বুধবার, ২৩ জানুয়ারী, ২০১৩

North Carolina Must Stop Attacking Religious Freedom, LGBT Families in 2013

COMMENTARY | Last year, North Carolina conservatives scored a major symbolic victory in their war on the family and on religious freedom. Even though North Carolina pastors and ministers who believe in marriage equality were already prohibited from performing same-gender weddings, our state's Republican Party pushed an agenda that included amending the state constitution to twice ban certain kinds of families and the practice of certain religious beliefs.

Specifically, those they don't like.

Here in Cary's suburban sprawl, it was easy to miss the battle unless you looked at the yard signs. But families were being split up, domestic partnerships invalidated, and bullies given new license to yell about people their God hates. And next door in Raleigh, conservative activists celebrated the passing of the amendment by eating the wedding cake they'd denied others.

The "war on the family" is losing

By electing President Obama to a second term -- plus voting in favor of marriage equality in multiple referenda -- the rest of the country demonstrated not how "PC" it was, or how "popular" it wanted to be, but how much empathy it had for those who were hurting. Across the rest of the country estranged families were brought back together, new ones were allowed to form, and people embraced tearfully as love and acceptance changed their lives.

The social conservatives in North Carolina and other holdouts know they can't block out the rest of the world forever. Not with the way things are going. Not when the children they tossed out, the friends and relatives they shun, and the pastors they're warned not to listen to are going on with their own lives without them. And are starting to take exception to people cursing at them, laughing at them, or acting as though they had died, because of differences that matter as little to them as their hair color.

People are going to die in the meantime

Preachers are still riling people up against "queers and homosexuals," and they and transgender persons are still being murdered or killing themselves. Words and actions have consequences, and North Carolina voters decided last year which consequences they approve of.

But it's not too late for them to change that.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-must-stop-attacking-religious-freedom-lgbt-215200784.html

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