Over at DCist, Sommer Mathis gives us the latest from the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, which was asked to consider whether a referendum on gay marriage would violate D.C.'s human-rights law by putting the civil rights of the LGBT community up to a vote. Like the question of whether recognition of gay marriage from other states should be subject to a referendum that the Board considered earlier this year, the answer was a no-brainer:
In an opinion released today, the Board made much the same argument that it did in a previous decision that barred a ballot initiative on the matter of recognizing same-sex marriages that are performed legally in other jurisdictions. In both decisions, the Board held that such initiatives do 'not present a proper subject of initiative because it would authorize discrimination prohibited under the Human Rights Act (“HRA”).'
The HRA of course, is part of the long game that D.C. LGBT rights activists have been playing. The 1970s-era human-rights law contains a provision, inserted by marriage-equality opponent Marion Barry, that the referendum process could never be used to "interfere with basic human and civil rights." Marriage is obviously one of those. At the time, the GLAA, a local LGBT rights group, lobbied hard to ensure that LGBTs would be among the protected groups named in the law -- meaning that when the National Organization for Marriage came to town with Bishop Harry Jackson as their front man, the battle had already mostly been won. That old line about one side playing chess and the other playing checkers? That's what this looks like.
With no referendum, and with a mostly Democratic Congress unlikely to interfere, and the D.C. City Council set to vote on a marriage equality bill in early December, marriage equality in D.C. is looking like more of a sure thing than health-care reform. After all the criticism of the black community we've seen in the past year over marriage equality, a majority black city is about to become among the first to recognize unions between same-sex couples.
-- A. Serwer
