Full announcement from the Coalition to Protect All NC Families:

Raleigh, N.C. - The North Carolina Libertarian Party today declared its formal opposition to Amendment One. The state’s third-largest party is encouraging its members, as well as all other voters, regardless of party affiliation, to vote against the constitutional amendment on the May 8 primary ballot.

J.J. Summerell, chair of the North Carolina Libertarian Party, declared the Libertarian Party’s unequivocal opposition to Amendment One.

“We oppose Amendment One simply because it’s badly designed,” Summerell said in a video released today by Protect All NC Families, the official coalition effort to defeat Amendment One.

Summerell went on to explain how the amendment could harm millions of North Carolina families, women and children by potentially impacting contract agreements between individuals, stripping health care from children of unmarried couples and invalidating domestic violence laws meant to protect unmarried North Carolinians.

Amendment One, Summerell says, is “fraught with far-reaching, unintended consequences.”

In his own Protect All NC Families video, Mike Munger, a professor at Duke University and the NC Libertarian Party’s 2008 gubernatorial candidate, discussed the genuine uncertainty surrounding Amendment One harms.

The amendment “encumbers contract arrangements between all sorts of other people in ways we can’t even begin to imagine,” Munger said.

He went on to say that, through the amendment, “government is making a choice about which kinds of arrangements families can raise children in.”

While legal experts debate how widespread the negative impacts of the amendment will be, Munger suggests there is no question about whether the amendment’s passage would definitively hurt North Carolina’s citizens and economy.

“The effects of this law are going to be substantial; they are going to be economic and they are going to affect people all over the state,” said Munger.

The North Carolina Libertarian Party now joins the North Carolina Democratic Party as well as many high-profile state Democratic and Republican politicians who have urged North Carolinians to vote against Amendment One on May 8.

“This latest declaration against Amendment One further reveals that opposition to the amendment is not only growing, but growing in all parts of the political spectrum,” said Jeremy Kennedy, campaign manager for Protect All NC Families. “The proposed constitutional amendment is not a conservative measure, but an extreme and unnecessary act that reaches into people’s personal lives at the expense of the entire state.”