said that [her] writing the word "partner" was basically a provocation, evidence of a need "to show that she's different." "They get that way," she told me. By "they," she meant women who were fed up with men because "men can be difficult," and so now they "experiment" with female relationships because they're tired of having men boss them around. She told me about a friend whose wife left him for another woman. And about a young family member who was molested by a same-sex adult male. And about a gay man who once plunged a knife into a chair in the restaurant where she worked. And—she finally lost me here—something about the Navy SEALs.

I have a feeling that this Donna was a bigot before she had negativeThis story has been updated to include a corrected chart of entirely white male county commissions.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton made history this year when she became the nation's first woman presidential nominee of a major political party. But for women in North Carolina, there's still a long way to go in terms of political leadership at the county level.

Of the state's 582 county commissioners, only 97 are women. That's just 17 percent of commissioners in a state that is 51 percent female. In 42 of North Carolina's 100 counties, there are no women commissioners at all.

Those numbers are drawn from a Facing South analysis of data on the racial and gender makeup of North Carolina county commissions from the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an initiative of the Women's