As you may know, North Carolina was thought to be a moderate southern state during the fifties and sixties. While George Wallace bellowed segregation down in Alabama, the governors up here walked a fine line between taking action on civil rights and avoiding a white supremacist backlash. Yet North Carolina had an active Klan, multiple bombings of homes of civil rights lawyers, and plenty of segregationist politicians. With such ingredients for violence, what made my state turn out to be “moderate”? It came down to Hodges and Sanford, who occupied the governor’s mansion from 1955 to 1960 and from 1961 to 1964, respectively.

William Umstead was North Carolina’s governor when Brown v. Board was handed down, but he died soon afterward, and his lieutenant governor Luther Hodges took office. Hodges wasn’t a career politician; he was a successful businessman who had worked in New York before moving to Germany to work for the Marshall Plan. As governor, he wanted to see North Carolina develop a modern economy that would improve the standard of living for everyone in the state. To this end, he spent a great deal of time attracting businesses to North Carolina. There’s no indication that Hodges questioned segregation, but he knew that northerners were averse to it. To put it simply, economic development was more important to Hodges than resisting integration, and so he consciously aimed at “moderation” on racial issues. Developing the state’s moderate reputation was key to getting large corporations such as IBM to set up in the new Research Triangle Park, which was one of Hodges’s projects. But as Christensen notes, “the middle turned out to be token integration,” not meaningful action.

If the moderation of the first North Carolina governor to respond to Brown v. Board was a part of a marketing plan for the state, the moderation of the next governor was more sincere. Terry Sanford was a liberal, but one who’d seen his hero Frank Porter Graham go down in flames in a Senate campaign against a race-baiting segregationist opponent. He’d seen the power of a segregationist backlash, and so he was careful to support segregation in his campaign speeches: “The people of North Carolina do not want integration and we cannot afford to close our schools, but this is where [my opponent] would lead us. He is injecting a false issue on integration and it is false because he knows I am opposed to integration. The difference is that I know how to handle it, and he doesn’t.”

Sanford was lying. Once in office, he integrated the parks department and helped civil rights groups negotiate integration with stores and hotels. Later in life, Sanford had this to say about his carefully crafted statements: “You couldn’t get too far ahead of the people and you couldn’t say anything that you’d later feel bad about. … Under the circumstances, I was cautiously going as far as I could go.” Governor Sanford never moved quickly enough for activists in his party, and he didn’t like demonstrations and marches, but it seems that he did want to see an integrated North Carolina even when he claimed otherwise.

This kind of political lying is interesting to me, in this case because Sanford so clearly seems to be in the right. Had Sanford been straightforward, he might have lost to his segregationist opponent, Beverly Lake, and North Carolina might have had the same kind of shameful state-sponsored violence that Alabama did. In North Carolina’s age of machine politics, an ambitious young politician could get to the top by loyally riding the coattails of a more powerful politician, or by seizing an opportunity to beat a weak machine candidate, or by coming along at a time when an old machine was falling apart. Sanford had worked for Governor Kerr Scott and took control of Scott’s organization for his own gubernatorial campaign. Anyone with the ambition to rise through a machine as fast as Sanford did must have some sense that the normal rules don’t quite apply to him. And so political lying comes quite naturally. In this case, it was a good political lie.

Jesse Helms, more than anyone else in North Carolina, saw clearly how people resent political lying and managed to channel this resentment into anti-elitism. Remember what they used to say about Helms? “You may not like Jesse, but at least you know where he stands.” But railing against political lying has its limits. North Carolinians would vote someone like Jesse into the Senate — though by smaller margins than you might think — because he’d be one voice among many. But each time a Helms-style conservative ran for governor, he lost to a more pragmatic candidate. And even Helms had to do some political lying to downplay his racialist campaign tactics. (See pages 267-270 in Christensen’s book for a discussion of this.)

Conservative anti-elitism has a source in an accurate perception that progressives are lying politically. But one mistake of anti-elitist conservatives is to think that political lying derives from progressivism. It doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t have to: it follows from the kind of ambition it takes to win. Politicians who build their careers on doing the right thing — for example, Frank Porter Graham — won’t be able to protect their weak spots. But all of this has been said many times before.

Maine proponents of gay marriage rights woke to defeat today, which is a shame and another signal that the country is still bitterly divided on this issue.  The New York Times reports:

“The Catholic Church was a leading supporter of the repeal campaign, even asking parishes to pass a second collection plate at Sunday mass to help the cause.”

Which makes me sad as well.  I support religious institutions’ beliefs, however wrong-headed I think they may be, but I wish they’d afford the same dignity to others.  Nobody is trying to force the Church to support gay marriage, to allow gays to be married in its churches or by its priests.  What business did the Church have interfering with civil marriage laws – passing out second donation plates to oppose equality?

This is especially difficult for me because I’ve been taking RCIA classes at our local parish, which lead in April to confirmation in the Catholic Church.  I’ve always loved catholicism.  My family is largely Catholic, though I was raised non-denominational.  I went to Catholic school for a year, and always loved the saints, the rosary, the colors, the solemnity and the joy involved in the liturgical year, the intellectual and mystical traditions of the Church.  It all felt, and still feels, more real to me somehow.  Catholicism has a communal and spiritual depth to it that I never experienced at the Methodist or any other protestant church.

There are things that bother me about it, though.  I am a decentralist at heart.  I believe in the decentralization of power, no matter what the organization.  If there is to be a hierarchy, I want it to be a hierarchy that is still very flat, with power spread as far and wide as possible.  The very Catholic notion of subsidiarity plays a very strong role in my thinking on this – and, paradoxically perhaps, a very weak role in the Church itself. I’m not against the papacy.  I’m just against the level of power the Pope seems to wield.

Then, too, I think the treatment of women and gays is wrong.  I think women should be able to be priests.  I think, if Jesus were alive today, he’d agree.  I just find the notion that Apostolic succession ought to be confined to men a bit outdated.  Like a great misunderstanding of the universality of Christianity and Christ and what it means to be human and in communion with God.

I’m a little mixed on married priests, though I think by and large marriage should be allowed.  I just know enough pastor’s kids to know that dividing your life between God, your flock, and your family can be extraordinarily difficult – especially on your children.  Maybe there’s some wisdom in wedding priests to God only.  Maybe not.  People divide their lives similarly in a host of other professions.

In any case, the fact that the Catholic Church was instrumental in defeating marriage equality in Maine is saddening to me.  The Mormons did it in California, and they were an easy target for my ire, I have to admit.  I’ve always had issues with Mormonism, whether that’s fair or not.  But Catholics?  I mean, here is an institution devoted to peace and justice!  Catholic priests were at the vanguard of the anti-war movement during Vietnam.  The Pope came out against the Iraq war.  Catholics were social activists against slavery, against the slaughter of native Americans….

But not for the gays who want – shudder – to marry.  To become families.  To join one of the most important social institutions our civilization has to offer.

It’s a shame, and it makes me wonder at the thrust of my heart.  It makes me question whether I should be in this RCIA class at all, whether I should join an organization which I simply want to change.  Is there a conflict of interest here?  Should someone join a cause or a religious group or any other affiliation if one has such fundamental disagreements?

Update.

Andrew has a few more things to say about this:

The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art – their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don’t want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.

The truth about civil marriage – why it is the essential criterion for gay equality – is that it alone explodes this core marginalization and invisibility of gay people. It alone can reach those gay kids who need to know they have a future as a dignified human being with a family. It alone tells society that gay people are equal in their loves and in their hearts and in their families – not just useful in a society with a need for talented or able individuals whose private lives remain perforce sequestered from view.

This is why it remains the prize. And why our eyes must remain fixed upon it. In my view, the desperate nature of the current tactics against us, the blatant use of fear around children (which both worries parents and also stigmatizes gay people in one, deft swoop) are signs that what we are demanding truly, truly matters.