Florida to vote on gay-marriage ban in November
Petition drive beats Friday deadline

By Aaron Deslatte

Tallahassee Bureau

February 2, 2008

TALLAHASSEE


Florida voters will be asked to decide in November whether to write a ban on same-sex marriage into Florida's Constitution.

The state Division of Elections made the surprise announcement late Friday, after the signature-petition drive launched more than two years ago by social conservative groups managed to beat the signature deadline to make the presidential election ballot.

The group pushing the ban collected more than 649,000 signatures — well over the 611,000 required to place a citizens' initiative before voters statewide.

However, another hot-button proposal called the Florida Hometown Democracy that sought to limit growth by requiring public votes on development decisions fell 60,000 signatures short by Friday's deadline.

The Florida4Marriage group backing the gay-marriage ban had announced in December that it had enough signatures to put it on next fall's ballot, only to discover weeks later it was more than 20,000 signatures short of the number needed.

The main reason: About 27,000 signatures from Miami-Dade County and some results from other counties had been electronically reported twice to the state.

The foul-up prompted the state to scrap its new electronic signature verification process and set off an eleventh-hour drive by Florida4Marriage and Hometown Democracy to try to make up the lost ground.

"In less than 2 weeks we were able to collect 92,000 signatures, which we thought was remarkable," said John Stemberger, an Orlando lawyer and Florida4Marriage chairman.

Florida4Marriage's amendment would define marriage as "the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife," and that "no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized."

It has drawn attacks from opponent who say the amendment could deny rights to unmarried heterosexual couples in addition to gays and lesbians.

Florida already has a law banning same-sex marriage.

But social conservative groups such as Focus on the Family, Florida Family Action and the Florida Baptist Convention launched the constitutional drive in 2005, arguing the state's law could be invalidated in courts much as it was in Massachusetts.

The state Republican Party helped finance the drive in 2006, although it failed to make the ballot that year.

Gov. Charlie Crist distanced himself from the issue when he took office, proclaiming himself a "live and let live" governor.

Now with voters being asked to decide on gay marriage when they head to the polls to pick the next president, the amendment could drive more voters on both sides of the issue to the polls.

"These kinds of moral issues usually do push people in one direction or another," said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political scientist.