N.C. lawmaker: Anti-gay marriage measure is dead

A day after North Carolina lawmakers introduced legislation that would outlaw same-sex marriage and defy a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a top Republican there said Wednesday that the bill is dead on arrival.

North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore released a curt statement Wednesday shooting down the bill known as the “Uphold Historical Marriage Act.” Moore said lawmakers would not hear the bill, which prompted a new round of criticism this week for a state already drawing negative attention for its transgender bathroom law.

The new bill, also called House Bill 780, was filed on Tuesday, nearly two years after the Supreme Court upheld a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. Sponsored by four Republican members of the state’s House of Representatives, the onepage bill takes direct aim at the Supreme Court’s ruling and calls on lawmakers to declare it “null and void in the State of North Carolina.”

This legislation refers to a line in the North Carolina state constitution saying that only a marriage between a man and a woman “shall be valid or recognized” in the state, which was added through an amendment approved by voters in 2012.

The proposed bill in North Carolina says that “marriages between persons of the same gender” are invalid, even those performed outside of the state. Kennedy wrote in his 2015 opinion that the justices concluded “there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful samesex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex character.”

While the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2015 was largely followed by county and state officials, even by those who opposed samesex marriage, there were pockets of high-profile defiance. Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, was suspended from the bench after he told probate judges in the state not to give same-sex couples marriage licenses.

In Kentucky, a county clerk was jailed after refusing to comply with court orders that she begin issue such marriage licenses.

But in North Carolina this week, the top Republican in the state’s House of Representatives said the new bill there would go nowhere because of the very Supreme Court ruling it sought to declare null and void.

“There are strong constitutional concerns with this legislation given that the U.S. Supreme Court has firmly ruled on the issue, therefore House Bill 780 will be referred to the House Rules Committee and will not be heard,” Moore, the House speaker, said in a statement.

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, criticized the new marriage ban proposal this week, posting on Twitter that the bill was wrong and saying, “We need more LGBT protections, not fewer.”

None of the lawmakers listed as sponsors of the bill responded immediately to requests for comment Wednesday about Moore’s decision.