Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

North Carolina Voters Pass Same-Sex Marriage Ban

Signs outside a polling site in Wilmington, N.C. The vote on an amendment to the State Constitution banning same-sex marriage came after weeks of debate in churches and on the airwaves.Credit...Ken Blevins/Wilmington Star News, via Associated Press

As expected, North Carolinians voted in large numbers on Tuesday for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions, becoming the 30th state in the country and the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution.

About half a million people voted early, a record for a primary in the state, and turnout on Tuesday was unusually high as well. The amendment, which passed by a margin of more than 20 percentage points, was on the ballot along with other party primary races, some of which were closely contested.

The vote came after weeks of heated debate in church pews and over the airwaves. More than $3 million was spent on the rival campaigns. Ministers formed coalitions pushing for and against the measure, and cities passed resolutions condemning it. Former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Billy Graham weighed in on opposite sides, and law professors skirmished over the consequences.

North Carolina, a religious but also relatively moderate state on social issues, already has a law banning same-sex marriage. But Republican lawmakers pushed an amendment out of concern that the law was in danger of being struck down by judges.

While public opinion is shifting rapidly across the country and same-sex marriage continues to achieve legal recognition state by state, polls in North Carolina before the vote showed a narrowing but comfortable margin for passage.

Image
Voters in Hickory, N.C.  on Tuesday.Credit...Ken Blevins/The Star-News, via Associated Press

“We are not anti-gay — we are pro-marriage,” Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the executive committee for the pro-amendment Vote for Marriage NC, said at a victory rally in Raleigh, where supporters ate pieces of a wedding cake topped by figures of a man and a woman. “And the point, the whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design for marriage based on the demands of a group of adults.”

Opponents had raised almost twice as much money as the amendment’s supporters and had a robust network of volunteers and get-out-the-vote workers.

“We know that we pushed the needle forward,” Jeremy Kennedy, the campaign manager for the Coalition to Protect All NC families, a group that fought the amendment, said to a group of staff members and volunteers after the vote. “This is just a skirmish, a battle in the war that we will win.”

Mr. Kennedy added, “We gave everything we had.”

The North Carolina amendment declares that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”

A group of family law professors across the state called the language vague and untested, and warned that, in addition to applying to all variations of same-sex unions, it could also apply to the more than 150,000 straight couples in the state who live together but are unmarried. This could invalidate domestic-violence protections, undercut child custody arrangements and jeopardize hospital visiting rights, they said.

Three law professors from Campbell University, a Baptist college about 30 miles south of Raleigh, came out with a paper contesting this analysis, saying that this “much broader view of the amendment and its consequences has little support in the amendment’s language or context, or in court decisions from North Carolina or other states.”

Polling showed that feelings about the issue were divided in North Carolina as they are across much of the nation: along generational lines, with younger voters opposed to the amendment.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Ban on Gay Marriage Passes in North Carolina. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT