I normally don’t blog about my employer, Duke University (I work at its academic publisher Duke University Press), because I don’t like to co-mingle my online and offline worlds. It’s a general good rule for any blogger to have that separation to avoid any possible conflict of interest or interpretation that your personal blogging is being done on behalf of one’s employer.

However, in this case it is newsworthy to report that Duke’s News Service has put out a press release that dropped at the same time that Race to the Ballot came to Durham on Friday, and that alliances of student groups at Duke participated in the rally and forum held at NCCU against Amendment One.

It’s one thing to have a terrible roll of the health dice, it’s quite another to have your life profoundly affected by bigoted, scared legislators in the North Carolina General Assembly who thought putting my civil rights on the ballot was a good idea for our state. Here are my thoughts in video.

It’s a big week in the Bull City as the campaign to defeat the marriage discrimination amendment brings together multiple coalitions to educate voters and students about the harms of the amendment on our state on Friday. LGBTs and allies at historic black institution North Carolina Central University as well as Duke University are playing a huge role in Race to the Ballot’s “Running of the Bulls”.

Sherre Toler, who, until last week was the director of elections for Harnett County in my state, would rather leave her job than be a party to facilitating a ballot initiative this May that would allow marriage discrimination under the North Carolina Constitution.

Tami Fitzgerald is Executive Director of the so-called North Carolina Values Coalition founded in 2011 to politic in favor of the proposed anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution. She claims “legalizing gay marriage would take away the right of Christian psychologists to refuse treatment on the basis of their religious beliefs,” but can’t explain why.

The Charlotte Observer has a puff piece on the senior minister at uptown Charlotte’s First Baptist Church, who will be a well-known advocate for the passage of the anti-gay marriage discrimination amendment that will go before voters on May 8.

The vote on the amendment is May 8, 2012, so there is not a lot of time to educate voters around the state about just how extreme this ballot initiative is. Public Policy Polling’s latest data shows just how confused many North Carolinians are about the scope of the effect if this is passed. Most North Carolinians are fair-minded and want legal recognition for same-sex relationships…but some of these voters are still in favor of the amendment.

Education is sorely needed, because while polls show North Carolinians support legal recognition of same-sex couples, it’s another matter to get those in favor of fairness to out to vote — to give straight allies (as well as LGBTs) the information they need to speak to their friends and neighbors to motivate them with facts about what this amendment will do.

Perdue took the politically safe route of emphasizing the waste of time and money that the Republicans who pushed this amendment initiative through as unemployment plagues our state, but it is a slap in the face to use the statement to reiterate that every taxpaying LGBT citizen in this state is a second-class citizen and she likes it that way.

She didn’t have to do it, but she did. And that matters.

North Carolina State Senator James Forrester is militantly opposed to enlightened acceptance of gay human beings. He obviously does not give a damn that militant non-acceptance of gay people is the main cause of the elevated rate of suicide for gay teens.