Maryland’s recently passed gay-rights law, the Antidiscrimination Act of 2001, probably will not go into effect Oct. 1. The antigay group TakeBackMaryland.org gathered a sufficient number of valid signatures to hold it in abeyance pending a referendum by the public in November 2002.
The state board of elections certified the petition July 19. However the margin of signatures was only 1,411 more than what state law requires.
Gay-rights advocates countered with their own legal action July 30, charging both misrepresentation of the petition on the part of some who circulated it, and improper certification of petitions by county elections officials. State officials relied upon county registrars to check petitions against the voter rolls.
“We found enough signatures that should not have been validated, almost 5,000, that we thought we should challenge the petition,” said Charles J. Butler, an attorney with the prestigious Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling. The firm is donating its services on a pro bono basis. Butler also represented the mother of Barry Winchell, the gay soldier who was murdered as he slept at Fort Campbell, Ky., in 1999.
“There are problems with the [petition] circulator, with the witness affidavit, so that every signature on that page [of up to ten signatures] should be knocked out.” Butler said. There also are problems with signatures.
“What they’ve done is corrupt the referendum process by lying,” added Della Post, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. She maintains that the TakeBack petition circulators often misrepresented what the gay-rights law entails. They frequently said it would lead to gay marriage and teaching gay sex in schools.
A Mason-Dixon Poll, released July 24, showed 50 percent of Marylanders claiming that they would vote to uphold the law, with 17 percent undecided and the remainder opposed. Shannon Avery, with the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Baltimore, said the poll confirms the basic fairness of people in her state.
The Baltimore City Council unanimously adopted a resolution supporting the Antidiscrimination Act. Similar protection has been on the books in that city since 1989. About half of the state’s population already is covered by similar local ordinances.
“If they’re filing this lawsuit, they obviously must be worried about this going to referendum,” said Tres Kerns, co-founder of TakeBackMaryland.org.
Kerns upped the ante by writing to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, leveling sensationalist charges that the Governor and other elected officials who support gay rights are enforcing the law “selectively and politically in violation of my civil rights.”
He sought Ashcroft’s “immediate intervention.”
The Department of Justice has not commented on the request from Kerns.