In a sharp rebuke of members from his own party, North Carolina GOP House Speaker Tim Moore slapped down a bill that sought to invalidate the state’s law declaring same-sex marriage to be legal.
The bill was filed Tuesday, nearly two years after the Supreme Court ruled gay people have equal rights when it comes to marriage, and called on lawmakers to declare same-sex marriages in N.C. to be “null and void.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, GOP Rep. Larry Pittman, got a ton of heat on a Facebook post with commenters piling on for his backing of the bill. Pittman decided to get involved in the discussion and made a bizarre comparison of former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. He later deleted his comment, but not before someone got screenshots.
Pittman was replying to a commenter who said that since gay marriage was declared the law of the land by SCOTUS, he should just move on and “get over it.”
“And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it?” Pittman wrote in the now-deleted comment. “Lincoln was the same sort if tyrant, and personally responsible for the deaths of over 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional.”
From Jezebel‘s Ellie Shechet:
Just to summarize, an elected state official has just taken a stringent anti-Lincoln stance and explicitly communicated that he would prefer it if black people were still enslaved. To put this in better personal context, in 2012 Pittman called upon the state of North Carolina to bring back public hangings. This is what gerrymandering hath wrought, folks.
“Rep. Pittman and his ultra-conservative allies in the General Assembly have no sense of decency, no sense of shame and no sense of historical fact,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a press release. “I call on North Carolina’s Republican leaders to immediately condemn these outrageous and offensive statements.”
Pittman has not responded to various media outlets’ request for comment.
Featured image via NCGA. To follow Sky Palma on Facebook, click here.
