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Equality North Carolina Gets Ready For Amendment Battle

Equality North Carolina has gathered together some four hundred LGBTA activists from across their state on Saturday for a day-long conference on LGBT education, advocacy and organization. They are doing this ahead of the campaign to put marriage inequality into their constitution. The group’s leaders have been addressing the amendment while at the conference, seeing as how it is one of the most important issues on the minds of most attendees.

According to Qnotes:

Former Interim Executive Director Alex Miller and newly-hired Executive Director Stuart Campbell opened the conference with their annual State of Equality address. Miller ran down the group’s lobbying efforts on the amendment, which ultimately gained approval on Sept. 13.

Miller told the audience that North Carolinians will vote against the amendment when they are told the true harms and intents that are behind it. He also stated “When they picked this fight, they didn’t just pick it with us. They picked it with a lot of folks.”

Miller quoted the late state Senator James Forrester on how he, and the Republicans, were pushing LGBT people to “change their lifestyles”. In other words, this is about forcing people to behave like the theocrats want them to. Miller stated that “That’s what this bill is really about. It’s about their ideas of what a family is, what a couple is and imposing that on everybody. When the people of North Carolina know that, this will fail.”

Campbell was hired in October to replace Miller who took over after longtime Executive Director Ian Palmquist left. He stated that the amendment will be EQNC’s primary focus over the next several months. Campbell stated that “This will be a battle of historic proportions, but I do believe it is winnable.”

Campbell stated that there are three factors pointing to a potential victory, and that includes the fact that the amendment has been placed on the May 2012 primary ballot, and the amendment’s extreme and broad language. He also noted that the group has a growing coalition of faith, community of color, progressive and business leaders behind them.

Campbell stated “The language of this amendment is so extreme that even folks like Congresswoman Renee Ellmers, a conservative, Tea Party representative, has said she’ll vote against it. Our task — all of us, everyone in this room — will be to educate voters in North Carolina. Regardless of how you feel about marriage equality, this amendment is just bad for this state.”

He went on to say “The state of equality in North Carolina is precarious, but we’ve defied expectations before. Everyone said we couldn’t pass an anti-bullying bill. We did. Everyone said the amendment would be walked through the legislature but it won by only one vote.”

Miller will be cochairing the group’s push against the amendment and the campaign’s manager will be former Human Rights Campaign staffer Jeremy Kennedy. Among those who are there will be keynote speaker North Carolina NAACP President Reverend Doctor William J. Barber.

Via QNotes