I’ve received many requests to add my name to an online petition to Gov Schwarzenegger in the past few hours to redress Prop 8s injustice. Accompanying the petition is a nice list of corrections of popular arguments for Prop 8. You may have seen it too. I don’t believe Schwarzenegger will change his past 2 vetoes of gay marriage (which passed the CA Legislature) and I don’t think that a law like that could even happen now that Prop 8 has passed and the Constitutional has been Amended (by popular intent if not under the correct legal method which is being litigated)

I checked in with a legal/political pal who knows what’s up and here’s what she says if we want a genuine petition to put gay marriage back on the ballot:

To qualify an initiative for the CA ballot, you need to get a certain # of physical signatures by registered CA voters within a certain timeframe set by the second of state. the # you need is a percentage of the # of people who voted in the last election in CA. don’t remember what that percentage is, but it’s easily findable on second of state’s website.
A petition drive has to register with the sec of state and have the specific legal language in place before gathering a single signature. 

As for starting a petition drive, I recommend following EQCA‘s lead (Equality California, the gay lobby).  They will have the resources to put it together, to hire lawyers, figure out the statewide political strategy, etc.  For example, picking the time period to collect sigs is very important, which will depend on which upcoming election you want to qualify for.  some off-year elections will have low turnout, which is bad for us, and a lot will depend on whatever else is on the ballot at the time.

Also, the rules for a statewaide petition drive, including what the petition looks like, and who is qualified to gather signatures, are highly technical, and require advice of counsel to make sure you get it right.

If you want to sign up something to Overturn Prop 8 join this facebook groupso that you can be part of whatever drive occurs. This way you can be contacted by EQCA or whomever does the drive and we won’t lose al the momentum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.