No arrests were made at Moral Monday #13, as the N.C. General Assembly was no longer in session and entry to its buildings was strictly controlled. Former arrestees met earlier at a nearby church so that NAACP leaders and members of the legal-defense team representing the 926 arrestees could discuss next steps. A press conference brought news that the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) and the AFL-CIO of North Carolina were joining in on the upcoming legal challenges.
Afterwards, supporters marched from the church to Gov. Pat McCrory's office to deliver notification of these upcoming legal challenges, starting with demands that Gov. McCrory actually read the voter ID bill before he signs it -- something he has said publicly that he had not yet done.
Gov. McCrory signed the voter-suppression bill into law that evening.
No one here knows how to describe how different this North Carolina is from the state we lived in eight months ago. In less time than it takes to gestate a human fetus, our state has given birth to a place where guns are welcome in restaurants where alcohol is served, a place where voting is no longer a right but a privilege granted by a powerful few, a place where anyone (even someone with a firearm) can challenge your eligibility to vote,a place where women may have to travel to one clinic in the entire state that may still be permitted to provide a full range of reproductive medical services, a place where the water system your community built and maintained could now be controlled by a small group of Republican millionaires, a place where public education has been gutted, a place where your business is prohibited by law from contracting with union workers, a place where our state attorney general has been stripped of the power to work with the U.S. attorney general to address challenges to state laws.
The above paragraph would have to be the length of a George R.R. Martin novel to enumerate the ways in which our state has been ALEC-aformed by colonizing forces working with state-grown conservative, paleoconservative, and neoconservative collaborators.
And so we marched.