the pro-child agenda, the big corporations side with the sex offender.

When you do something really, really bad and run up against the moral law, the thing to do is to realize that what you did was wrong. The thing you shouldn’t do is to change the laws of the nation (which are lower than the moral law), so that you can force all the moral people to celebrate the wrong things you did. Sin is scary not just because of the harm it causes to the victims, but because the sinners are tempted to coerce acceptance from others (by exerting force against them) rather than admit their guilt and repent of the sin.