The last time a statewide referendum went before the
Illinois electorate, 1978, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt had just been shot and
paralyzed, perennial Hall of Fame reject Pete Rose cracked his 3,000th hit,
and Ted Kaczynski sent his first bomb to Northwestern University. On May 8, volunteers from a conservative group called
Protect Marriage Illinois submitted more than 345,000 petition signatures
to the Illinois State Board of Elections. PMI wants to prevent same-sex
couples from trading vows by having it declared in the state Constitution
that “marriage between a man and a woman is the only legal union that
shall be valid or recognized.”
It’s only the second such advisory referendum
in 28 years. A similar federal measure was defeated last week in the U.S.
Senate. Granted, states are the laboratories for democracy, but what
remains unclear from the PMI effort is what, specifically, they want to
protect. According to provisional data for 2004 from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, divorce here is actually on the
decline. Besides that, Illinois’ Defense of Marriage Act already
precludes gay couples from tying the knot. Nor is it likely that the
let’s-not-rock-the-boat, albeit Democratic-tilted, Illinois Supreme
Court will interfere. “We want to prevent marriage from being
redefined by some rogue judge,” says Peter LaBarbera, executive
director of the Illinois Family Institute, which has taken the lead on the
PMI ballot initiative. In the meantime, Fair Illinois, a group led by
Equality Illinois, one of the state’s chief gay-rights-advocacy
organizations, has begun the exhaustive process of verifying the signatures
by cross-checking the names against voter lists, hoping to disqualify
enough of them — PMI needs 283,111 valid signatures — to keep
the measure from moving forward. “From people running for mayor, governor, or
water commissioner, this is just how the process works,” says Matt
Kuzma, who coordinates volunteers for Fair Illinois. Disqualifying enough signatures may be difficult,
given the state has a large, solid block of conservative voters, as
evidenced by the March Republican primary, in which gubernatorial
candidates Bill Brady and Jim Oberweis together scooped up 368,946 votes in
their losing efforts.
Kuzma, who’s married, says he doesn’t
need PMI protecting his marriage. “The left’s favorite line is
‘Because you’re fighting against gay marriage, you’re not
concerned about divorce,’ ” LaBarbera says. “It just so
happens that this is the current threat. We’re trying to prevent a Roe v. Wade on the
marriage issue.”
Indeed, if it appears on the ballot, the PMI
amendment is sure to turn out the conservative vote — for whom,
though, is anybody’s guess. Gubernatorial candidates Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka,
the state’s sole Republican constitutional officeholder, and
incumbent Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, both oppose gay marriage, though
neither likes the idea of tinkering with the Constitution to outlaw the
practice. “We’re getting shut out here,”
LaBarbera says. “This is not Massachusetts — this is the
Midwest, Middle America — and to have two pro-homosexual candidates
is amazing.”
Topinka, he admits, will likely benefit more from a
deluge of conservatives at the polls, though he thinks right-wing voters
would be more enthusiastic if Topinka “threw a few bones to the
pro-marriage folks, maybe if she went to visit her sick aunt instead of
marching in gay-pride parades.”
It would be less work — and cheaper, for
sure — for Fair Illinois to let democracy do its thing and watch PMI
implode under the weight of its extremism. Still, Fair Illinois isn’t leaving anything to
chance. “It’s a great coffeehouse question: How
would you ideally like government to work? But when it comes down to
politics in Illinois, it comes to putting in the work,” Kuzma says. “[Illinois Family Institute] has called being
gay an infection. It’s pretty easy to take that as a slap in the
face. I’d rather do something constructive now.”
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2006.
