Bruce does the right thing on LGBT rights...so why can't Pa.?

There's not many musical artists that I can tell you where I heard them for this first time. Bruce Springsteen is one of them. It was the fall of 1975, in the basement of a football teammate's home in the shadows of the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was a post-game standing party -- in this dude's wood-paneled cavern where parents dared not venture. This was where I had my first beer, a Budweiser so bitter I can still taste it today. And it was where someone put on this new record called Born To Run. The music was fresh, different...the future, not unlike that stale beer. That  feeling that, a 16-year-old gets that, yes, these two lanes really could take us anywhere.

But you never know what wild places the future will take you if you stick around long enough. If you had told the 16-year-old me that, 40 years from now, Springsteen will still be a big rock star and he'll make headlines by sticking up for the rights of gay people -- including the rights of transgendered (a term that, needless to say, didn't exist in 1975) people to use the right rest room.

But here we are in 2016.

Here's the thing about Bruce Springsteen over those four decades: The man has a remarkable knack for doing the right thing in his public life. The bard of America's de-industrialization of the 1970s and '80s, Springsteen has long collected food and made donations to local poverty programs -- and then he began to see the connections between the blue-collar struggles he sang about and the politics around him. When an unarmed immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by 41 shots from New York City police officers, Springsteen felt he couldn't keep silent, even though he knew the song "American Skin" would offend some police-officer fans. This weekend, with a sold-out concert in Greensboro, N.C., looming, "the Boss" decided it was time to make another stand, for the rights of LGBT people.

As you may have heard, North Carolina this spring enacted a law rolling back protections for its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered citizens. The aspect of the law that's garnered the most attention is a hard slap at the transgender movement -- requiring all citizens to use the restroom of their birth gender. But that hot-button issue also gave lawmakers an excuse to strip other LGBT gains -- striking down gay-rights ordinances in more tolerant outposts like the city of Charlotte, barring LGBT discrimination lawsuits and making sure the state's discrimination laws don't cover LGBT people.

All this from the "good people" who brought you racial desegregation little more than a half-century ago. The move -- and a similar law that was passed in its Southern cousin state of Mississippi -- is outrageous. For Springsteen, there were surely echoes of the boycott that his bandmate Steven Van Zandt had organized in the mid-1980s of a South African resort called Sun City. Here was a new assault on human rights, right here in the United States.

A man who said "I ain't gonna play Sun City" ain't gonna play North Carolina, either.

"To my mind, it's an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress," Springsteen wrote on his website late last week. "Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters.

"As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards."

Needless to say, Bruce's "no surrender" approach to LGBT rights has sparked a lot of debate. There's always going to be a question about whether a boycott is a winning strategy. Obviously, Springsteen could have played the show and delivered an impassioned speech, denouncing the bigotry of the North Carolina GOP establishment before 20,000 people. But as we've seen repeatedly, going back to Martin Luther King's civil rights victories in the early 1960s, communities ultimately respond when they are hit in the wallet. Once again, Bruce has done the right thing.

And so it would be easy to crow about our moral superiority to those backwards Southern neo-Confederates, except a lot of us need to look in the mirror when it comes to LGBT equality. Consider our own state, Pennsylvania. We've long lagged most of our neighboring states in passing a basic law to protect the gay and transgendered communities against discrimination.

Last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf -- tired of the long wait for lawmakers to act -- signed an executive order that would at least extend LGBT anti-discrimination protection to state employees and contractors. "This is the right thing for us to do," he said. "Just as it was the right thing for William Penn to do when he proclaimed that Pennsylvania was a place for everyone, regardless of their religion."

That just leaves the other 95 percent or so of the state in the dark...ages. It's hard to take the high ethical ground on human rights and sexual orientation when the Keystone State continues to take the low road. I wish our (mostly Republican) recalcitrant lawmakers would channel their inner Springsteen on this one. Baby, we were not born to run...away from a moral challenge.