NJ conservative Republican Governor Chris Christie personally believes that the legal rights of gays and lesbians should be subject to a popular vote of NJ voters.
Christie sounds like he is from Alabama or Mississippi.
In the 1960s when the federal government was finally passing civil rights legislation to end the South's racial segregation laws (in Louisiana, racial segregation was so extreme that the law required not only that black and white students attend separate public schools but that the text books used by black and white students had to be stored in separate warehouses), southern politicians and state legislatures proposed that the civil rights laws should be subject to a vote of the people. Let the good people of Alabama or Mississippi decide by popular vote if African-Americans could eat at restaurants and store lunch counters, sleep in hotels, attend public schools, drink from water fountains, ride in the front of the bus, vote, etc.
NJ Republican Governor Chris Christie has borrowed from that U.S. civil rights history and wants the voters of NJ to decide whether the gay and lesbian residents of NJ have equal rights or less than equal rights with other New Jerseyans.
Gov Christie apparently wants to make sure that when he runs for President in 2016 primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, he can tell the voters down there that he is "one of them".