Harnett County Director of Elections Sherre Toler has forcefully resigned so as to avoid having to facilitate North Carolina’s discriminatory marriage inequality amendment in May. In a letter of protest, Toler compared voting on same-sex marriage to voting on interracial marriage and announced she would be forming a political consulting business to “defeat the effort to write discrimination into the North Carolina Constitution.”

Pam Spaulding interviewed Toler about her decision. She explained her goals moving forward and also how she sees the amendment as discrimination:

TOLER: Discrimination is discrimination in whatever form it takes. The Supreme Court acknowledged in the Loving case that the “freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State” Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). The same constitutional provisions that led the Court to that decision most certainly apply to the “freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of [the same gender] resides with the individual…” We cannot allow the civil rights of a minority group to be put to the vote of a majority.

 Yup.