The North Carolina House of Representatives passed today, 75-42, a proposed anti-LGBT state constitutional amendment that would ban marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships and other relationship recognition for same-sex couples.
The House took up the amendment after its rushed passage through the chamber’s Rules Committee earlier this afternoon. It came as another surprise move by Republican legislative leaders, who had previously announced, though sneakily, that the amendment would be heard today in a Senate committee. Sources say two GOP senators had excused absences, leaving the body without the votes for passage.
The newest version of the amendment, SB 514, moves the ballot date from November 2012 to the primary election in May 2012. Speaker of the House Thom Tillis (R-Mecklenburg) said the date change was a way to “remove politics” from the issue.
Yeah, because by holding the Hate The Gays vote during a hotly contested Republican primary race in May, it "removes politics" from the issue. What it does of course is assure the bill will have zero problems passing as North Carolina Republicans take aim at yet another minority group they wish to destroy.
Having said that, there were more than a few Democrats who pushed back.
One of the strongest speeches against the measure came from Forsyth County’s Larry Womble.
“This proposed piece of legislation is clearly an example of discrimination,” Womble said. “It is discrimination in its highest form…We’ve been so silent on some of the atrocities committed in this state against other people, human beings; the only difference is it might be the texture of their hair, the pigmentation of their skin or the color of their eyes. We are again today discriminating against people who are citizens. They are not criminals. They’ve not broken any laws. I assume they register and vote. They go to school. They work. They want to ascribe to the best that this society can offer…North Carolina is bigger than this. North Carolina is better than this. We need to rise to the occasion as we have done before when there’s been issues that are not right and not fair.”
Sadly, my home state's long and storied history of hatred shows that North Carolina is only "bigger and better than that" only when it is dragged kicking and screaming into doing so after decades of discrimination and embarrassment as a national laughing stock. Sadly, this still puts it ahead of neighboring South Carolina by a generation or two in that respect.
As I have said time and again, the tyranny of the majority is alive and well in America and is one of the chief tools of the Republican Party.
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