History worth watching. Happy Valentines Day!

The challenge to Washington State's five-hour-old marriage equality law will be called Referendum 73, filed this afternoon in Olympia by a phalanx of Christians. "The referendum simply takes the exact language of the bill that the Legislature passed and Gregoire signed, and places it on the ballot," says the Washington Secretary of State's Office. At the side of Evangelical pastors and activists was National Organization for Marriage's Christopher Plante, who had just flown in from Rhode Island, with a vow that marriage opponents would spend a combined $2 million to $6 million.

The referendum was officially filed by Joseph Backholm, director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington (the state affiliate of Focus on the Family). The Secretary of State's office says the new campaign is called Preserve Marriage Washington, which sounds like jam you'd get at a wedding reception.

It will take about three weeks for Referendum 73 to get its ballot title and hit the streets with petitions. Same-sex marriage opponents have until June 6 to gather 120,577 signatures.

Assuming the measure qualifies for the fall ballot, which it almost certainly will, supporters of marriage equality want to APPROVE Referendum 73, thereby upholding Washington's same-sex marriage law.

Donate now to Washington United for Marriage.

The other side has the Knights of Columbus, the National Organization for Marriage, Opus Dei, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. All of them will be opening their wallets—wicking millions of dollars in member dues and collection plate revenue from across America—and siphoning that cash into Washington State to repeal same-sex marriage. Just as in Maine, New York, and California, they're preparing right now to unleash a Biblical flood of television advertisements, radio ads, and glossy mailers to scare the shit out of moderate voters with hateful anti-gay propaganda.

They don't want Washington to be the first state to uphold marriage equality at the ballot. Every time marriage has been passed, it's been by a legislature or a court. But every it's been repealed—until now, hopefully—it's been by voters listening to their well-heeled campaigns.

Don't let them win.

Our side—the marriage equality side—doesn't have a centuries-in-the making hierarchical Catholic church, or Mormon Church, or unscrupulous front organizations brimming with cash. Marriage equality just has us. With polls showing that 55 percent of voters would uphold marriage in a referendum, this election is ours to lose if we don't play ball. That means our own expensive flood of commercials and glossy mailers that tell our stories of loving relationships.

Give $50, $100, $1,000, $10,000.

DONATE HERE.

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Time to make some history, Slog: Which of these two anti-gay-marriage state representatives will win a flower from a gay florist, a bacon cheeseburger from Jack in the Box, their official state portrait on this week's cover of The Stranger, and the hard-to-earn title of Tournament of Dunces Champion, 2012? (Polls close at 7 p.m.!)

Mark "A Jack in the Box Commercial Told Me How to Vote Today" Hargrove...

...versus Matt "My Business Will Not Participate In Gay Marriages Because Florists Are Oppressed and Man I Hate Tulips" Shea

There's an obvious question for Pastor Joe Fuiten, Pastor Ken Hutcherson, Captain Twink Joseph Backholm, Archbishop Peter J. Sartain and others campaigning to overturn the marriage equality law:

Why are you trying to change the definition of marriage?!?!!

• E.S.
• Doreen Higgins, 54, of Vashon Island.

Continue reading »

Pastor Joe Fuiten walked into the Washington Secretary of State's office this morning to file a referendum attempting to overturn the same sex-marriage law that lawmakers passed last week. One problem: Governor Chris Gregoire hadn't signed the bill yet. So election workers turned him away with a 3:30 p.m. appointment to return (after the bill was signed), says Secretary of State's office spokesman David Ammons. Also this morning: Family Policy Institute of Washington director Joseph Backholm waltzed in with his own, separate plans to file a marriage referendum. Same problem, of course.

"I'd heard for a few days that they are not in sync on this," Ammons says.

"It will be interesting to see if they can come to an agreement on running the referendum, otherwise they are dividing their energy and resources," Ammons continues. He points out that, while advocates can file multiple challenges to the same bill, "You cannot combine the signatures form 1, 2, 3, 4 petitions" to qualify for the ballot.

The divisions between anti-gay activists run deep. The somewhat more measured Fuiten, for example, has long feuded with incendiary Pastor Ken Hutcherson. Whereas both men run hardline mega churches on the Eastside, Fuiten spurned the 2009 campaign to overturn a domestic partnership law that Hutcherson and Backholm supported. Fuiten may have ties to the money, though. He announced earlier this month that he'd secured $1 million from an out-of-state donor, who, by all likely calculations, is the Catholic-church-linked National Organization for Marriage.

All that said, divisions in 2009 didn't stop their referendum from making the ballot (ultimately their campaign failed, though). If they make it to the ballot again with this bill—as seems certain with all that Catholic cash—marriage will remain in limbo until the fall election.

• E.S.

As governor for more than seven years, this is one of my proudest moments. And most surely today is a proud day in the history of the Legislature and the state of Washington. It is a day historians will mark as a milestone for equal rights. A day when we did what was right, we did what was just, and we did what was fair. We stood up for equality and we did it together – Republicans and Democrats, gay and straight, young and old, and a variety of religious faiths. I’m proud of who and what we are in this state.

I’m proud that our same-sex couples will no longer be treated as separate but equal. They will be equal. I’m proud that children in our schools and neighborhoods will not have to wonder why their loving parents are considered different than other loving parents. I’m proud of parents who have fought so fiercely for the rights of their much-loved gay and lesbian children. And I’m proud that children who discover they are gay and lesbian can feel good about themselves.

• E.S.
• The desk, the bill, and the governor's chair, waiting.

In about ten minutes, here in the state capitol building in Olympia, Governor Chris Gregoire will sign a bill granting gay and lesbian couples the right to marry in Washington State. With all the focus on the house and senate votes over the last two weeks, and with all the talk about the repeal referendum that's set to be filed as soon as the governor signs the bill into law, it's easy to lose sight of the historical weight of this moment.

So, a pause to consider just how long people in Washington State have been pushing to make this law a reality. It starts, at least in the courts, on Sept. 20, 1971:

On September 20, 1971, Paul Barwick, a Vietnam veteran and former state patrol dispatcher, showed up at the King County auditor's office requesting a marriage license. With him was the man he wanted to wed, John Singer, a staffer at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who favored dresses rather than pants at work, and who was soon to change his name to Faygele benMiriam.

The two lived together in a gay-activist commune on Capitol Hill, and had recently heard that their state's marriage law had become gender-neutral in language. Their request for a marriage license, quite unusual at the time, landed on the desk of then-auditor Lloyd Hara (now a Port Commissioner) who promptly refused to grant the license. The couple sued, and their case, known as Singer v. Hara, became, at least until [recently], the best-known gay marriage case in this state.

Singer v. Hara was tossed out by two courts (many gay activists now ruefully describe it as having been "laughed out" of two courts), and it ended, in 1974, at the state court of appeals level, with the couple broke and wary of filing yet another appeal, lest they further cement the dispiriting precedent.

I wrote that in August of 2006, just after another big Washington State court decision on gay marriage: The State Supreme Court's ruling that the Washington State Defense of Marriage Act—passed in 1998—was constitutional.

The majority in that case, Andersen v. King County, went out of its way to note that nothing in the 2006 ruling prohibited a future legislature from overturning our Defense of Marriage Act. As it turned out, it was this legislature that did so—after legislatures in 2007 and 2009 created, and then expanded to "everything but marriage," our state's domestic partnership rights. (And after voters upheld those rights at the polls in 2009.)

There are certainly other mileposts that could be marked here—including Cal Anderson, in 1987, becoming our state's first openly gay legislator, with Ed Murray and Jamie Pedersen following in his footsteps—but for the moment just consider how long it took to make the law Governor Gregoire is about to sign, in front of me, in a few minutes: 40 years.