You would think we would have learned. You would think we would have learned from all sorts of things, even in recent years: the election of George W. Bush; the sucking morass that resulted from the initial triumph in Iraq; the economic catastrophe that followed at least in part from the unleashing of financial institutions from Glass-Steagall. We never look around the corner far enough to see what may come from our actions today. So why are North Carolina's radical conservatives rushing headlong into a ban civil unions and remove all recognition of anything other than heterosexual church-sanctioned marriage?
It's a good thing for the citizens of North Carolina that Frank Eaton, a documentary filmmaker, can see around the corner better than others. His new ad against the anti-gay Amendment One is devastating:
If you can't see it, Frank's ad focuses intently on the faces of four women, all of whom are bruised, and tells North Carolinians that if this Amendment passes, 1,000,000 unmarried women in North Carolina could lose their protections under our domestic violence statutes, because only marriages would be recognized as "domestic legal unions" in North Carolina. It happened in Ohio.
Please folks, we can beat this divisive, discriminatory, negative and appallingly badly drafted Amendment. But we need to get on the air with ads like this and the ones posted by EqualityNC and ProtectNCFamilies.org.
You can help.
First, please take Frank's entirely self-funded and homemade ad and post it to Twitter, to Facebook, to your blogs. Email it to your friends. Something that good needs to be viral, and fast. It won't be on TV. But you can get it seen by hundreds of thousands.
Second, send money. I hate asking for it. You hate being asked for it. But the forces of bigotry are counting on hiding the facts from good people in North Carolina, who otherwise would support civil unions, and would never, ever, support something that will have the ghastly negative effects this Amendment will have. They meet well-reasoned arguments like these with inanities like "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," and the more we can expose people to the actual facts, the less purchase such bigots will have in the minds of North Carolina voters.
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The more we can get on the air, the better.
This is a chance to do something historic. North Carolina is a progressive southern state. V.O. Key established it decades ago in his study of our politics. From the Sit-In Movement to Research Triangle Park, from the gleaming towers of Charlotte to nation's largest Community College system, North Carolinans like Ella Baker, Dr. Frank Porter Graham, Terry Sanford, Jim Hunt, and a generation of thoughtful leaders built a miracle here in the South.
We can do it again. Let the unintended consequence of Amendment One be the final nail in the coffin of anti-gay bigotry as a campaign tactic. Beat these guys. Beat them here.