A First Amendment: North Carolina's Wasn't a Referedum

We've all heard it. We all know. The people of North Carolina have made their call. It is now not only illegal for gay couples to get married or have legally acknowledged domestic relationships. Straight couples can't either. However, this was a move made by the people...right? 

There are referendums, and then there are elections. Amendment One was conceived by the latter. Let's first understand how a referendum-initiative works. A group of people who are well-versed on a publicly-affective subject (the political elite) writes up a draft/bill. This bill is voted by the people. Essentially, this process serves to combine the "minority" and "majority" in an attempt to include all citizens in the legislative process. What has happened in North Carolina is, however, simply a device of majoritarian politics.

Sponsored by Republican State Senator Peter Brunstetter, the Bill began its journey in the hands of a whole another kind of political "elite." Interestingly enough, proponents of the Bill had repeatedly argued their case as so - "the amendment was needed to keep 'activist judges or politicians' from overturning the state's 1996 law" (Zucchino, "North Carolina Passes..."). Indeed reactionary forces aren't any less "activist" than their progressive counterparts and, in this case, undemocratic, too.

We can argue the constitution all day. A person has a right to privacy certainly (but how far is that going to go) and let's not forget the preamble. Civics 101: the Constitution is a terrible source for political theory. Let's deal with democracy as I have defined it (stole more like - refer to Robert Dahl's thoughts on democratic theory; also read my article Omniarchy: the days for "representative democracy" are over) and the way the referendum-initiative works to further it. All of this, of course, is to understand just how North Carolina  has shown to us that their process is majoritarian - how its "election of law" not people is just a facade.

The law was manufactured by a politician, Peter Brunstetter, not the political elite. What's the difference? Well, first of all, the political elite isn't a power elite. It is a cause elite; meaning, it is on the forefront of a "cause" and is made up of experts in that elite's subject area. Certainly, Brunstetter is not an expert in the area of Gay studies. He isn't fighting a Gay or even an anti-Gay cause to be considered a member of the political elite. "Brunstetter currently serves the Senate as co-Chairman of the Appropriations/Base Budget Committee, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary I Committee, Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Rules and Operations of the Senate, and as a member of the Finance, Commerce, and Redistricting Committees." (Wikipedia, Peter Brunstetter). Saying he wrote Amendment One as a power move wouldn't be wrong - it couldn't be wrong.

But the wider and more painful difference between such a politician as Brunstetter and the political elite is pluralism and hole in the definition of a "minority." Certainly one man cannot be a representative of the "minority" to represent the gap between "majority" and minority. (The idea of the omniarchy is to create an all by combining a majority and minority). If anything, this is just a majority times two development. Not only did the majority vote in the law (as omniarchy would suggest) they also voted in the one-man "minority." 

A politician's penned Bill cannot be the subject of a true referendum. That politician is the emobiment of the representative system and, thus, the persona of the majority. For him to "strike a deal" makes no sense. He is in debt to the majority. Certainly, then, there is still no reason to believe that the mechanisms of an omniarchy, the processes of a referendum-initiative would fail; that is to say - referendums will create omniarchies and everyone will have a say in the creation of laws. Though, one must ask - where were the LGBTQ-ers when North Carolina needed them so badly? Perhaps it was too engaged in power-orientated political attacks against a severely misguided happens-to-be son of immigrants. How the wheel in the sky turns.