Oregon Heterosexual Supremacists Fail To Gather Signatures To Repeal Domestic partnerships

There is some good news today out of Oregon. As Mad Professah reported earlier this year, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed both a non-discrimination bill called the Oregon Equality Act (inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity and covering employment, public accomodations, housing and other areas) as well as a domestic partnership bill (the Oregon Family Fairness Act) and both bills were signed into law on May 9, 2007 by Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski.

However, soon afterwards heterosexual supremacists announced they would start collecting signatures to put the civil rights of the minority up to a majority vote, in the hopes that the majority would repeal both LGBT rights laws and prevent them from going into effect on January 1, 2008.

Yesterday came word that the evil doers collected 55,063 signatures to put a measure on the November 2008 ballot to place the Oregon Family Fairness Act on hold until then. Happily, they needed 55, 179 signatures so Oregon will join California and Washington with comprehensive domestic partnership laws in effect at the beginning of the year. However, they clearly came very very close (just 116 signatures) and are apparently not discouraged:

Sponsors of the referral effort had conceded in recent days that they probably hadn't gotten enough signatures. But they vowed to take another avenue to try to derail the laws — an initiative effort to repeal the laws outright. They would have until next July to collect 82,000 valid signatures to repeal each of the two laws.

"We're not discouraged," said former state Sen. Marylin Shannon, spokeswoman for the referral effort. "We definitely will file initiatives to repeal both of these laws. We are very optimistic about it."

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Gay rights activists say that many of those couples plan to file for domestic partnership status as soon as the new law takes effect Jan. 1.

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Oregon's domestic partnerships measure covers benefits relating to inheritance rights, child-rearing and custody, joint state tax filings, joint health, auto and homeowners insurance policies, visitation rights at hospitals and others. It does not affect federal benefits for married couples including Social Security and joint filing of federal tax returns.

Later this week, the Secretary of State will announce whether the heterosexual supremacists also failed to reach their signature goal to refer the Oregon Equality Act to the voters but most political observers expect that they will fail in this effort, since the domestic partnership act was the measure that provoked more voter opposition.

Congratulations to Basic Rights Oregon and fellow LGBT activists in our neighboring state!