Weather Signs

This analysis of Republican "performance" so far (voter turn-out as opposed to registered voters) in the 2012 primaries finds that Republican performance is actually down from 2008:

Analysts said that Mr. Romney has had particular trouble energizing urban and suburban voters — typically moderates and swing voters — who would be vital to him against Mr. Obama. Less-than-robust turnout in the primaries from those areas in states like Florida and Michigan, analysts said, suggests a challenge for Mr. Romney in energizing independents and the less conservative components of the Republican electorate.

Watching the Young Republicans turn off an audience of fellow students with extremist pronouncements on everything from contraception to immigration to the right to vote last Tuesday evening at their debate with ASU College Democrats would seem to confirm the observation that the contemporary Republican Party has become Tea-Party radical, top-to-bottom and young-to-old, and downright frightening.

The ASU youngsters at least seemed to actually revel in just how mean they can be.

Look Who Else Opposes Amendment 1

Richard Vinroot

Speaker of the NC House Thom Tillis, the man more responsible for Amendment 1's being on the May 8th ballot (take a step back, Danny Soucek!), said earlier this week that it ain't nuttin much to pass discrimination into the state's Constitution, since young people will repeal it in another generation.

Former Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot (and former Republican candidate for governor) heard those words and decided he couldn't be silent any longer. He came out publicly this a.m. against the amendment:

“My reaction [to Tillis's statement], was, ‘My gosh, the legislature wants us to put something in the constitution that the leader of our party – the speaker of the House – doesn’t think will stand the test of time for more than a decade,’ ” Vinroot told the Observer. “I can’t imagine amending the constitution for something he believes is that tenuous.”

Amendment 1 & the Law of Unintended Consequences

The people who justify legal discrimination against a minority of our state's citizens (via Amendment 1) scream hysterically about "activist judges" (who supposedly are poised just off-shore waiting for the perfect surprise moment to force everyone into gay unions). But the unleashing of activist judges is exactly what the passage of Amendment 1 promises to achieve.

So says a prominent Charlotte attorney, Russell M. Robinson II, the founding partner of Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, P.A. He wrote in the Charlotte Observer yesterday, "The proposed amendment is so poorly worded and so unnecessary that its adoption would actually increase the probability of a federal court invalidating its ban on same-sex marriage."

Mr. Robinson also emphasizes what many others have warned about, the broad, vague, undefined language of the amendment which will invite many lawsuits and hence the arrival of all those activist judges, wading ashore with their opinions locked and loaded:

...the proposed constitutional amendment widely prohibits any “domestic union” that is not a marriage between a man and a woman, with an exception added later saying that it “does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party” (apparently even including same-sex parties). All of that language is so absurdly broad and unclear that it threatens to disrupt a wide range of domestic and family relationships, together with benefits dependent on those relationships. It will undoubtedly provoke multiple lawsuits to determine what it means, and it can also deter businesses from moving to North Carolina because of the uncertainty of our law in this important area....

Robinson also tucks in a neat little lesson in Biblical truth that the Deborah Greenes of this world might want to read and heed:

Writing religious beliefs into law to enforce them against everybody has created terrible problems down through history, and is still doing so in some parts of the world. It is also condemned by the Bible in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (4:14-15), which says that such beliefs are matters of faith, not law, “because law brings wrath.” This attempt to put a religious belief into our state constitution is thus contrary to a clear New Testament command and is already bringing wrath to us all.

Modern Politics Is All About Wedges

That's not a quote from Deborah Greene, but she certainly knows the truth of it.

Revealed today by reporter Laura Leslie is an internal document from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) which speaks frankly of at least one of the political strategies being used in North Carolina to put civil rights discrimination into the North Carolina Constitution by way of Amendment 1:

"The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two Key Democratic constituencies,” says the report. 

“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," the report instructs. “No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party.”

In these mountains, the forces of blue-nosed repression don't need this particular wedge. All they need are the regular church-goers who'll believe what their preachers say and fall obediently into line to "save marriage," completely ignoring the philandering and divorce in their own ranks which have done a sight more to destroy marriage than the love and commitment between two people of the same sex.

20 More Years of Discrimination Ain't No Big Thang!

Even while Sen. Danny Soucek, chief sponsor of the miserably written massive government intrusion into private lives otherwise known as Amendment 1, is planning a big church rally at Watauga High School on April 10 (just in case anyone didn't think this was all about religion and had very little to do with good government), the Republican Speaker of the NC House, Thom Tillis, was on the campus of NC State University admitting that the "anti-gay amendment" was just the dying gasp of an older generation:

“It’s a generational issue,” Tillis said. “The data shows right now that you are a generation away from that issue.”

According to Tillis, researchers have predicted Amendment One will pass with approximately 54 percent, but Tillis, who voted to pass the amendment, believes it won’t remain long. 

“If it passes, I think it will be repealed within 20 years,” Tillis said.

You wanna know what legislative cynicism looks like? It looks like this particular politician who reassures his young audience that it's okay if a bad law gets written into the state's constitution because his young audience will be the people who'll eventually repeal it.

You wanna know what "doesn't have a clue" looks like? Attend the church rally on April 10th.

John Hood Comes Out of the Closet

John Hood, leader of a mere sliver of the Art Pope Empire, comes out against Amendment 1 (via Rob Schofield):

"I think amending North Carolina’s constitution to forbid gay and lesbian couples from receiving any future legal recognition, including civil unions, is unwise and unfair. In my opinion the real threat to marriage is not the prospect of gay people getting hitched. It is the reality of straight people too quickly resorting to divorce, or never getting hitched in the first place."

Whaaa??? It was Art Pope's dutiful minions in the NC General Assembly, like Li'l Danny Soucek and Jonathan Jordan, who pushed this s**t in the first place.

So what gives with the cognitive dissonance, Mr. Hood?

Windows Into the Plutocratic Soul

A lot of news and chatter since last night about an anti-Obama post that showed up on a John Locke Foundation blog, Meck Deck, written by Tara Servatius. The photo-shopped fake photo of the president as a black drag queen, sitting on the ground with a bucket of Kentucky Fried between his legs, has since been taken down, and Ms. Servatius has resigned, and John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation is all apologies and "shocked, I'm shocked."

But, really!

Give us a giant break, since Tara Servatius had a pretty clear track record as a talk radio extremist before she started flacking for Mr. Hood's "think-tank." Even Forest Gump knew that "ugly is as ugly does."

John Hood is mainly shocked that his kingdom of Popeism has a self-inflicted wound today.

Amendment 1 ... Badly Written and "Absurdly Broad"

Russell and Sally Robinson are prominent Republican philanthropists in Mecklenburg County and speak with a rationality we don't often associate with contemporary Republican activists (like li'l Danny Gayhate).

Russell Robinson has another distinction: he's the grandson of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice William B. Rodman, who authored the 1868 North Carolina Constitution. He has an actual care for our founding document that Republican extremists only claim to have.

Hattip: Matt Comer