Posted on 11/24/2006 6:07:37 PM PST by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(AP) BOSTON -- Gov. Mitt Romney, a fierce opponent of gay marriage and possible presidential contender, on Friday asked Massachusetts' highest court to force a proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment onto the state's 2008 ballot.
Romney filed the request with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court -- the same court that ruled 4-3 in 2003 that the state could no longer deny marriage licenses to gay couples -- after lawmakers postponed action on the question until January.
The move by lawmakers was widely seen by supporters and opponents of gay marriage as a way to kill the measure.
Romney is asking the court to order the Massachusetts secretary of state to put the question on the 2008 ballot if lawmakers fail to take action when they return on Jan. 2, the last day of the legislative session.
Backers of the question, which would define marriage in Massachusetts as the union of a man and a woman, gathered more than 170,000 signatures of people in support of the proposed amendment, which would ban future gay marriages in Massachusetts but leave existing same-sex marriages intact.
Under the constitution, the question needed the backing of just 50 of 200 lawmakers in the current two-year legislative session. It would come up for a second vote in the new legislative session in 2007, where it would also need the backing of 50 lawmakers.
Opponents of the question, including powerful House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, D-Boston, feared they didn't have the 151 votes needed to kill the measure and instead called for a vote to recess the joint House-Senate session from Nov. 9 until Jan. 2.
Lawmakers approved the recess vote by a majority of 109-87.
The decision to recess rather than end the joint session, known as a constitutional convention, limited Romney's options. If lawmakers had ended the session, Romney could have called them back into session, but could not have forced a vote.
Romney publicly criticized and said the state Constitution requires they take a vote on whether the question should go before voters.
Romney, who is nearing a decision on whether to jump into the 2008 race for the Republican presidential nomination, publicly denounced the recess vote at a recent Statehouse rally.
Supporters of the proposed amendment say marriage is a fundamental building block of society and voters -- not a single judge majority -- should decided whether to change the definition. Backers of gay marriage say minority civil rights should never be put to a popular vote.
Since gay marriage became legal, more than 8,000 same-sex couples have tied the knot in Massachusetts, the only state to allow gay marriage.
The Legislature grappled with efforts to ban same-sex marriages before the high court ruling. In 2002, lawmakers refused to vote on a citizens' initiative that would have banned gay marriage. Two years later, they voted down their own proposed amendment that would have banned gay marriage and legalized civil unions.
In the November elections, amendments to ban gay marriage passed in Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. Only Arizona defeated such an amendment.
Vermont and Connecticut have legalized civil unions that give same-sex couples benefits similar to marriage. New Jersey's highest court has ordered the Legislature to allow either marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples.
Well, I guess you have to be an Extremely Extreme Extremist to oppose same sex marriage in Massachusetts!....lol
Just this afternoon I was arguing with a liberal who thinks America should be a true democracy. It became a lot less attractive to her when I pointed out a few ballot proposals that are more of a true form of democracy. She then decided that things like gay marriage, gun control and affirmative action shouldn't be subject to votes.
in other words, true democracy is great....as long as she can get her way.
Actually, this is not a bad idea. Maybe Massachusetts voters aren't as leftist as the politicians who represent them.
Yes, let the people decide. I hope that the people of Massachusetts are smarter than their politicians. Then again, they (the grand folk of Massachusetts) did elect these politicians, so one has to wonder.
The downside to this whole thing … they keep electing these same liberal ne'er-do-well’s and idiot nabobs time after time … any vote by the general public might, just might, reflect their (politician’s) electoral proclivities.
I still think that anything this influential on life in America, should be voted on by the populace of the state.
Let the voters speak …
Good thing he got this in before the election!
Yes they are, and they are in the majority-what I call the Massachusetts Moonbat Majority!
I believe that Mass. requires two successive legislatures to approve this, and the first approval was already received...
The toxic Left won't dare allow the American public to vote on gay marriage because that would reveal that such unions are less popular than the left-wing news media would have Joe Average believe.
Which is to say, such a vote would reveal that the Left has been lying for a long, long time.
And the Left's ability to bypass such a public vote reveals that socialists truly hate democracy, even in democratic republics.
They'd flunk a test on how American women won the right to vote in the 1920's, then. Alcohol, too. Same for anti-smoking measures today.
And don't forget the civil rights movement. While court cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education were important in that struggle, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are the key laws, passed by the Congress, which broke the back of legal discrimination in this country. The people, through elected representatives, passed these civil rights laws.
I dont think it was. We have voted on a couple different proposed ballots at the State House in the past, but they all ended up failing. This current one, iniated by petition was supposed to get the first vote this May, they pushed it to August, then they pushed it to the day after the election to avoid a voter backlash, and then they pushed it to the last day of the Session. I don't believe they have gotten even the first vote yet, and because they cant vote on it twice in one day (or they wont vote on it twice in one day) the issue is pretty much dead in the Legislature, thats why Romney is sueing them in court.
The danger here is that if the measure fails, it will add weight to the homo's contention that the word never was defined, else the legislature would not be attempting to define it, removing an ambiguity that exists only in the minds of the legislators and the people who signed the petition.
Sorry, but that's the way it is. The simple truth is that the first instance of homo's applying for a 'marriage' license should have been summarily rejected on the grounds that a marriage license could only be granted to a man and a woman.
How simple can it get?
Chief Judge Anthony Lewis-Margaret Marshall(S.Africa, Democrat, NewYorkTimes, SJC-Massachusetts):
"Let citizens vote? Screw you all.
The law will be what my husband from the New York Times says it is."
Those were instances of representative democracy at work. Here are folks now saying, no, no, not good enough, give us direct voting on the issue in order to defeat it. Sounds like it exactly proves the Left's argument about civil rights going before a popular vote of the People being a bad idea.
The irony is that Romney is calling for judicial activism. He wants the court to overrule the Legislature about whether to present the proposed ballot measure to the voters.
I've lived in Massachusetts all my life, and... Yes. They are.
P.S. Would you be allowed to compete in a dog show if you claimed you were a toy poodle?
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