“North Carolina legislators cannot strip equality out of the Constitution and the law,” declared the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Monday, as it announced that it was jointly filing a lawsuit (pdf) against North Carolina’s extreme anti-LGBTQ law passed last week. Advocacy groups Lambda Legal and Equality North Carolina also joined the suit.

Protests swept the state late last week when news of the “hate bill” broke on Thursday morning. 

“No legislature should be using its power to require cities, counties, or school districts to discriminate against anyone. This law is a targeted and unprecedented attack on the LGBTQ community, particularly against transgender people, both young people and adults,” argued Tara Borelli, senior attorney with Lambda Legal.

The new law, HB 2, mandates discrimination against LGBTQ citizens: transgender people are barred from using public bathrooms not assigned to their “biological sex,” corporations are permitted to discriminate against anyone at will without repercussion, and no one may file suit in state court if they feel they have been discriminated against for any reason—including race, sex, and religion. Instead, they will be forced to pursue those claims in federal court. The unprecedented measure also bans municipalities from passing their own minimum wage laws.

The legislation was introduced and signed into law in only a day, in an unprecedented legislative process that the lawsuit alleges was “rife with procedural irregularities.”

“Lawmakers made no attempt to cloak their actions in a veneer of neutrality,” reads the complaint, “instead openly and virulently attacking transgender people, who were falsely portrayed as predatory and dangerous to others.”

The ACLU describes the suit:

The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of a transgender college student, a transgender university employee, and a lesbian professor, all of whom study or work in the state’s public university system. The ACLU reports that the case was “filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina against North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, Attorney General Roy Cooper, and the University of North Carolina.”

“Clearly HB 2 is unconstitutional,” Borelli argued, “as it not only violates the guarantees of equal protection and due process in the U.S. Constitution but it also violates Title IX by requiring discrimination in education. North Carolina legislators cannot strip equality out of the Constitution and the law.”