The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Three GetEQUAL activists: Angel Chandler, Mary Counce, and our own Alum 2008 U.S Senate Candidate Jim Neal were arrested at the North Carolina state capitol yesterday for disrupting a legislative session. The direct action followed the event, "Rally in Raleigh" in protest of the anti-gay Senate Bill 106 that would put an amendment on the 2012 ballot preventing private businesses and municipalities in NC from offering domestic partnership insurance benefits. The bill would invalidate the Domestic Partnership Registries Chapel Hill, Asheville, and Carrboro, the three cities in NC that offer such benefits.

According to a press release from GetEQUAL, the activists began chanting "Liberty and Justice for All in North Carolina" before being taken into custody by police and charged with "disorderly conduct and trespassing".

Project contributor Pam Spaulding, who spoke at the rally, was able to capture some of the action:

Around 2:20 into it, while Jim and the GetEQUAL activists are being arrested, that's when the security threatened to arrest me and a couple of other people for simply being present to videotape/photograph the event.

Spaulding adds that Neal was released about four hours after his arrest, and Chandler and Counce were released shortly after. Neal's court date is set for July 11.

Be sure to check out more from the rally on Pam's House Blend, as well as a letter from Jim Neal, who writes:

This note in response to my defiance of the law today is neither some personal manifesto, act of self-aggrandizement, stunt nor press release. It's been a long day and I felt like recording my thoughts and forwarding them to a collection of friends and family. What I and other did today was hardly courageous or unprecedented. I will say that my personal expression of civil disobedience today was perhaps the most noble gesture I have made in my lifetime.

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