Down to the Wire: 75,000 Signatures Needed to Protect Traditional Marriage in Washington State     7/16/2009
By Rebekah Ries

Washington state supporters of traditional marriage are organizing a final push to place a referendum on the ballot this November. With a little more than a week to go, organizers still need to collect 75,000 more signatures for the petition to qualify.

Members of Concerned Women for America (CWA) of Washington have joined with churches, family organizations, and conservative groups across the state to collect signatures. The supporters have worked tirelessly since May on circulating the petitions, and are a little over halfway to their goal.

Organizers have until July 25 to turn 120,577 valid signatures in to the Secretary of State's office. Lead organizer Gary Randall reports that more than 75,000 signatures have been received so far. "We think this is good news. However, it points out exactly how much work is left to do in just two weeks," Randall announced on his "Faith & Freedom PAC" blog last week. "We need at least 150,000 signatures to ensure that we have the 120,577 necessary. There are always some signatures that are disqualified for various reasons."

Referendum 71, as the initiative is called, would overturn Washington's "everything but marriage" law (SB 5688) passed in this year's legislative session, which grants homosexual couples and couples in state-registered domestic partnerships all of the rights and benefits extended to married couples. Although the bill refrains from calling domestic partnerships "marriages," it does include the phrase "marriage shall apply equally to state registered domestic partnerships" 180 times.

"For several years, the Washington State Legislature has been re-defining or 'expanding' marriage and the family by granting state-registered domestic partners the rights, responsibilities and benefits traditionally reserved for married couples," says CWA of Washington State Director Maureen Richardson. The legislature is slowly but surely destroying "the special relationship of marriage between man and woman that has been honored and encouraged through laws meant to protect the institution of family as the bedrock of society."

Referendum supporters also fear that the "everything but marriage" law threatens their civil rights. The Family Policy Institute of Washington, a conservative think-tank, says, "As homosexual couples receive equivalent recognition to married couples, there is an inevitable conflict with the conscience and religious freedom of those who disagree." The law threatens employers' "ability to run their businesses freely, threatens the ability of religious leaders to teach their religion faithfully, and prevents individuals and businesses from competing for government contracts and/or receiving professional licenses. This bill does much more than provide health benefits and inheritance rights. It threatens every citizen's freedom to disagree."

"SB 5688 was packaged and presented to the legislature as a domestic partnerships expansion of benefits," reports the conservative Christian Telegraph. "In truth, it will demolish the state's historical understanding and definition of marriage as that of uniting a man and a woman for life." Marriage supporters also fear that the bill will trigger a string of lawsuits from homosexual activists seeking to overturn Washington's Defense of Marriage Act, which was upheld by the Washington Supreme Court in 2006. The state's new recognition of homosexual partnerships as equal to marriage could open the door for further challenges to that law.

To learn more about the Referendum 71 petition, please visit http://protectmarriagewa.com/.

To get involved in CWA of Washington State, go to http://wa.cwfa.org or e-mail director@washington.cwfa.org. If you would like to get involved with one of our other fine state organizations, please visit the CWA in the States site.

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