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.

When I saw the headline over at Facing South, I had no idea that the nativist batsh*ttery has run off the rails into complete batsh*ttery.

The brains down in Louisiana have decided to throw a tantrum over the fact that the U.S. census attempts to count all people in the country, regardless of immigration status.

2011 Pride, held in Durham, NC on 9/24/2011, was a festive, albeit rainy affair (toward the end). Given the recent act by the NC state legislature to put a marriage amendment on the ballot, I expected a healthy fundie turnout. I saw only about 10 people tops, however.

The debate on the topic of North Carolina’s discriminatory, job-killing marriage amendment was really over before it began when bill sponsor, the bigoted State House Majority Leader Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam (R-Apex) passed out two documents to the attendees at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Law today. In his opening remarks he gleefully referred to the “Act Concerning Marriages (1669)” handout (below) as if it were some holy text representing law in North Carolina. He seems to have forgotten that in 1669, blacks were slaves and they couldn’t even marry one another. That’s a real tradition to uphold.

The cover of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice features a dramatic picture of a burning bus and the mug shots of Freedom Riders who’d been jailed in the notorious Parchman Mississippi State Prison. Most of us are familiar with these images. Ray Arsenault’s book provides the stories behind the pictures — and so much more.

Danielle McGuire, the prizewinning author and assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, has written a beautifully crafted and richly researched testimony of the hidden transcript of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power makes a powerful case for re-imagining the Civil Rights Movement in the South through the lens of sexual violence. This path-breaking book spotlights incidents of sexual assault from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s. Rather than remaining secreted, these brutal attacks inspired community protests among African Americans and their white allies. These grassroots struggles of resistance to white supremacy helped initiate the wider Civil Rights Movement that emerged after World War II and which eventually forced the national government to end racial segregation and black disfranchisement. Also, these community-based networks of support provided the infrastructure for the more familiar history of civil rights activities in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Tallahassee, Florida and other southern cities.

The Democrats are doomed! Southern Whites don’t like them anymore.

It’s the last few hours of the campaign. The polls are all over the map, and traditional measures don’t mean much anyway, because many races are already in the can. Early voting has turned it into election month, with a rolling sea of decisions over the country. The great wave election of 2002, whereby Bush’s power was confirmed with a series of stunning victories, including defeating Max Cleland of Georgia, is set to be reversed.