NC House Speaker Under Fire For His Vow To Destroy Marriage Equality

October 8, 2014 | Filed under: LGBT Issues,States Issues | Posted by: Madison Kimrey

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The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear appeals on marriage equality this week has held circuit court rulings in place that have struck down state marriage bans.
In North Carolina, an amendment to the state constitution, Amendment One, was passed in 2012. One of the strong supporters of Amendment One from the beginning has been current NC House Speaker Thom Tillis. However, when visiting NC State University back in 2012, he had this to say to students: “If it passes, I think it will be repealed within 20 years.” Tillis called the constitutional ban on marriage a “generational issue” and told students, “The data shows right now that you are a generation away from that issue.”

Welcome to the next generation. Just like many of the other positions of Thom Tillis, his estimation of how long it would take to overturn the constitutional marriage ban he supported was way too conservative.
Just two years after Amendment One passed, NC Attorney General Roy Cooper has told North Carolinians to soon expect a federal judge to strike down the amendment and will not be taking any legal action to challenge the circuit court’s decision. He filed a brief to district court judge William L Olsteen expressing the legal opinion that Judge Olsteen is required to follow the decision of the 4^th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Roy Cooper said, “It is the job of the attorney general to argue for state laws, but also to recognize when there are no arguments left.”
Thom Tillis, however, fails to recognize there are no arguments left. As part of a joint statement with NC Senate leader Phil Berger, Tillis vowed to “vigorously defend the values of our state and the will of more than 60 percent of North Carolina voters who made it clear that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
In Tuesday night’s US Senate debate, Tillis said, “Government needs to get out of the way. We need to get our spending under control and we need to reduce our regulations.”
As so eloquently stated in an editorial in the Charlotte Observer, instead of using tax dollars to defend a law that even he recognized from the beginning would be overturned, perhaps Thom Tillis should write the check for the extensive legal bills himself.

NC House Candidate from Pitt County, Uriah Ward, had this to say:

“It is absolutely incredible that Tillis and Berger insist on hiring outside lawyers to defend a law that the highest Courts in the USA have deemed unconstitutional.

This isn’t about same-sex marriage. It’s about the economy! Why can we have an open checkbook for attorneys that charge $500 an hour to defend an issue that has already been determined? This is political posturing at its worst. They know the fight is over, they are just pandering to their base. The GOP attorneys will take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the taxpayers of NC and donate it back to the SuperPACs spending millions against Kay Hagan. WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS!!!!

Yet our children don’t have textbooks, our teachers cannot pay their bills, the refusal of the Medicaid expansion- that was OUR MONEY! NC Tax payers’ dollars are now being used to pay rich GOP Attorneys instead of focusing on the needs of the state. We are better than this.”