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Guilford Co. Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen

Guilford County Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen

Senate Bill 2, the controversial proposal to allow North Carolina magistrates to avoid their duty to perform marriages for same-sex couples was whisked through the state Senate’s Judiciary II Committee today as thousands of North Carolinians remained stranded by an unexpected snowstorm. By my watch, the meeting featured all of eight minutes in public comment on what is, by any fair assessment, a proposal of great import and serious constitutional implications.

Of course, the lightning-fast review was no accident. When you’re selling a proposal that’s a gussied up effort to legalize discrimination and “separate but equal” public services, it’s best not to linger in any one place for too long lest people quickly see through the pancake makeup.

Let’s hope that, at some point, public outrage at the proposal (see for instance, today’s edition of the Fitzsimon File) forces lawmakers to apply the brakes to this particular train so that additional rational voices can be heard.

In this vein, a great example would be Guilford County Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen. here is a letter Thigpen sent to the memberso the Judiciary II Committee via email at 7:40 this morning:

Dear Judiciary II Committee members,

I learned late yesterday SB 2 had been put on the calendar for hearing today. It’s snowing in Guilford County and Schools are closed. I don’t know if I’ll be able to attend but I wanted to express a number of concerns I have with the bill, specifically regarding the Register of Deeds provisions. They are as follows:

1) A “sincerely held religious objection” is not defined. If a Catholic employee discovers an applicant is applying for a second marriage, can they file a religious objection based on this bill?

2) As a manager, Register of Deeds will be put on notice by their employee(s) regarding their religious objection (which is not defined). There is no due diligence or deliberation regarding this matter. The employee is given power, without question, to state the religious objection and immediately be exempted from issuing marriage licenses to ANY citizen. The employee is then given a six month free pass from performing their duties processing marriage licenses.

This can have a serious impact on our daily operations and undermines our role as managers of our offices. Read More

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If crazy ol’ Keith Olbermann was still hosting is MSNBC news and commentary show these days, you can bet that former Arkansas Governor-turned-semi-permanent-Presidential-candidate Mike Huckabee would be a strong contender for the today’s “Worst Person in the World” award.

As Associated Press reported yesterday via WRAL.com:

“Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Sunday said being gay is akin to choosing to drink alcohol or use profanity — lifestyle choices he says are appealing to others but not to him.

The former Baptist pastor, who is weighing a second run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, also claimed that forcing people of faith to accept gay marriage as policy is on par with telling Jews that they must serve ‘bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.’ That dish would run afoul of kosher rules in the same way Huckabee sees asking Christians to accept same-sex marriages.”

Sadly, this kind of hateful and ignorant talk appears to be exactly what some on the far right are looking for. Witness the latest glowing Huckabee reviews from the “nonpartisan” Pope-Civitas Institute, which brought Huckabee to speak at a church in Charlotte last week (with a fee for admission, with those who paid more getting better seats) and then posted a pair of glowing reviews of the man and his likely candidacy (here and here) on its blog.

The bottom line: We’ve come a long way fast in recent years when it comes to overcoming fear, ignorance and discrimination in this country, but if Mike Huckabee and his ilk were to have their way, that progress would come to a screeching halt.
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Paul Stam 2

State Rep. Paul Stam

If you had any hopes that this year’s version of the North Carolina General Assembly would be less reactionary than the last two, these should have been quickly dashed in recent days by the announcement that the 2015 session will commence its substantive work next Wednesday with a “briefing” on a bill to sanction and promote discrimination against the state’s LGBT population.

The proposal comes, of course, from that irrepressible foe of tolerance and modernity, Rep. Paul Stam of Wake County — a man who has devoted the lion’s share of his years in elected office to advancing a narrow and backward-looking social agenda. Under this latest proposal, Stam would attempt to allow registers of deeds and magistrates to opt out of serving LGBT citizens seeking marriage licenses if doing so “would violate their core religious beliefs.” No word yet on whether Stam would allow similar treatment of officials with “religious” objections to interracial marriage.

Happily, there is a deep and growing wellspring of opposition to Stam’s sham. Chris Sgro of Equality NC does a fine job of explaining this opposition on the editorial page of this morning’s edition of Raleigh’s News & Observer. Here is an excerpt: Read More

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Gay marriage 3Regular NC Policy Watch contributor Charles Beem weighs in this morning with is thoughts on the painfully slow process of finalizing America’s embrace of marriage equality.

The waiting game: Marriage equality and the Supreme Court
By Dr. Charles Beem

It has been nearly three months since the triumph of marriage equality in North Carolina, and it appears that the institution of heterosexual marriage has survived intact. For the LGBT community in North Carolina, it is the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal couple of years, which has seen this state slide from purple to red and all the attendant regression in health care, education, and civil rights that has accompanied the slide to the right.

Most notorious, of course, was the passage of Amendment One, a sucker punch thrown at the electorate in a May 2012 primary election in which a whopping 34% of registered voters participated, which, from hindsight, was sort of like a state passing a law prohibiting interracial marriage on the eve of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967). After a federal appeals court declared the amendment unconstitutional last October, we witnessed the spectacle of conservative legislative leaders spending your tax dollars to try to defend the amendment, which reminds me of the soldiers who fanatically defended Hitler’s bunker from the Russians after he was dead!

Yet despite the momentous gains made for marriage equality in 2014, there is still cause to worry. Quite unlike the Warren Court that ruled unanimously in Loving in 1967, the current U.S. Supreme Court is quite obviously divided on an issue that a majority of Americans are coming to believe is a natural and logical, if not inevitable, progression of civil rights. Read More

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When my family first started attending Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh several years ago, there was a little boy who was about the same age as our youngest daughter. His name was Max and he had a younger sister named Erin. The kids stood out a little because both Max and Erin were African-American and their two dads, Nathan and Dave, were white. I learned at the time from a close friend who knew the family well that the two kids had been adopted out of extremely rough, impoverished circumstances. The term “crack baby” was used.

By all appearances, though, the kids seemed pretty doggone normal and the parents were clearly loving and attentive. I have a vivid memory of one of the dads holding a wriggling Erin, dressed in her finest holiday dress, as Max portrayed one of the animals in the children’s Christmas play.

As the years went on and Max and his family moved away, I heard occasionally through my friend that they were doing well (Max had actually been admitted to West Point!) and took it as a remarkable testament to the power of love to overcome some of the worst things that society has to dish out — namely the grinding poverty from which the kids were rescued and the absurd and hateful discrimination that I knew the family still found itself subjected to regularly.

And then last night, my Pullen friend passed along this amazing story from writer S.L. Price of Sports Illustrated that fills in a lot of the details I had missed in recent years. Unless you are one of the shrinking number of troubled souls still clinging to a closed heart and mind on the question of LGBT equality, I promise you will be unable to read it or watch the accompanying video without feeling a lump in your throat. Indeed, it may happen even if you are — I sure hope so.

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