Next May, North Carolina voters are scheduled to go to the polls to vote on a proposed amendment to the North Carolina state constitution that will ban same-sex marriage. Yet, according to recent polls, support for same-sex unions is on the rise. Nearly 53% of Americans favor the right to marry for everyone. That’s up from 42% five years ago. Host Frank Stasio discusses what could happen to the legal issue of gay marriage in North Carolina with Evan Wolfson, founder and Executive Director of “Freedom to Marry” and the author of the book, “Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry” (Simon & Schuster/2005); and Michael Gerhardt, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law and the Director of the Center for Law and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.