Legislating Bigotry

With New York recently legalizing gay marriage, the Republican efforts to seal equality behind the barrier of state constitutions has progressed to North Carolina.  These battles at the state level are vicious, but will be difficult to overturn...and that's the point.  States with laws on the books are now being targeted for making bigotry part and parcel of the states' constitutional code.

North Carolina's General Assembly has scheduled a legislative session beginning Monday to consider an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as solely between one man and one woman.

"This is about far more than gay marriage or LGBT people in our state," said Anthony J. Pugliese, a member of the Board of Directors for the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce. "Every version of this amendment requires a divisive 14-month public campaign. Any version of this amendment would harm business recruitment, stifle economic development and jeopardize the kind of workforce diversity NC companies need to succeed."

"As we work tirelessly to recover from this recession we need to grow our economy and our tax base with as few impediments as possible, but this amendment would have a chilling effect on those efforts and take our state in the wrong direction," he added. "I urge any lawmaker who considers themselves 'pro-business' to oppose this amendment and work diligently toward its defeat."

State law already restricts marriage to opposite sex couples, but a constitutional amendment would protect the law from legal challenges.

If three-fifths of the Republican-controlled legislature approved it, North Carolina voters would ultimately decide the amendment's fate in a statewide referendum in 2012.

North Carolina House Majority Leader Paul Stam said that same sex marriage needed to be banned to protect children.

"We see in countries around the world where they legitimize same-sex marriage that marriage itself is depreciated," he said during a press conference. "I think you'll find that the impetus for same-sex marriage is not for same-sex people to get married – very, very few of them do – rather it is to delegitimize marriage as an institution, as a whole." 

It's kind of hard for same-sex couples to get married at all in North Carolina since Republicans outlawed it, just saying.   But the simple fact of the matter is every time the rights of LGBT Americans are subjected to the tyranny of the majority, they lose those rights.

I often wonder what would happen if bans on interracial marriage or refusal in emancipation from slavery or the continuation of Jim Crow laws or banning women's suffrage had been "put to the people" to add for all time to state constitutions.  There would still be states where I wouldn't be a free American, where people of different races couldn't marry, where women couldn't vote and where even if I was a freedman, I'd be subject to second-class citizenry.

And yet Republicans have no problem with subjecting their own sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and parents to this sort of mob mentality of hate.