Jodie Brunstetter, the wife of
prominent North Carolina state Senator Peter Brunstetter, is being
criticized for saying that Amendment One would protect the Caucasian
race.
According to ThinkProgress.com,
Brunstetter made her remarks outside an early voting site.
“The reason my husband wrote
Amendment One was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we
need to uh, reproduce,” she allegedly told another supporter. The
conversation was overheard by an African-America poll worker and told
to Winston-Salem freelance journalist Chad Nance, who reported the
story on the site of Greensboro alternative Yes!
Weekly.
“During the conversation, Ms.
Brunstetter said her husband was the architect of Amendment One, and
one of the reasons he wrote it was to protect the Caucasian race,”
Nance paraphrased. “She said Caucasians or whites created this
country. We wrote the Constitution. This is about protecting the
Constitution. There already is a law on the books against same-sex
marriage, but this protects the Constitution from activist judges.”
Senator Brunstetter told ThinkProgress:
“My wife is one of the sweetest, most genuine people you will ever
met. Her convictions on the marriage amendment are spiritual in
nature, not racial. The individual in question had been quite
abusive and intimidating. The amendment is not racially motivated,
is quite simple and straightforward and, in fact, is widely supported
in many areas of the African-American community.”
Rev. William J. Barber, president of
the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, responded in a statement.
“The alleged comments by the
supporter of Amendment One would be less concerning if they did not
fit as a piece of the cynical puzzle of race-based political agendas
and money found in the forces and rationales behind the
discriminatory Amendment,” he said, referring to the National
Organization for Marriage's (NOM) strategy
to pit minorities against supporters of gay marriage.