Bad news from North Carolina

Political machinations have put a marriage amendment on the ballot in North Carolina in May 2012. Pam's House Blend has followed much of the story for us (Pam lives in NC). Pam writes,

For the first time in a long time – I just bawled driving home; I’m not one to cry easily, either. The North Carolina General Assembly has declared that I’m subhuman – but they’ll gladly take my lesbian tax dollars, thank you very much.

. I know exactly how she feels.

The scheming in this whole thing has been disgusting. The date of the election was chosen to match the Republican primary, thus facilitating the turnout of the most rabid right-wingers and depress the turnout of those in favor of equality.

Public Comment was not allowed from the house nor from the Senate

The Religious right-wing helped draft the text.

Open letters have exposed the medical and scientific lies used by the advocates, and have pointed out that this bill would potentially eliminate any protections that gay couples have:

The bar on “domestic legal unions” would clearly ban relationship rights beyond same-sex marriage: at the very least, it would also bar recognition of civil unions, as well as the domestic partnerships now offered to public employees in some municipalities. The vagueness of this language and the absence of its use in prior law, however, mean that courts might interpret it far more broadly to upend completely the very minimal legal rights, obligations, and protections now available to unmarried couples, whether same-sex or opposite-sex.

And the Charlotte Observer tells us that business leaders also react with dismay, knowing that high-tech entrepreneurs and desirable employees don't want to locate in a state of hate.

More than 75 business leaders signed the letter, which says, in part, "We write to oppose this extreme amendment because of the significant harm it will cause our state's pro-business environment, its major employers, and efforts to spur job-creation in North Carolina."

Progressive Faith Leaders have also come out against this bill.

This amendment is a cynical ploy from right wing Christianists and known hate groups to damage LGBT people as much as they can. We'll need to hear from everyone and work to Get Out the Vote to defeat bias and bigotry, fear and ignorance.

It becomes very hard at times not to return hate for hate to these awful, awful Christianists. If I weren't married to a woman of devout Christian faith, I'd have an even harder time of it.

The hand of the grave: constitutional amendments

From Slate:

[M]ost states can't do what New York did. Their legislatures can't legalize gay marriage, because their voters have passed ballot measures that prohibit it under their state constitutions. The ballot measures were enacted years ago, when gay marriage was unpopular. Now many of the old voters who opposed same-sex marriage are being replaced by young voters who support it. But the old electorate, through its constitutional amendments, has handcuffed the new electorate. The living are being ruled by the dead....

[I]n California, Virginia, or the other 27 states where constitutional amendments forbid gay marriage... legislators are bound not by today's constituents but by yesterday's voters. Many of those voters aren't even around anymore. The strongest support for banning gay marriage, nationally and in nearly every state that has faced a referendum, has come from old people. In Arizona, California, Oregon, and Wisconsin, voters below the age of 30 opposed ballot measures to ban gay marriage but were outvoted by their elders. In Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia, young voters split almost evenly. Today, you can see the same pattern in Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, and other state and national polls. Gay marriage is becoming a majority position in part because people are changing their minds, and in part because a generation that's OK with homosexuality is replacing a generation that wasn't.

The question now is whether the new majority will get its way. To undo the constitutional amendments of the past decade, supporters of gay marriage will have to pass ballot measures in those states. In Nevada, they'll have to do it twice. Passing ballot measures is hard. People tend to vote against them out of suspicion and fear, particularly when you're messing with the constitution.

From a conservative standpoint, that's how the system should work. The point of amending state constitutions while the polls were still against gay marriage was to protect the culture of the traditional family from the onslaught of normalized homosexuality.

But if the culture of the traditional family as enshrined in these constitutions is wrong—if marriage is moral and healthy regardless of sexual orientation—then the walls erected by those ballot measures are a prison inflicted by the old on the young. And that legacy, unlike marriage, is a bond that death alone can't break.

Massive shift in Michigan

The Detroit Free Press reports,

In what Glengariff Group pollster Richard Czuba describes as a seismic shift in public opinion, even support for gay marriage has nearly doubled since a similar poll in 2004. That poll was conducted before voters approved an amendment to the Michigan Constitution defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.

In October 2004, a Glengariff poll showed 24% of Michiganders supported marriage rights for same-sex partners, and only 42% supported legal recognition of civil unions. In the new poll, support for same sex marriage was 46.5% and for civil unions 63.7%. Forty-eight percent of state voters said they opposed adding marriage rights, the only one of nine gay rights issues not winning majority support....

Czuba said a shift in opinion was evident in almost every demographic group, including self-identified Republicans. He attributed much of the change to the sharply higher number of poll respondents who said they know a gay or lesbian person in 2009 (80.2%) compared with in 2004 (56%).

Well, that's just marvelous, isn't it? The problem is that before they had their equal rights epiphany, the voters of Michigan passed a broadly-worded Constitutional Amendment against same-sex marriage, which the court has interpreted to say bars civil unions, health benefits for same-sex partners, and other fundamental protections. Which, some believe, has further damaged the economy of a badly damaged state, by making it inhospitable to the "creative class".

So now what, Michigan?

Seems a Michigan lawmaker is making the first move:

The proposal announced by State Rep. Pam Byrnes faces an uphill climb. Michigan voters in 2004 passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman, effectively banning the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.....The joint resolution by the Democrat from Washtenaw County's Lyndon Township would have to be approved by two-thirds of the Michigan Legislature before it would be put to voters in the 2010 election.

Good luck with that. Chances are pretty bad.