By Kirk Ross
Staff writer
If you fight a battle on someone else’s terms and at a time of their choosing, you are more than likely going to get knocked on your backside.
For all the fight there seemed to be in the opposition to Amendment One around here, the deck was pretty stacked in favor of its passage starting with the concept of the majority voting on the rights of a minority, which is not on the list of best practices for functioning democracies. Add in that the vote was scheduled during the primary and the amendment’s wording was difficult to understand.
I feel pretty certain that if somehow the opposition to Amendment One had managed to prevail, we’d have seen a stripped-down version of the amendment aimed at just gay marriage as early as this fall. But the overreach in the confused wording of this temporary amendment, which bans any civil union (gay or straight) and jeopardizes domestic violence orders, was only seen for what it was in eight of 100 counties.
It’s no crime to be a low-information voter, but the vote this week underlines the fact that our state is rife with ’em and is a reminder of how immune to rational thought our politics have become.
The people who wanted to codify discrimination into our state constitution got their wish. They’ve been at it for a dozen years, and only when the legislature flipped did it become possible. Prior to that, the leadership in the General Assembly was unwilling to put civil rights up for a vote.
The important thing to remember coming out of Tuesday is that Amendment One is not about marriage. It is about division – an attempt to create a wedge between communities and weaken opposition in order to further not just the far-right social agenda of its proponents, but the rest of their agenda as well.
Some of those who voted to place this on the ballot opted to be on the wrong side of history not because of their strong beliefs, but because of their lust for power. As we threw ourselves against this latest attempt to divide us, the rest of their agenda continued to roll on with little attention paid to it.
Right now, committees are hard at work in the legislature rewriting longstanding policies in Medicaid and health services, environmental protection and education. They are on a fast track to make budget adjustments. The schedule sets the final vote on the budget bill a little more than three weeks from now.
There are a lot of unknowns about what else will happen. We know that opening up the state to fracking is on the agenda and so is Voter ID. Making it harder to vote in this state seems to be a high on the list of the legislature’s priorities.
By having to fight this unnecessary, unconstitutional and hateful amendment we’ve already lost time, effort and, most importantly, attention on our state’s struggling economy, rampant poverty and public health nightmares. People are suffering because of it. And that’s why we can’t just declare ours state a hopeless case and walk away.
As the loss began to sink in Tuesday evening, there was a lot of trash talking about North Carolina – calls for boycotts, generalizations about what a bunch of ignorant crackers we all are and so on. And there was anger around here directed at those 92 counties that voted for the amendment.
Please remember that in every one of those counties thousands of people stood up for civil rights and did so on hostile ground. Let’s not dishonor them by lumping them in with their neighbors.
The true goal of those pushing the amendment was to divide us. Emerging from this test more united and more organized against the politics of division and hate is the only way forward and the only way we win.