The Facts About Amendment One

May 8 is upon us, folks, and unfortunately too many North Carolinians are either unaware that there is an amendment vote or confused as to what the amendment would actually do.

The amendment question will appear on the May 8 ballot, and will read as follows:

Constitutional amendment to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.

Voters will either vote FOR the amendment or AGAINST the amendment. Seems pretty straightforward, right? That's all part of its design.

Like most referendums and ballot questions, most voters read the wording for the first time while they are in the voting booth. People who have no additional information will very likely be voting for something with which they very strongly disagree.

From a PPP poll in late March (emphasis mine):

The marriage amendment which will be on the ballot during the May 8th North Carolina primary continues to lead for passage by 20 points, but if voters are informed of its negative consequences for the potential future passage of civil unions for gay couples, it would narrowly fail.

58% of likely primary voters say right now that they would vote “yes,” while 38% plan to vote “no.” But at the same time, 51% of these voters support some form of legal recognition for gay couples’ relationships, either full marriage or civil unions. 34% of those folks are planning to vote for the amendment. Because of that, if informed that the amendment would ban both marriage and civil unions for gay couples, support goes down 17 points to 41%, and opposition rises 4% to 42%.

Part of the problem is that voters are not well informed about what the amendment does. A 34% plurality say they are not sure on that question. Almost as many (31%) do know that it would ban both gay marriage and civil unions, but then not many fewer (28%) think it would only ban marriage. 7% actually think it would legalize gay marriage. Those who think it bans solely marriage rights are voting 67-30 for it, so 8% of North Carolinians, while misinformed, are voting against the measure simply because they think it bans same-sex marriage alone. Of course, those who think a “yes” vote actually legalizes these unions are voting by the same margin for it.

This is troubling, and underscores the need for an agressive education drive these next few weeks. More importantly, we need to ensure that people actually go out and vote.

Please visit ProtectNCFamilies.org for downloadable tools, printable information sheets, videos, or to donate or volunteer. We need all the help we can get these last few weeks.

Most importantly, talk openly with your friends, neighbors, family, community & church leaders, and make sure that, no matter how they vote, that they have all the information. This isn't just about marriage. It's about all North Carolinians, gay or straight.

The Family Leader: Do You Want Gay Marriage In Your Coffee?

The folks at The Family Leader have released a little video warning fellow Christian conservatives about the harms of drinking Starbucks.

As you probably are aware, the National Organization for Marriage initiated a boycott of Starbucks due to the company's vocal support of same-sex marriage. The boycott has been a complete failure, and now NOM is moving their initiative to countries where homosexuality is criminalized or stigmatized.

Regardless, the backwards blowhards at The Family Leader are having another go at it.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Family Leader, they are an "umbrella group comprising the Iowa Family Policy Center, Marriage Matters, Iowa Family PAC, and Iowa for Freedom." Their mission statement states that the organization "provides a consistent, courageous voice in the churches, in the legislature, in the media, in the courtroom, in the public square…always standing for God’s truth."

If you recall, they were the folks behind "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY," which was signed by Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry. Mitt Romney said the pledge was"undignified and inappropriate." Particularly, Romney took issue with language in the pledge which stated that children born into slavery in 1860 were better off than children born today in America.

The description accompanying the video reads as follows:

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) http://www.nationformarriage.org/ are urging customers across the globe to "Dump Starbucks" because the company has taken a corporate-wide position that the definition of marriage between one man and one woman should be eliminated and that so-called same-s*x marriage should become equally normal.

On January 24th, 2012, Starbucks issued a memorandum declaring that a bill in the state of Washington to legalize so called same-s*x marriage is "core to who we are and what we value as a company".

A portion of every cup of coffee purchased at a Starbucks goes to fund this corporate attack on marriage. If you would like more information about why NOM wants you to "dump Starbucks" or would like to sign the petition, click the www.DumpStarbucks.com link above. Take action today!

Watch:

On The Eve Of The Titanic Anniversary, Let's Remember That The Homosexual Agenda Is Like An Iceberg

As we observe the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, what could possibly be more apt than a homosexual agenda analogy?

Leave it to Truth in Action Ministries to use the opportunity to force a metaphor.

See, the Titanic is America. And the homosexual agenda is the iceberg. Or something.

Anyway, by adding ominous music and some cinematic flair, it's clear that if Americans don't stop people from being gay, then this naturally occurring formation will prevail over the poorly executed man-made construct. Or something?

Watch:

Rick Santorum's Greatest Hits

We've dedicated a lot of posts here to Rick Santorum. I had considered posting a look back at the insanity that was the Rick Santorum campaign, but I'd honestly rather pound roofing nails into my eye sockets.

Thankfully, the folks at Right Wing Watch pulled together a highlight reel for us.

Enjoy, and pour one out for Rick. Hopefully his improbable rise to possible GOP candidate for the nomination is the closest we will ever come to an American theocracy.

The Great Zombie Uprising Of 33 A.D.: Jesus Wasn't The Only One Who Rose From The Dead

I stopped being a Christian not because I stopped believing in empathy, compassion, and kindness, but because I couldn't accept the main tenets of Christianity -- mostly the supernatural stuff.

Christian theology states that Jesus suffered, died, was entombed, and then was resurrected from the dead. He not only came back to life (which might be half-way believable to a skeptic, given the fact that in biblical times, it might have been easy to declare someone dead prematurely), but he ascended bodily into heaven. This means that Jesus' body floated (of flied) up into the air and into Heaven.

If we're honest with ourselves, this is very far out stuff. There is no reason to believe, given what we now know about life, death, consciousness, and the self, that the body of a human being could come back to life and then float up into space. There is also no science to explain how, without a functioning brain, a person could retain any sense of their former living self in any type of afterlife. (Of course, the claim is that Jesus wasn't just a normal human being, but more on that later.)

I do realize that most Christians actually do believe that the resurrection actually occurred:

In the 2008-2009 wave of the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, 94 percent of evangelicals, 91 percent of Catholics and 78 percent of mainline Protestants said Jesus was raised bodily from the dead after his crucifixion.

Jesus' resurrection from the dead was an actual event, said three-quarters of the more than 25,000 respondents to congregational surveys offered by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research from 2004 to 2010. Most of the participants were mainline Protestants.

More than two-thirds of Christian respondents, including 84 percent of black and evangelical respondents, strongly agreed with the statement, "Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead," according to the Portraits of American Life Study.

I also believe that many of these respondents haven't really sat down and thought about what is required to actually believe the resurrection to be true.

I also believe that many people don't like the implications of the resurrection as myth. If the resurrection is a myth, what else is not literally true? If the resurrection is mere symbolism, doesn't that kind of throw a wrench the whole Christian doctrine?

Resurrection aside, there are some pretty amazing claims made in The Gospel of Matthew that are sorely overlooked by the average Christian. In fact, having been a Christian myself for a good part of my life, I was kind of amazed to have been made aware of this particular passage.

After Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, Matthew 27 describes, quite simply, a major zombie uprising:

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

This is fairly clear in the text. Zombies actually rose out of the ground and walked into the city and certainly scared the bejesus out of people. What in the world are we to make of this?

I don't know. I'm no theologian, and I'm sure apologetics have found a way to explain it. But I believe one of the big takeaways from this passage is this: The Bible should not be taken literally. If you do take it literally, it is rife with claims that, quite honestly, are no less fantastical than the claims made in Greek or Roman mythology, or Scientology, for that matter. The only difference is that you likely have heard them since birth, and hence, they seem as true as the crossing of the Delaware.

The Bible is a book written by superstitious Bronze Age men with a very limited understanding of the laws of nature and the capacity to spin a good yarn. This doesn't mean that there was no Jesus. All signs point to the fact that he indeed existed. This doesn't mean that the Bible doesn't offer us great passages of wisdom, beauty, horror, and heartbreak. It does. It doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is bogus.

As comedian David Cross said, "The Bible is the world's longest game of telephone." There is probably a great deal of truth to that. It doesn't make the Bible sinister, or counterfeit. It makes it exactly what it is: a long oral history put to paper in a great undertaking that took hundreds of years, with many different authors writing to many different audiences for many different reasons, in different languages. Throw in some major squabbles over content and purpose, the expulsion of several books, significant editing, and pseudonymous writing, and you have a complex, if not flawed, collection of writing. We also have to take into consideration the fact that the Gospels, which many believe to be eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, were written many years after Jesus' death. The first Gospel accounts (Mark) did not appear until 40 years after Jesus died. If we take into consideration the life expectancy at time of the writing, that is quite a bit more than a lifetime.

C.S Lewis posed to us his 'trilemma': Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.

Lewis is forgetting a fourth option: Perhaps Jesus never made the claims to begin with. This is not a radical suggestion.

Regardless, there is much to gain from the observance of Easter. It is, after all, a celebration of rebirth that echoes other springtime rituals predating Christianity. Its symbols and traditions reverberate all throughout human history.

There's certainly no reason to let a couple of zombies get in the way.

My Amendment One Twitter-Fight With Two Leading Anti-LGBT Bigots

On Friday night, I responded to a tweet by Peter LaBarbera referencing NC's Amendment 1 measure, which would add language to the NC constitution which would define marriage as between one man and one woman.

DL Foster, Patrick Wooden, Peter LaBarbera

For those of you unfamiliar with Peter LaBarbera, he is the president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, an anti-LGBT organization that is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He's a horrible, horrible man.

As I was preparing to reply to LaBarbera's tweet, Pastor DL Foster, founder of the ex-gay ministry organization Witness Freedom Ministries chimed in by praising NC conservatives and people of faith for their 'passion' for fighting 'evil' homosexuality.

For those of you unfamiliar with DL (yes, that's what he goes by) Foster, he was "delivered from homosexual sin over 22 years ago," and now reveres himself as "an expert, well versed on issues in the cross section of sexuality and theology." His Website states that he's been "quoted, cited and interviewed extensively in such media venues as CNN, Newsweek, Charisma, WorldNetDaily, 700 Club Newswatch, AOL Black Voices, Faith Under Fire, ABC News, Jewish World Review, TV One Network and numerous other print and broadcast mediums."

It was an ugly and disjointed discussion, if you can even call it a discussion. As these things go, it was sloppy, rapid-fire torrent of off-the-cuff remarks, retorts, overlapping threads and nothing even resembling a conclusion.

If anything useful came out of it, hopefully the below Storify-zation of the melee will show you what we're up against on May 8, and just how important it is that people get out and vote.

We won't change the minds of folks like Pete and DL. We're better off using that time and energy making sure that people know the harms of the amendment, and that they actually go to the polls to vote.

Anyway, here goes...

It's probably worth noting that DL Foster blocked me immediately after this 'conversation.' I've only been blocked (that I'm aware of) by two other accounts: Governor Rick Perry and the Pro-Amendment organization NC 4 Marriage.

He's in good company.

Harry Crews (1935-2012)

Southern writer Harry Crews died Wednesday, March 28. He was 76 years old.

Harry Crews is one of those literary figures whom people either know very well or not at all. If you have read Harry Crews, it is likely that you have devoured most everything he put to paper. Some of it was not so great, but some of it is some of the most visceral, terrifying, and hilarious writing that has ever come out of the South.

I count his memoir, Childhood: The Biography of a Place, among one of the best pieces of Southern writing, period. It is here that we learn where Crews developed his empathy for the scarred, the grotesque, and the physically challenged. Harry Crews, for part of his childhood, was all of those things.

Playing as a young boy, Crews fell into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog. He suffered, confined to a bed for months with severe burns.

Crews also was bed-ridden for six weeks at the age of five, when his legs inexplicably tightened up (it is believed he had Polio), pulling his heels to the backs of his thighs.

I believe that we gain empathy through our own suffering. Perhaps I want to believe this because in childhood, I dealt with a handful of afflictions, mental and physical, which left me exposed to ridicule and scorn. Granted, I was fortunate enough to not live in south rural Georgia in the 1930's (my childhood was a dream compared to Crews'), but through these trials I developed a heightened sense of empathy that I carry with me to this day.

Harry Crews, through his wild, campy, gothic stories and outlandish casts of characters, taught us a great deal. He taught us that freaks are just as human as anyone else. He taught us that what we often see as personal defects are quite often our greatest assets. He taught us that our desire to be accepted and loved will lead us to ruin if we are not grounded. He taught us that no matter what snake oil is being peddled, and no matter how slick the peddler, we would do well to question the claims.

In many ways, Harry Crews was a skeptic. He wrote a great deal about religion -- there was the charismatic, but highly flawed faith healing Evangelical in 'The Gospel Singer,' the snake-handlers in 'A Feast of Snakes' to name a few -- but a running theme throughout all of his books was the search for the truth.

“I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit," said Crews in an interview. "If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit.”

The loss of Harry Crews is a great loss for Southern literature, for the South, and for literature, period. He was a huge inspiration to me. He dished out a lot of tough love. Through his own personal trajectory, he reminded me that anyone can create art if they work hard enough. He reminded me that a life in which we don't continuously seek the truth is a life that has not been lived fully.

As a tribute to Crews, I have collected some of my favorite Crews passages and quotes from interviews:

"I know what it's like to have people look at you and [have] their face mirror your own rather dreadful circumstances. That is to say, your freakishness. And there were other times I felt freakish, too. ... When I left the farm and went into the Marines. Here I am, a boy off a farm in Georgia, who, among other things, I didn't know what a pizza was. Never heard of one. Didn't know what pepperoni was. So I go to Paris Island and the Marine Corps, in a platoon of boys from New Jersey, New York. Well, everything about my speech, the idiom of my speech was all wrong."

“I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”
― A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

“If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”

"A writer's job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing, to look at it. To not blink, to not be embarrassed by it or ashamed of it. Strip it down and let's get to where the blood is, where the bone is."

"When I first got out of the Marine Corps, I travelled with a circus for about six months, and it had a freakshow. One guy had a deformity in the middle of his forehead that looked just like an eye, so they billed him as Cyclops. And there was a woman with a beard—I don't mean just fuzz, I mean a black beard. They let me sleep in the back of the trailer, and I remember one morning seeing them alone together. I could cry right now because it was just so sweet. He was kissing her, and she was hugging him, and they were talking about what they were going to have for supper. Now, how is that being a freak? I think it's a man and a woman doing the best they can with what they got. That, incidentally, is my definition of fiction."

"Survival is triumph enough."