The battle over what marriage should look like in Colorado already has begun on front porches across the state.
In what amounts to a pre-emptive strike, opponents of a constitutional amendment that would recognize marriage as only between one man and one woman have hired 12 to 15 people to knock on doors and identify potential supporters of their side.
The amendment’s sponsors, meanwhile, expect to gain approval as early as today from the secretary of state’s office on the wording of their petitions.
Once that happens, Coloradans for Marriage executive director Jon Paul said, organizers still will be about two weeks away from having volunteers trained well enough to begin gathering signatures.
The marriage group is expected to have little trouble making an Aug. 7 deadline of getting the roughly 68,000 valid signatures from registered Colorado voters needed to make the November ballot.
Sean Duffy, spokesman for the anti- amendment group Coloradans for Fairness and Equality, said paid canvassers working for his group already have knocked on thousands of doors statewide. The goal is to educate and identify supporters for get- out-the vote drives this fall.
“We’ve got a challenge ahead of us because we need to be educating Colorado very aggressively,” said Duffy, a Republican political consultant. “The other team just has to sell one sentence. We’ve got to sell decades of real serious discrimination that really hasn’t hit the radar screens of most people.”
Duffy said canvassers also are recruiting support for a dueling initiative that would offer domestic partnership status to same- sex couples.
Coloradans for Marriage plans to use an all-volunteer force to gather signatures statewide, Paul said.
The group, led by a coalition of Christian and conservative leaders, has people on the district and county level ready to fan out.
“We have a strong group of people within the church that we think will be very amenable to signing our petitions,” Paul said. “But also, we don’t want to ignore places where there is major opportunity.”
Paul said possible locations are events and political party caucus meetings. He said the coalition has no target in mind for the number of signatures it’s seeking but will ensure that it will be well over the minimum, because some will invariably be thrown out.
Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-820-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.
