Dec 12, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR  | COMMENTS     

Organizers of a community forum on same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia, which was scheduled to take place Thursday night, said their goal was to build a consensus within the gay community on the best strategy for helping gays win the right to marry in the nation’s capital.

“It’s not a question of whether we should move forward on marriage,” said Michael Crawford, chair of the local group D.C. for Marriage, which organized the forum. “We’re in agreement that we should go forward.”

“The No. 1 goal is to bring the community together to figure out how to move forward in terms of strategy and timing,” Crawford said.

The marriage forum was to take place less than two months after gay D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At-Large) said he was strongly considering introducing a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington in January, during the Council’s first legislative session in 2009.

Ben Young, Catania’s chief of staff, said Wednesday that Catania had no further comment on the marriage issue and whether or not he plans to introduce a gay marriage bill in January.

Thursday’s forum was also set to take place one week after veteran D.C. gay rights leader Frank Kameny offered his own strategy for the City Council to enact a same-sex marriage bill if the Council decides to move ahead with such a bill early next year.

Kameny has said he, too, was uncertain whether January would be the best time to introduce such a bill in the Council.

But he said that if the decision is made to go forward with the bill, it should be drafted as an amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act and should be introduced as an emergency bill.

Kameny noted that linking the bill to the Human Rights Act and moving it as an emergency measure would be the best possible means of preventing it from being blocked or killed by a voter referendum organized by same-sex marriage opponents.

The city’s election law, as amended in the D.C. Home Rule Act in the late 1970s, prohibits the Board of Elections & Ethics from placing a voter referendum or initiative on the ballot if it changes the Human Rights Act in a way that would lead to discrimination.

Kameny, a former member of the D.C. Commission on Human Rights, played a lead role in persuading the Council to adopt the initiative and referendum restriction on the Human Rights Act.

At that time, Kameny and other local gay leaders said the change was needed to prevent gay rights opponents from attempting to repeal the Human Rights Act’s provision banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gay rights opponents had killed gay rights laws in a number of U.S. cities, including Miami, through ballot measures in the 1970s.

Kameny said that approving the bill as an emergency measure would mean it would take effect immediately after the Council passes it and Mayor Adrian Fenty signs it. He noted that following this path would eliminate the period in which opponents are required under the city’s election law to gather signatures and clear other technical requirements needed to place a referendum on the ballot.

Other people familiar with the Council’s legislative procedures, including Ronald Collins, an attorney and assistant secretary to the Council, noted that all bills passed as emergency measures have a lifetime of only 90 days. Collins said emergency bills must also simultaneously be approved as a permanent bill, which, in turn, must go through the regular legislative process.

That process includes a 30 legislative day review by Congress for bills pertaining to civil law like a marriage bill, Collins said.

D.C. elections board attorney Terri Stroud said she could not comment on whether introducing a same-sex marriage bill in the form of an emergency measure would block it from being subjected to a referendum. She noted that she and other election board attorneys would have to make a determination on such a question at the time it comes before the elections board.

Many local observers believe well-funded anti-gay organizations from outside the city would likely become involved in backing an anti-gay marriage referendum campaign in the District. Such groups would also likely bankroll a court challenge to an attempt to block a referendum similar to the strategy proposed by Kameny.

Some gay activists, including Crawford, have said the local community may not be able to obtain the organizational and financial resources needed to defeat a controversial ballot measure on gay marriage. Such a ballot referendum could surface as early as the spring of 2009 if Catania and other Council members ...