National
Out-of-state activists headed to N.C. to fight amendment
Volunteers ready to staff phone banks, boost turnout for Tuesday vote
K. Travis Ballie (Blade photo by Michael Key)
For K. Travis Ballie, helping with the campaign against Amendment One in North Carolina represents a chance to reverse the losses on state ballot initiatives in the more than 30 states that have seen votes on marriage equality.
“I’m going down because 2012 is a very unique year, even since 2004, when we saw the greatest number of marriage amendments on the ballot, we didn’t defeat any of them,” Ballie said. “Now in 2012, we have an anti-marriage amendment on the ballot in a southern state, in North Carolina, which also happens to be one of the most important swing states in this election cycle.”
Ballie, a gay 23-year-old Silver Spring, Md., resident, said he’s personally invested in the fight against the anti-gay measure — which will come before state voters Tuesday and would make a ban on same-sex marriage part of the state constitution — because he has gay friends in North Carolina, including one who had a marriage ceremony in the state a few weeks ago.
“This is really her marriage on the ballot,” Ballie said. “When there are people like Hillary that are in North Carolina that are just pleading for help from activists across the country, the only moral response is to go down to North Carolina and really help defeat this amendment.”
Ballie said challenging anti-gay amendments wherever they emerge across the country is important.
“I think we’re at a point where our community understands that we need to put up a fight wherever an amendment happens, be it a Southern state, be it the Northeast, anywhere in the country,” Ballie said. “These amendments are politically feasible to be defeated and even if we lose, which we won’t, we are really orchestrating one of the largest LGBT-focused statewide campaigns in North Carolina, one of the fastest growing states in our country.”
Ballie is one of several LGBT rights supporters — coming from places like D.C., Sacramento and Chicago — who are expected to travel to North Carolina to help in the campaign against Amendment One.
Another D.C.-area resident, Bryan Oklin, a gay 28-year-old attorney, said he also intends to travel to North Carolina to participate in efforts against Amendment One, calling it a “misguided, divisive measure,” because of the negative effect it would have on LGBT families.
“It seeks to enshrine in the North Carolina state Constitution that one group of the state’s citizens deserves less civil rights than all others,” Oklin said. “It is a backwards, bigoted initiative reminiscent of a past, less tolerant period of time.”
Same-sex marriage is already barred by statute in North Carolina. Opponents say the measure would not only make that ban part of the state constitution, but also prohibit civil unions and interfere with domestic partner benefits offered by municipalities as well as threaten contractual arrangements between same-sex partners.
Adam Bink, director of online programs for the Courage Campaign and an organizer for grassroots efforts against Amendment One, said the Coalition to Protect All NC Families, the campaign against Amendment One, will have more than 100 volunteers coming from out of state either through their signup form or through the Human Rights Campaign. On top of that, Courage Campaign will bring in 15 additional supporters.
“We’ll be putting volunteers to work at phone banks, events like OutRaleigh 2012 this weekend, and going to doors to talk to voters and leave reminders to vote across college campuses and in neighborhoods,” Bink said. “They’ll be focused on one core mission: ensuring we get our supporters to the polls.”
Bink said the out-of-state efforts that helped lead to the passage of California’s Proposition 8 are a stark reminder of why outside support can be important.
“Courage Campaign members from across the country wrote in to tell us they’re going because don’t want to leave any state behind, and because they understand that Amendment 1 goes too far in hurting families across North Carolina,” Bink said. “Our members will never forget the busloads of volunteers from outside California that helped pass Prop 8. We’ve learned from that experience.”
It’s this memory of Prop 8 that is motivating Amanda Wallner, a 24-year-old lesbian from Sacramento, Calif., to travel to North Carolina. For her, the memory of the passage of Prop 8 in 2008 as a college student and the rescinding of the marriage law in Maine in 2009 — which she helped fight — both weigh heavily on her.
“The loss of the ‘No on 8’ campaign hit me really hard,” Wallner said. “When we lost, I could barely get out of bed the next day. I still get emotional sometimes when I read about it. Any opportunity that I have to apply some of the lessons that I learned during that campaign to help out other LGBT people — I’m really excited to have the opportunity.”
Wallner added that going door-to-door explaining the harm of anti-gay amendments brings the biggest gains for the LGBT movement.
“That’s one of the reasons that I love electoral campaigns so much,” Wallner said. “It gives me that opportunity to talk to people face to face, and for them to be able to put a face to the issue.”
These activists could face an uphill battle; polls have shown majority support for the amendment, though there has been a shift in momentum in recent weeks.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said he thinks the amendment is likely to pass as similar marriage amendments have in the past.
“I couldn’t guess the margin at the moment, but it is hard to see how it fails to garner a majority ‘yes’ vote,” Sabato said. “The usual patterns are emerging: Seniors are strongly in favor and young people are the least likely to back it, Democrats are opposed while Republicans support.”
Even so, the pro-LGBT side in the race has a funding advantage over proponents of the anti-gay amendment. According to media reports, the Coalition to Protect All NC Families has raised $2.3 million to date and has $294,000 in cash on hand, while Vote for Marriage NC has raised a total of $1.2 million and has $112,000 in cash on hand. The pro-LGBT side is touting that individual small donations make up the bulk of its funds, while large contributions from the Christian Action League and the National Organization for Marriage made up the other side.
Moreover, recent polling shows support for the marriage amendment is declining. Data published last week by Public Policy Polling found only 54 percent of voters in the state plan to vote for it, while 40 percent are opposed to the measure. That’s the lowest level of support for the measure that PPP has found in polling since last October.
Bink said the decline in support for the North Carolina amendment shows the pro-LGBT side is within “striking distance” of victory.
“What’s more, the same poll shows that the more North Carolinians learn what Amendment One does, the less they support it, which is why an original 27-point lead has been cut in half,” Bink said. “A supermajority of North Carolinians oppose a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage as well as civil unions and domestic partnerships for unmarried couples of any gender, endangers domestic violence laws, and takes benefits like health insurance away from children of unmarried couples.”
National
Man charged in Mall of America shooting plot inspired by Pulse massacre: report
Suspect exchanged hundreds of messages, pledged loyalty to ISIS
The U.S. Department of Justice charged Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, of Richfield, Minn., on Oct. 7 with one count of knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition in order to commit a federal crime of terrorism. Mohamud allegedly planned to carry out a mass-casualty attack in support of ISIS, inspired in part by the Pulse nightclub massacre that took place on June 12, 2016 when then-29-year-old Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and wounded 58 – one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, and the deadliest targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
According to a DOJ statement release, Mohamud was arrested on Oct. 6 by the FBI, which had arranged to sell him an AK-47 assault rifle, magazines, and ammunition through an undercover FBI employee. Mohamud was arrested shortly after paying $600 in cash and taking possession of those items; he reaffirmed his intention to shoot people at the Mall of America during the transaction.
“Mohamud allegedly sought to carry out a mass-casualty shooting at the Mall of America, expressing a desire to emulate some of the most horrific ISIS-inspired attacks in the United States, including the atrocities at Pulse Nightclub and 2025 New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg in the statement by the DOJ. “The National Security Division will continue to work closely with the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force to track down and prosecute ISIS-inspired terrorists in the United States.”
According to the complaint, beginning on or about December 2024, Mohamud had exchanged hundreds of messages through multiple social media and messaging apps with a confidential source, and expressed a desire to travel to Somalia to join a designated foreign terrorist organization to fight on their behalf.
The defendant stated many times that if he was unable to travel overseas because of a lack of funds, he planned to carry out a mass-casualty event in Minnesota in support of ISIS.
According to the DOJ, “In July 2026, Mohamud sent messages discussing his intent to carry out a mass-casualty shooting attack at the Mall of America because he claimed it was owned by Jews. He wrote that [he] wanted to kill 30 to 60 people so no one would go there.”
“During the course of his communications, Mohamud stated that he wanted to commit an attack similar to those of the Pulse Nightclub mass-shooting in Orlando, the Bondi Beach mass-shooting in Australia, and the New Year’s Day vehicle-ramming attack in New Orleans.”
This case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Ryan White of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Bejar for the District of Minnesota.
California
Calif. GOP gubernatorial candidate ad ‘disgusting attempt to exploit lesbian intimacy’
Activists, anti-LGBTQ religious leaders criticized Steve Hilton spot
Two women sit on a bed, a Pride flag hanging behind them. One is nervous; the other tells her to be calm and that she’ll do “all the work.” The music swells. The two hold hands and — fill out a ballot voting for Steve Hilton?
This is the new advertisement from the Hilton gubernatorial campaign that is drawing rebuke from both sides of the aisle, but for very different reasons.
Jorge Reyes Salinas, the communications director at Equality California, said the ad was an insult to the queer community.
“This ad is a disgusting attempt to exploit lesbian intimacy for political attention,” he said. The advertisement plays on media tropes that Salinas says “reduce lesbian and bisexual women … to sexual entertainment,” rather than showing them as well-rounded characters. “Any group of the LGBTQ+ community deserves the same dignity and respect as everyone else,” he said.
The ad is truly hyper-sexualized. It ends with one woman telling the other, “Now lick it.” The two pause and stare before she reveals an envelope to send the ballot, and large text pops up saying, “Just try it!”
Salinas characterized the ad as a desperate attempt to get attention from a candidate who is trailing far behind in the polls in heavily Democratic California. The Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra, who is endorsed by Equality California, holds a 25-point lead over Hilton according to recent polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
Conservatives have also criticized the ad.
Influential evangelical Pastor Jack Hibbs thought the ad was distasteful and said, “lesbianism among college girls and some high school girls that right now is an actual pandemic of social ill.” Republican attorney general candidate Michael Gates said it undermines “the sanctity of the relationship between parents and their children.” This criticism is rather confusing because although the ad features two relatively young women, they both appear to be adults, not minors.
“The comments from Pastor Jack Hibbs should be criticized because there is nothing wrong with two women being attracted to each other,” Salinas said. “We’re calling out the ad’s stereotypes, while also rejecting the homophobia in the response to it … by other Republicans.”
The backlash from Hilton’s own party and supporters shows that an advertisement full of queer innuendo was ill-considered, considering the national GOP’s attacks on LGBTQ people in recent years. Hilton himself has been campaigning against transgender girls and women competing in school sports and using locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. This context might be why Hilton’s political base responded to the ad just as poorly as the liberal voters he was attempting to court.
Hilton says the ad is part of a new series rolling out before Election Day, showing stereotypical California liberal archetypes voting for Hilton. He claims these ads are authentically filmed with real actors, as opposed to being A.I. generated, like many of his previous ads. One other advertisement has been released so far by the campaign showing a man at a spiritual retreat also being swayed to vote for Hilton, although it is notably absent of sexual innuendo.
Caleb Kaufman is a California Local News Fellow placed with the Los Angeles Blade. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
2026 Midterm Elections
Trump uses anti-trans slur against Democratic Senate candidate
President mocked Annie Andrews
President Donald Trump used an anti-trans slur against Democratic South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews on Monday as he sought to rally support for Republicans in the state’s Senate race.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump attacked Andrews three times, referring to her as “trannie” while promoting U.S. Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.)’s campaign.
Andrews is running against Graham for a Senate seat in the solidly Republican state.
Earlier this year, Graham was specially appointed to the seat following the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, who represented South Carolina in the Senate from 2003 to 2026.
Andrews, the Democratic nominee from the state, is a pediatrician that lives in Charleston with her three children. She told NBC News that she will “work with anyone to put South Carolina first.”
“As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina,” Andrews said, adding that “lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together.”
Andrews used the attention from the president’s attack to emphasize what she described as a focus on policy issues rather than the culture wars that have dominated much of the political debate.
“If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you,” she added.
Trump’s remarks have drawn criticism from leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) condemned Trump’s words Monday night on social media, calling his attacks on Andrews “despicable.”
“Annie Andrews is a mom and pediatrician who’s always put her community first — and she’s exactly who South Carolina needs representing them in the Senate,” Schumer said on X.
Former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, a Republican, also criticized the president’s attack on Andrews, urging voters to “reject politics based on division and hate.”
“This is abhorrent. Elections don’t have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better,” Beasley wrote Monday night on X.
South Carolina has not elected a Democratic senator in nearly three decades.
Andrews’s campaign website does not mention her positions on LGBTQ issues.
The Washington Blade reached out to Andrews’s campaign for comment on Trump’s attack and her positions on transgender rights but did not hear back by time of publication.
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