News-Record.com

Click here for my newspaper story on the bills to ban gay marriage filed at the General Assembly. The bill would enshrine a law already on the books in the N.C. Constitution.

For those looking to save time and hand-wringing, the most relevant portion of the story might be this:

In 2007, Hackney used his power as Speaker to kill a similar bill in the House that had managed to pass its first committee hearing. When asked if he would do the same again this year, Hackney said, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

Senate leader Marc Basnight also was skeptical about the need for such a bill. When asked if he worried North Carolina’s marriage law could be overturned, Basnight said, “No one has shown me that could occur.”

Asked Tuesday afternoon if Forrester’s bill would be doomed to the same fate as in previous years, Basnight was noncommittal.

“Will it come up? I can’t say,” Basnight said.

But he assigned the bill to Ways and Means, a committee that has not met since 2001 and is controlled by one of Basnight’s chief deputies. Assigning a bill there is viewed as an efficient way to kill legislation.

In other words, the same legislative leaders who have blocked similar bills in the past show no signs of letting up on them.

You can read the Senate version of the bill here.

Update: You can click here to listen to Rep. David Lewis take questions about the bills from us scruffy media types during a news conference Tuesday. Lewis is a genuinely nice guy (whether you disagree with him or not, he's always very civil - unlike yours truly) and got a lot of hard questions from us. And frankly, the harder the questions got, the less help he got from other supporters of the bill.