Like a cockroach scurrying for cover when the light goes on, House Majority Leader Skip Stam (R), seeing the moral bankruptcy that he has wrought with Amendment One on the ballot, tries to tell the Fayetteville Observer that he actually wanted a kinder, gentler (presumably only anti-gay) ballot initiative, but that he was pressured by a national hate group to use the language people will see at the polls. (NC Policy Watch)

House Majority Leader Paul Stam, a chief proponent of the amendment, dismisses such talk as crazy and foolish, but he had never deigned to tell us why the amendment goes so much further than simply restating the ban on same-sex marriage if that is his goal.

This weekend, Stam finally explained it to the Fayetteville Observer who reported it this way.

Stam, the Raleigh lawmaker, said he wanted a more narrowly worded amendment but was “overruled” by “national experts” he identified as the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy group.

This is so grotesque and enraging that I’ll just leave it to Chris Fitzsimon’s commentary:

I don’t recall electing the Alliance Defense Fund to represent me or to overrule members of the North Carolina General Assembly.  Apparently Stam’s first allegiance is to a hate group, not the people in Wake County that he is supposed to represent.

…The amendment that the Alliance wrote reflects their offensive philosophy that gay couples deserve no rights—not marriage, not civil unions, not employee benefits, not even privacy in their own homes.

That’s what it is really on the ballot, a referendum on the basic human rights of tens of thousands of people in our communities.

The polls show both that the amendment is likely to pass and that most voters don’t understand what it really does, how it far it goes into denying rights to our friends and families and neighbors because of who they love and want to spend their lives with.

Alliance Defense Fund’s honcho,  Alan Sears, leads an organization that compares marriage equality to bestiality, child marriage, and says pedophilia is linked to homosexuality — comments by the way that Stam himself agrees with.