Painting My Town Red

Well, now we have evidence that even the "bluest" areas have faint touches of red here and there. DC has some homo-haters in it.

The D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics has scheduled a Nov. 18 hearing to decide if a petition that seeks to define marriage as being between one man and one woman only can be circulated in the District, according to Bill O'Field, DCBOEE spokesperson.

Lisa L. Greene, who claims to represent the group D.C. Citizens for Marriage [no Web site could be found], filed the paperwork seeking a citizen's initiative that would ban gay marriage in the District. If DCBOEE determines that the group's proposed "District of Columbia Marriage Protection Act" is a proper
subject matter for an initiative measure, Greene's group would have to collect at least 19,196 signatures of registered District voters in 180 days to bring the issue to the ballot. That total is 5 percent of the number of total registered voters in the District.

The text of the initiative is this:

The Citizens of the District of Columbia and the District Council defines and preserves marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman only.

Great. Now I gotta be a second class citizen in my own city? Well, maybe. It appears that there may be some chance of fighting this thing.

One possible legal challenge to the initiative is a 1980s era District law, pushed through at the request of local gay activists, that bans D.C. initiatives or referenda that would remove civil rights protections conferred by the D.C. Human Rights Act. It's unclear whether same-sex marriage could be considered a civil rights protection conferred under the city's human rights law, but some activists could attempt to use this law to block the anti-gay marriage initiative.

Here's my take. If they manage to get a referendum on this thing, it will pass; even in "true blue," heavily Democratic D.C. My reasoning? While D.C. is a pretty liberal city, it's also a predominantly black city, and it's already been noted how the gay marriage issue helped give the Bush campaign team inroads into African American communities where there weren't many before. My guess is that if this becomes a referendum, the black churches in D.C. will support it, and it will pass.

Comments

[Tom Armstrong]

T.,

It seems that the Gay marriage issue is more subtle to the electorate than it seems on November 3.

You talk about DC, but there is this, too, from Oregon, per the Nov 14 David Broder column:

Tim Hibbitts, an independent pollster in Portland, Ore., has done some exit poll calculations that make an interesting point. Gay marriage was an energizing issue in states such as his, where it was on the ballot as a voter initiative. Bush lost Oregon, even though the measure banning gay marriage passed.

In the national exit polls, Hibbitts found that 12 percent of Bush's voters actually favored permitting gay marriages; 38 percent favored civil unions but not gay marriages. That leaves 50 percent of the Bush voters who said no legal recognition should be given to same-sex couples. Kerry voters went the other way, with less than a quarter taking a no-recognition stance. But on both sides, Hibbitts points out, opinion is nuanced, not monolithic. You can see why Congress is wary of a constitutional amendment on this issue.

So while there is inhumanity in the Blues, there is humanity in the Reds as well. Who'd a thunk it.