Chris Christie Defends Response to Marriage Equality Bill January 27, 2012, 10:50 am Some readers thought I was a little hard on Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey this week. On Wednesday I wrote about his decision to veto any law guaranteeing marriage rights to all state residents. He said he thought the issue should be left up to voters. And I said that civil rights don't belong on a ballot. Besides, referendums are a bad way to govern a state. Check out California sometime. In the comments section and elsewhere, some argued that I should have given Mr. Christie credit for his faith in democracy and his deference to the popular will. I was thinking about that when I read an article on Talking Points Memo - which made me realize that actually I had been way too nice to the governor. "The fact of the matter is," Mr. Christie told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South." OK, I get that Mr. Christie is a conservative Republican, which requires him to have a flexible understanding of the history of race relations in this country. I also assume he's coming under great pressure from religious groups to oppose any bill that would extend the right to marry to all adult New Jersey residents. But this willful, propagandistic distortion of American history is shocking. I say willful, because surely Mr. Christie is aware that the African Americans who were fighting and dying in the streets in the South were fighting and dying, among other things, to earn the right to ... vote. Does Mr. Christie really think that the black people struggling for true freedom in the 1960s should have put their fate in the hands of the very people who were burning crosses on their lawns and lynching their sons and daughters? Mr. Christie later tried a pathetic defense - that it was OK to have the whole state vote on marriage rights because polls suggest a majority currently supports giving those rights to all residents. But one of Mr. Christie's friends, Mayor Cory Booker, pointed out how silly that was. "No minority should have their rights subject to the passions and the sentiments of the majority," he said. This is the fundamental bedrock of what our nation stands for. And let's be clear, this is a civil rights issue. Churches can marry, or refuse to marry, anyone they choose. That is of no concern to anyone outside that church, especially not the government. But society confers important rights on married couples - including inheritance and parental rights - that are being denied to a segment of American society simply because of bigotry and fear. It's time for that to change.