Minn. Senate Approves Putting Gay Rights Up to Popular Vote

The Republican-dominated Minnesota state senate has approved a plan to put the rights of the state's gay and lesbian citizens up to a popular vote next year, Reuters reported on May 11.

The May 11 vote followed approval from panels in both the State House of Representatives and the State Senate.

The ballot measure would write anti-gay language into the state's constitution, providing for an amendment that denies marriage to same-sex families. Minnesota currently has a state law banning marriage parity, but advocates of the ballot measure suggest that unless the state's constitution is altered to exclude same-sex couples from equal access to marriage rights and protections, gay and lesbian families might one day win a court challenge to the law's constitutionality.

Just such a challenge led to the nation's first same-sex marriages, in Massachusetts, seven years ago. Since then, six other states have also approved marriage equality, although ballot measures in two states--California in 2008 and Maine in 2009--rescinded marriage equality.

Currently, five states grant marriage parity to gay and lesbian families, and eight states offer civil unions.

"After nearly 3-1/2 hours of debate the Senate voted 38 to 27 in favor of advancing the proposal, with the vote largely along party lines in the Republican majority body," the Reuters article said.

"I believe it is the people who should determine the meaning and structure of our policies through the process of political debate, a statewide community conversation and ultimately democratic voting," Republican State Sen. Warren Limmer said. Limmer is a sponsor of the measure, the Reuters article noted.

Democratic state lawmakers voiced their disagreement with the measure.

"It sends a pretty clear message to me that Republicans in this body care more about passing their divisive social agenda than putting Minnesotans back to work or balancing the state's budget," said Senate Minority Leader Thomas Bakk.

The Reuters article noted that approval for the measure sailed through the state senate even as the legislature had been unable to work out a spending bill to address a deficit of over $5 billion in the Minnesota budget.

State Sen. Scott Dibble, who is openly gay, predicted that the campaign surrounding the ballot measure would echo the deeply divisive and bitter campaign that rocked California as proponents and opponents of Proposition 8 locked horns, pouring a record amount of money into the campaign.

"We are not going to have a conversation," Dibble warned, "we are going to have an ugly, angry, divisive campaign." Dibble also predicted that the state would be "profoundly changed through this 18-month experience that we are about to embark on."

The tumult from Proposition 8 continues to roil California and the nation. A federal judge struck down the measure as unconstitutional last year; the verdict is currently under appeal, a process that might take years. Meantime, the 18,000 families that wed in California during the six months that marriage equality was legal there are still legally married, but should a same-sex marriage end there, the former spouses would not be free to wed again.

Other same-sex couples who missed the window are left to wait, either for a hold on the resumption of marriages in California to be lifted or for an eventual Supreme Court ruling that might not go their way.

Meantime, state and federal laws continue to lag behind the changing social views that see a growing acceptance of marriage equality, especially among younger voters--a fact cited by at least one Minnesota lawmaker.

"This new [legislative] majority is very, very wrong," Democratic State Sen. Terri Bonoff said in the Minneapolis newspaper Star Tribune on May 11. "This new majority is out of step with the people of Minnesota and the people of this country. People have moved on."

If so, the ballot measure might be the first of its sort to fail at the ballot box, outside of an Arizona anti-gay ballot measure that voters rejected in 2006.

But history is against such an outcome. Even in Arizona, voters did not reject the measure because it deprived their fellow citizens of rights and protections that the majority enjoys. That measure failed because voters feared that cohabiting straight couples might be economically affected. When the measure was subsequently reworded to specify that only same-sex families would be targeted, Arizona voters readily approved it.

Voters in 30 other states have also approved such ballot measures, writing anti-gay law into their bedrock legal documents.

The full State House of Representatives will either kill the measure or send it on to voters. Like the state senate, the state house is dominated by Republicans.

Minn. State Sen. Ron Latz suggested that GOP lawmakers were seeking to boost conservative voter turnout in the next election, which will decide who occupies the White House for the following four years.

"It's the latest installment in the culture wars," Latz said.

Some online bloggers contrasted the actions of Minnesota lawmakers with those of Delaware's legislature. On May 11, Del. Gov. Jack Markell signed a bill that will make civil unions legal in that state as of Jan. 1, 2012.

"Don't let Minnesota's anti-gay ballot measure get you down," a May 12 posting at the blog kevinism read. "Last night Delaware governor Jack Markell signed the state's civil union bill into law. And Markell's speech will make all that Minnesota snow filling your jaded heart melt clean away."

In his ten-minute address, Markell told a jubilant crowd, "Tonight, with the signing of this law, we say to any Delawarean regardless of sexual orientation--if you've committed yourself to someone, and you've made that pledge to spend your life together in partnership, when life or death decisions come, we honor your right to make those decisions together."