No on Amendment One
In case the bigoted intentions of the backers of North Carolina's Amendment One weren't already clear, the wife of the author of the amendment has made its vile intentions
perfectly clear:
The wife of a North Carolina state senator reportedly told poll workers during early voting Monday that an amendment sponsored by her husband was intended partially to protect the Caucasian race.
Jodie Brunstetter is the wife of state Sen. Peter Brunstetter (R), a supporter of Amendment 1, which would change North Carolina's Constitution to permit only heterosexual marriage.
According to the alternative Yes! Weekly, writer and campaigner Chad Nance spoke to a pollworker who told him that Jodie Brunstetter said, "The reason my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce."
And it gets even worse: According to Brunstetter, only white people know how to
protect the Constitution:
Nance paraphrased the remarks, as told to him by those who were present: “During the conversation, Ms. Brunstetter said her husband was the architect of Amendment 1, and one of the reasons he wrote it was to protect the Caucasian race. She said Caucasians or whites created this country. We wrote the Constitution. This is about protecting the Constitution. There already is a law on the books against same-sex marriage, but this protects the Constitution from activist judges.”
The fact that these anti-gay activists are a bunch of racist bigots shouldn't be surprising: after all, it was the National Organization for Marriage that produced the
infamous memo that detailed the organization's race-based "divide and conquer" strategy toward preventing the spread of marriage equality:
"The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks -- two key Democratic constituencies," states one of the memos. "Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots," continued the memo, part of a set of documents that emerged as a result of a Maine lawsuit and then were leaked by the Human Rights Campaign.
In response, the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP has issued via press release a harsh condemnation, and is urging a vote against Amendment One:
The real insult to the Civil Rights Movement is that the same regressive, ultra-conservative Tea Party type folks suing to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act, re-segregating and robbing our public schools of valuable resources, blocking workers' rights to organize, trying to force us all to get photo ID's to exercise our right to vote and cut back on the time and opportunities to vote, and attempting to repeal the Racial Justice Act, now somehow think the sons and daughters of the Civil Rights Movement cannot see through their Trojan Horse trick.
And now this -- the allegation of a blatant reference to a twisted race-based rationale for Amendment One being written in the first place. North Carolinians must reject this ultra-conservative, regressive and mean spirited agenda. We must be better than this as a state and as a people who make glowing claims to our belief in justice and fairness for all. We must vote AGAINST discrimination, division and hate in our Constitution. We must vote AGAINST Amendment One.
With only a few days left to go in the campaign, it couldn't happen to a better set of bigots. What all minority communities in North Carolina need to understand is that Amendment One is the brainchild of white supremacists who are seeking to force other white people into being "breeders" so they can create more white people, who are apparently the only thing that can save Western Civilization. In other words, the tea party.