For me, it comes down to a basic human rights issue. However, there is also an economic component to Zurcher's argument. He says the city has a sizable and growing homosexual community which spends a considerable amount of money in all of the traditional ways - on housing, health care, entertainment, and the like. A visitor considering Fayetteville's crowded bars and restaurants, its bustling shopping centers and overtaxed street system, comes away with the sense that such an argument just might carry some weight. Everybody's busy here.
Business is good.
If at any time in its recent past Fayetteville could truly be described as a sleepy mountain village, albeit one occasionally enlivened by the gridiron exploits of a few oversized post-adolescents, that era is long over. Fayetteville is too hyped, too hard at work. Not that commerce is its only animating principle. Though it lies unmistakably within the Bible Belt, Fayetteville has enjoyed a reputation as a civilized place with a tolerant, reasonably well-educated population. It was the first town in the South to integrate its schools following the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.