Ellie is three months old, cooing and playing in her portable jungle gym. She has curly hair and a newborn’s twinkle, and already she’s sleeping through the night for her lucky parents. Perhaps, laughs her father Jerry, that’s God offering some payback for how long they had to wait for her.

Someday, her two fathers will tell Ellie about her adoption. They’ll tell her about their family. They’ll tell how they once struggled with the prospect of bringing her into a household that some look down upon.

Maybe by then, there will be less they have to explain.

On Tuesday, North Carolina will vote on Amendment One, which would add the state’s existing same-sex marriage ban to the constitution. It is a flawed and discriminatory amendment that also would ban civil unions, potentially endangering health insurance benefits and safeguards against domestic violence.

All of which would have little precise impact right now on Charlotte’s Jerry Gardner and his partner of 13 years, Eric LaMonica. They already can’t be married, because N.C. law forbids it, and they don’t see any immediate threat to their insurance benefits.

What they and we see in the amendment, however, is a disheartening embrace of discrimination – that in an attempt to protect marriage from a phantom threat, voters may affirm the bigotry society seems poised to abandon.

It’s especially disappointing, they think, because of Ellie. Four years ago, when they first decided to pursue adoption, Gardner and LaMonica fretted about what society might tell their child about homosexuals. Now, with their daughter a reality, they worry her friends will say their family isn’t really a family, because her parents aren’t allowed to be married.

This is the stain of Amendment One – not only the benefits it threatens, but the message it sends to homosexuals, to sons and daughters and those who would judge them all. Discriminating against gays is acceptable, the amendment says. Their relationships, their commitment and love, have less value.

Some will continue to believe that, regardless of what happens in this week’s vote. But Tuesday also won’t change this: There’s a shift happening, in polls and in hearts, on homosexuality. We’re no longer the America that widely scorns gays. A majority of people in the U.S. now believe they shouldn’t be blocked from marrying, surveys say, and if North Carolina doesn’t reject Amendment One on Tuesday, Maine will likely be the first state later this year to see voters make that statement on marriage.

In 20 years, Ellie LaMonica’s generation will see North Carolina as the last of the Southern states to adopt a same-sex marriage amendment – or the first to join this national movement toward tolerance. Voters can lead us to that inevitability Tuesday by rejecting Amendment One, rejecting bigotry, and telling gays and everyone else what Ellie’s fathers plan to tell her as soon as she can understand: That it doesn’t matter what some might think. “Regardless of anything else,” Jerry Gardner says, “We are a family.”