The Virginia Organizing Project : VOP urges NO vote on amendment #1 on November 7

VOP urges NO vote on amendment #1 on November 7

“Many gays and lesbians worked side by side with me in the 60’s civil rights movement. Am I to now tell them ‘thanks’ for risking life and limb to help win my rights — but allow their exclusion because of a condition of their birth? Not a chance,” wrote Julian Bond, NAACP national chair, in an August 2006 Virginian-Pilot op-ed.

On April 11, 1947, one of the people that Julian Bond wrote about, Bayard Rustin, left Petersburg, Virginia, sitting in the front of a bus. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but another African-American, one of his fellow Freedom Riders, had just been arrested in Richmond for sitting there. Rustin also got arrested, two days later, in North Carolina. Released on bond, he was forced by threats of violence to leave Chapel Hill before the sun set.

Bayard Rustin, a gay African-American man, continued his work in the civil rights movement. He was asked to coordinate the 1963 March on Washington, bringing together the whole spectrum of civil rights groups as well as labor and other allies. Realizing how powerful that March might be, and hoping to deprive it of its skilled organizer, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina went onto the Senate floor and denounced Rustin as a “pervert.” Thurmond’s tactic failed when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other leaders of the March stood up for Rustin.

In the op-ed quoted above, Bond went on to write: “When others gain a civil right, my rights are not reduced in any way . . . the more won by others, the stronger the army defending my rights becomes.”

On November 7, Virginians will decide whether we will strengthen “the army” defending all of our rights, or weaken all of our rights with a harsh and unneeded amendment to the Virginia Constitution, the so-called “marriage amendment.” The amendment will be Question Number One on the ballot given to every voter on November 7.

A statewide organization, the Commonwealth Coalition, is spearheading a grassroots campaign for a No vote on this amendment. The Coalition’s website, www.votenova.org, will be a source of up-to-the-minute news and ideas through Election Day. (The Virginia Organizing Project is a member of the Commonwealth Coalition.) The Coalition sums up the amendment as seeking “to write into the Virginia constitution not only a permanent ban on same-sex marriage, which has been against the law for 30 years, but also every other form of legal protection for unmarried couples, including any ‘legal status’ that ‘intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage.’”

Like Strom Thurmond’s attack on Rustin, this amendment seeks to enflame prejudices and discomforts about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people. But just as Thurmond was really targeting the wider movement for social justice, the amendment is really seeking to divide and conquer “the army defending our rights.”

“We must all respond to this common threat,” said VOP State Governing Board member Andy Kegley. “Be sure and join in the actions like People of Faith the week of October 15-22, organized by People of Faith for Equality in Virginia, and in phone banking and canvassing organized by the Commonwealth Coalition. And above all, talk to people you know and ask them to read the whole amendment before they go to the polls.”

Why it is important to ask people to read the whole amendment? Websites like www.va4marriage.org that favor the amendment do not emphasize the text of the amendment itself. They just assure the public that if the amendment passes, “absolutely nothing will change” in Virginia.

The first sentence of the amendment is brutally straightforward. It would put the already existing ban on same-sex marriage into the Virginia Constitution. But the two sentences that follow take us into what blogger Kenton Ngo called a “legal minefield.” Though groups like www.va4marriage.org insist there will be “no unintended consequences” from the amendment, these two sentences may change the lives of thousands of Virginians who never thought about same-sex marriage one way or the other.

“Our challenge now is to be sure voters know to read the fine print before they vote,” Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, campaign manager for The Commonwealth Coalition, said. “If they do, we are confident that they will vote NO to this far reaching proposal to write discrimination into Virginia’s bill of rights and intrude the government into our private lives.” The Coalition has found that polling shows that when Virginians read the language of the whole amendment, their support for it drops below 50 percent.

It’s not only average Virginians who get concerned when they read those sentences. More than 135 attorneys, including 1985 Republican candidate for Governor Wyatt Durrette and two former Attorneys General of Virginia, as well as law school professors, corporate lawyers, and other members of the Virginia Bar, have signed onto a legal memo that came to this conclusion:

“Approval of the Amendment could cause significant disruption to settled legal rights, duties and protections in the Commonwealth, allow those seeking to escape their legal obligations elsewhere to clog our courts, and insert the courts into the private affairs of Virginians. These effects go far beyond the claimed purpose of the Amendment: to reserve marriage for one man and one woman.”

No one can predict with certainty who may take what issues into the courts, and how the courts will respond. But the broadly written second paragraph of the amendment could harm a broad cross-section of Virginians, including:

all unmarried couples in Virginia, straight or gay
unmarried partners of abusers
forward-looking businesses
Virginia’s tourist industry
faith traditions that welcome LGBT people
children, parents and other kinfolk of GLBT people

All unmarried couples in Virginia, straight or gay

The 2000 census counted about 113,000 Virginians who lived as male-female unmarried couples. It will only take one lawsuit to throw these relationships into turmoil. The second paragraph of the amendment forbids “a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals” that resembles marriage. That language does not specifically mention same-sex relationships. So every unmarried couple in Virginia will enter a legal “Twilight Zone” if the amendment passes. If they have children together or own property together, or even have their names on the same lease, will they be in legal limbo? An Arlington lawyer recently told the Washington Blade that unmarried gay couples without a prior agreement on property and other issues are making a “$30,000 to $50,000 mistake . . . because if you’re reduced to litigation, it simply isn’t cheap.” The lawyer’s comments may be just as relevant to unmarried opposite-sex couples if the amendment passes.

Unmarried partners of abusers

Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment very similar to the amendment that Virginians will vote on this November. Based on experiences there, the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, which does not have a position on same-sex marriage, is calling for a “No” vote on the amendment. The Alliance reports that in Ohio, “defense attorneys representing abusers have had criminal cases dismissed by arguing unmarried domestic violence victims are no longer eligible for protective orders, and that their abusers cannot be charged with domestic violence.” The Alliance adds that now in Ohio, “unmarried victims wanting to bring domestic abuse cases or seeking protective orders are being turned away — before their cases are even heard!” According to the Alliance, “over 55 percent of victims served by domestic violence programs are not married to their abusers.”

Forward-looking businesses

According to the Connection Newspapers, “a substantial number of Northern Virginia’s largest businesses offer their unmarried employees domestic partner benefits . . . [and] account for more than 100,000 jobs in Northern Virginia and upwards of $84.4 billion in revenue . . . [They] include Gannett Co. in McLean; Northrop Grumman in Reston, McLean and Herndon; AOL Time Warner in Dulles; Booz Allen Hamilton in Tysons Corner; Capital One in McLean; Freddie Mac in McLean; and Sprint/Nextel in Reston.” A spokesperson for AOL told the Connection, “If you look beyond the amendment’s first paragraph, there are some vague loopholes that would put benefits at risk.”

Small businesses are also concerned. The Greater Falls Church Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution opposing the amendment, noting that it would “if passed, make illegal all contractual relations between two unmarried persons that could be conceivably construed or challenged as, in the wording of the Amendment, ‘approximating the design, qualities, significance or effects of marriage.’” The Chamber went on to say that it believed that “all business partnerships that could be construed or challenged as being organized after such a fashion de facto void and punishable by the law, disqualifiable from government contract bidding and subject to lawsuits by anyone dealing with such a business partnership.”

Virginia’s leaders of both parties pride themselves on a pro-business position, and amendment supporters assure everyone that the amendment will not put the state’s business climate at risk. But, as Ray Warren, a former Republican officeholder, recently warned, “Many large companies have gay employees as part of their senior management, and all wish to compete for the best talent available. It would be easy enough to locate in Raleigh, North Carolina, rather than Richmond, or Maryland rather than Northern Virginia to avoid the issue. In a tight and competitive business climate, such things matter.”

Virginia’s tourist industry

“If they don’t like the expression of the will of the people of Virginia, they don’t have to come here,” Delegate Robert Marshall, co-sponsor of the amendment, told the Associated Press. Now the Delegate’s “Bring it on” moment is having the results you might expect.

In August 2006, the American Psychological Association decided to move its 2007 and 2008 meetings from Virginia to Washington, D.C.

“Some of our staff are gay and lesbian,” said Clinton Anderson, staff liaison of the APA’s Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Concerns office. “They expressed concerns that hospitals and emergency rooms might not honor powers of attorney. People felt unsafe in their lives about meeting in Virginia.”

In addition, groups have been formed to urge boycotts of Virginia tourism, taking up Delegate Marshall on his challenge. One of them is called “Virginia is for Haters.” At a time when tourism and travel revenues represent more than 10 percent of the world economy, and competition for the tourist dollar is growing daily, Delegate Marshall’s words may turn out not just to be rude, but to be economically unwise.

Faith traditions that welcome LGBT people

Virginia has a deeply rooted tradition of freedom of religion. But when Quakers decided in the 1700s that their faith required them to oppose slavery, many of them felt that they had to leave the slave state of Virginia. As a result, Virginia lost many of its most successful farmers and businesspeople — people who went on to work hard in other states for educational reform, prison reform and other needs.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is a matter of faith for many Virginians, but others have a different faith perspective. Reverend Allen Happe is one of them; he preached in 1995 that “if some churches or individuals wish to place their own peculiar restrictions on Jesus’ command to love, they may legally do so but they have no right to prevent the rest of us from exercising a wider interpretation of Christian discipleship, nor to prevent the free exercise of our religious covenants as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” Rev. Happe has strong opinions — but so do those like www.va4marriage.org, who feel that preventing same-sex marriage” preserve[s] the bedrock of Western Civilization in Virginia.” Do we really want to tip the scales so far in favor of one faith perspective, even if it may be in the majority?

Children, parents and other kinfolk of GLBT people

Responding to what they see as the “atmosphere created by . . . homophobic narrow-minded fear-based laws,” Sarah Bohannon and her transgendered partner are leaving Virginia. She shared this decision in a sermon at her church in August. Her congregation will feel the loss, but also her “parents in Leesburg, a sister and nephew in Fredericksburg, another sister and brother-in-law in Silver Spring . . . [and] aunts and uncles and . . . cousins . . . in Annapolis, Charlottesville and Culpeper.” All these people will have less contact with their loved one. But if Sarah and her partner had stayed in Virginia, that family network would have had to support Sarah in situations like a recent hospitalization, when, she told her congregation, “I was terrified that I would not be allowed to see him if I told the whole truth. I was afraid I would not be told about his condition or consulted with . . .” Either way, straight family members are paying a price for Virginia’s increasingly anti-LGBT climate. It’s easy to forget — most of the people who love LGBT Virginians are straight people.

“Virginia already chose decades ago to make same-sex marriage illegal. With this amendment, it goes far beyond that choice,” said Andy Kegley. “If it passes, millions of Virginians will feel the impact of this amendment, and it may take years of litigation and thousands of disrupted lives before it is even clear what the amendment means. Finally, it will take many years to get this ugliness out of our Constitution. We are in danger of changing what it means to be a Virginian. Vote NO on November 7.”

For more information on the amendment and what you can do, contact The Commonwealth Coalition at (804) 643-2050 or info@voteNOva.org or you may also contact People of Faith for Equality in Virginia at info@faith4equality.org.

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