Student Congress expresses opposition to Amendment One

Student Congress members almost unanimously came together Tuesday night in opposition of North Carolina’s Amendment One.

If passed, Amendment One will ban same-sex marriage on the level of the state’s constitution.

The resolution was sponsored by speaker pro tempore Adam Horowitz and co-sponsored by more than 20 other Congress members.

Prior to the full Congress meetings, District 1 representative Connor Brady said he hoped the vote would go smoothly, but that it could be close.

“We’re hoping it will be a pretty easy vote, but it’s going to come down to a few members for sure,” he said.

The vote passed with 31 members voting for the resolution, one opposing and three abstaining.

Prior to the vote, Horowitz compared the amendment to the Three-Fifths Compromise in the U.S. Constitution, which counted every five slaves as three people for population calculations.

He said the clause is a dark spot on Constitution and that Amendment One could create similar consequences for North Carolina.

“No matter what we did, that clause will be in there — that we discriminated against members of our community, that we discriminated against other human beings,” he said.

Horowitz said UNC’s resolution will be sent to leaders in the N.C. General Assembly, UNC-system student body presidents and the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court.

Student Congress also passed a motion that will consolidate graduate program honor courts.

Currently, many graduate-level professional schools operate their own distinct honor courts, unlike undergraduate which is condensed under one court, said Andrew Baird, the graduate Honor Court chairman, one of the proposers of the motion.

“This proposal is to consolidate those groups into one larger group, so it actually looks a lot like the undergraduate system does now,” he said.

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