
{"id":25406,"date":"2012-04-26T10:25:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T14:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=25406"},"modified":"2012-04-25T17:06:41","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T21:06:41","slug":"amendment-one-something-we-can-agree-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2012\/04\/26\/amendment-one-something-we-can-agree-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Amendment One: something we can agree on"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Jen Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until I took a job at Equality NC in 2011 that I became harshly aware that I had unwittingly surrounded myself with people who agreed with me all of my life. <\/p>\n<p>It was only then that I began fighting a broad constitutional rewrite brought to the table by my own legislature \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a DOMA-like ballot measure that would later become known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Amendment One\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c only to realize that there appeared to be quite a few folks in the last Southeastern state to consider it who not only didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want me to get married, but also who didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want me in the state at all.<br \/>\nA state, I might add, I was born in, committed to and never left. <\/p>\n<p>This new legislative pushback of highly political proportions was a far cry from the acceptance I felt in my native Eastern North Carolina, not to mention the warm, progressive embrace of the Triangle area I now called home. <\/p>\n<p>And so, learning quickly that some wanted to run me out of my state with this never-before-seen \u00e2\u20ac\u0153domestic legal union\u00e2\u20ac\u009d-defining legislation, I instead chose to run across it, searching for common ground as I traversed it, educating voters all along the way \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 322 miles from Mitchell County to Morehead City \u00e2\u20ac\u201c on the intended and unintended harms of Amendment One. <\/p>\n<p>Admittedly it was a search, once again, to find something we could all agree on: that they or I or we weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t all that bad, but that this amendment certainly is. <\/p>\n<p>And we did. And we did. <\/p>\n<p>In Bakersville and Shelby and Whispering Pines and other smaller communities like the one I grew up in, towns nice enough to host Amendment One events where our team, dubbed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Race to the Ballot,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d faced opposition from those unimpressed by anything but the Good Book all it took was a mention that children could lose health insurance in a post-Amendment world to quiet even the most angry crowds and yield affirming nods from the masses.<\/p>\n<p>We found something we could agree on: Children deserve health insurance. And if Amendment One would take away even one child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s medical care, then maybe we could just this once see this amendment isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for North Carolina \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s against. <\/p>\n<p>In places like Hickory and Salisbury and Rocky Mount \u00e2\u20ac\u201c where people might have been undecided about marriage equality \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they were nonetheless fazed by the very real threats to unmarried domestic-violence victims if Amendment One were to pass. <\/p>\n<p>We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always agree on everything, but if even one woman or child is put in danger by an amendment that could invalidate basic protections for those who are battered by a person they live with, then maybe we could agree Amendment One isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for North Carolina. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s against. <\/p>\n<p>In places like the Triangle and Triad, where crowds lined up in droves to hear how they could get involved with defeating an amendment that hurts children, women and families they know and love, we were the least prepared. Unprepared for all of the stories \u00e2\u20ac\u201c stories like one from a parent in Greensboro who attended an event with her daughter, knowing the next week she faced a court date over custody, and in a couple of months an amendment that could completely negate her relationship to a kid who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always been hers. <\/p>\n<p>And again we agreed. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not right. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not us. This amendment isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for North Carolina. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re voting against. <\/p>\n<p>Long before this statewide Race to the Ballot, I spent a lot of time in places like Carrboro all of my adult life, slowly forgetting that battles for justice \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or in this case maybe just for basic protections \u00e2\u20ac\u201c aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always a slam-dunk; that it sometimes takes more than a little bit of conversation to see these harms, and even then not eye-to-eye; that there can be no agreement in complacency; and that we all have a part to play in bringing our fellow citizens with us on this journey to keep our state on the right side of history \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to the polls, on May 8, to vote against. <\/p>\n<p>If I lived in Chapel Hill or Carrboro or Durham, which I do, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d think defeating Amendment One was just such a slam-dunk. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t walk through my neighborhood without tripping over a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Vote Against\u00e2\u20ac\u009d yard sign or having someone stop to tell me how much they like my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Protect All NC Families\u00e2\u20ac\u009d T-shirt. <\/p>\n<p>But they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re never far from my mind, the lessons of that Race: that while in my own backyard voting against Amendment One is a no-brainer, in my neighbor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neck of the woods a couple hundred miles east or west or south or north, the path to what is right isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as clear and must come straight from the heart. <\/p>\n<p>And if we can agree on that too, maybe we can try to remember a time before they tried to divide us, a time not so long ago in Eastern North Carolina, when I was just a girl, and you were just my neighbor, and we agreed. We agreed. Vote against.<\/p>\n<p><em>Jen Jones is communications director for Equality NC and recently ran 322-miles across the state to educate North Carolinians about the harms of Amendment One.<\/em>  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until I took a job at Equality NC in 2011 that I became harshly aware that I had unwittingly surrounded myself with people who agreed with me all of my life. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25406"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25409,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25406\/revisions\/25409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}