A North Carolina legislator, Republican Rep. Larry Pittman of Cabarrus County, compared President Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler on Facebook. The comment was in response to a flow of criticism over legislation he and two others sponsored in the General Assembly to restore a state ban on same-sex marriage.
In the long thread, someone posted "the Civil War is over. The Fed won. Get over it."
In an apparent response, Pittman wrote, "And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it? Lincoln was the same sort of tyrant." Pittman wrote on his page that Lincoln was "personally responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional."
A civil war website said an estimated 620,000 men died in the line of duty during the Civil War. The number was raised to 750,000 in 2012 in The New York Times by a historian from Binghamton University.
"Representative Pittman and his ultra-conservative allies in the General Assembly have no sense of decency, no sense of shame and no sense of historical fact," North Carolina Democratic Party chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement as he called on Republican leaders to condemn Pittman's comments.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling effectively voided an amendment to North Carolina's constitution which forbade same-sex marriage. It was an amendment voters approved in 2012. The bill co-sponsored by Pittman claims the Supreme Court overstepped boundaries as the federal government changed a state law.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Tim Moore of Kings Mountain said in a statement that the bill introduced this week won't be considered because the nation's highest court "has firmly ruled on the issue."
Source: nydailynews.com
