Driven to distraction

All you have to do is look at today’s front-page story in the N&O to know that North Carolina faces some pretty hefty challenges. Hurricane Irene destroyed more than 1,100 homes and damage from the storm has reached $71 million and still climbing.

The same front page details how today is the final day of a federal program to help laid-off workers pay for health insurance while looking for work. With an unemployment rate topping 10%, this news will undoubtedly make worse the situation facing so many North Carolinians.

And yet, tucked in the Triangle section, aptly under political news is the headline, “GOP pushes same-sex marriage amendment.” That’s right. According to our new legislative majority, altering our state’s Constitution to deny couples the right to make a lifelong commitment to each other is pressing business.

Majority Leader Paul “Skip” Stam and House Speaker Pro Tem Dale Folwell held a press conference yesterday in Winston-Salem where they attempted to justify why the NC General Assembly is going back for a Special Session to vote on putting marriage discrimination on the ballot in 2012.

It’s not even worth detailing all of Stam’s egregious comments filled as they were with his typical bigotries and downright lies. I mean one of his milder comments was to suggest that biology demands that we deny same-sex couples the right to marry.

Of course, we know where he’s going with this. Marriage is all about procreation so, obviously, any couple that can’t procreate should be denied the right to marry. Aside from being absurd, Stam’s comment really just betrays his usual fixation on women’s reproductive lives, which leads to the New Majority’s next pressing issue.

Last week Speaker Thom Tillis said that the legislature might once again take up the ban they imposed on Planned Parenthood receiving state and federal funds to provide basic health care. Tillis suggested they might tinker with the language to prevent additional lawsuits. If he wants to prevent lawsuits and save taxpayer money, he should simply lift the ban.

Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina went to court because the legislature banned us from receiving state and federal funds to provide lifesaving cancer screening, birth control, treatment of STDs and teen pregnancy prevention services. Remember, this was a ban, not a cut.

We went to court to protect our patients’ right to continue to see their established health care provider at Planned Parenthood. We went to court because NC faces a shortage of providers willing to care for patients like ours—mostly low-income women and men with little or no health insurance.

We went to court because the new legislative majority would rather play politics with women’s lives than focus on today’s real pressing issues.

Unfortunately, the upcoming Special Session just promises more of the same. It will cost taxpayers roughly $50,000 a day for the legislature to debate whether citizens of North Carolina should be able to vote on people’s marriage or whether low-income women should be able to see their trusted provider for birth control.—clearly, some of today’s most pressing issues.

I can just imagine all those unemployed North Carolinians out there, all those left homeless after Hurricane Irene breathing a collective sigh of relief.