With ballots yet to be counted from some of Colorado’s most populous counties, voters leaned toward reinforcing traditional marriage Tuesday night while shying away from a measure that would extend many basic legal rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples.
By supporting Amendment 43 by a double-digit margin, voters headed toward chiseling the existing legal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman into the state constitution – effectively closing the door to gay marriage.
“If these numbers hold, we’re excited about the idea that marriage would be protected for future generations and cemented in the constitution, where it will be safe from activist judges and in the hands of the people of Colorado,” said Jon Paul, executive director of Coloradans for Marriage, which got the initiative on the ballot.
In a closer battle over Referendum I, returns from areas outside Denver were rejecting the measure to give committed same-sex couples a framework to gain legal benefits like inheritance and medical decision-making rights.
But with nearly all the Denver vote yet to be tallied, supporters still harbored hope.
“We have faith the people in Colorado are fair,” said Bobby Clark, who watched the returns trickle in with his partner, Shaun Cartwright, and other gay-rights advocates at the Hyatt Regency Denver. “We’re not asking for anything special.”
With a little more than half the votes counted statewide, Amendment 43 supporters held a 14-point lead, while Referendum I proponents trailed the “no” votes by 9 percentage points.
“We’ve got a long way to go, I’ll grant that,” said Sean Duffy, executive director of Coloradans for Fairness. “It’s going to come in close – we just don’t know in Denver. It could be a significant loss, or we could squeak it out.”
Although eight states voted Tuesday on measures to ban gay marriage, Coloradans stood alone in also deciding whether to separately allow domestic partnerships.
The marriage measure, Amendment 43, defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Similar measures in about 20 states previously passed.
By press time, three more states – South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin – had passed marriage amendments, while four others still counted votes along with Colorado.
Gay-rights advocates took a new tack in this election by pushing Referendum I onto the ballot through the last legislative session.
Instead of simply opposing Amendment 43, backers offered voters an alternative – recognition of domestic partnerships for same-sex couples that would grant them many of the rights and responsibilities of marriage.
Key among those were inheritance and medical decision-making rights, which would grant registered domestic partners spousal status in what some legal experts call the “default rules” of Colorado law.
Referendum I also created responsibilities as well, such as a framework for dissolution of same-sex relationships that includes provisions for child custody and child support.
The Referendum I campaign, funded largely by the Gill Action Fund of entrepreneur and gay- rights advocate Tim Gill, focused much of its message on the fact that the measure is not marriage. Its protections don’t extend to federal law, where tax issues would still be problematic for same-sex couples, and wouldn’t apply outside Colorado.
But the opposition to Referendum I, led by Colorado Family Action, a political arm of Focus on the Family, consistently cast the measure as marriage by another name.
Proponents of Amendment 43, which was drafted by a group of Christian organizations, maintained that they didn’t need to sell voters on the idea so much as simply get them to the polls.
In the campaign’s final days, conservative Christian forces took a jolt when pastor Ted Haggard, an architect of Amendment 43, was removed from his position at New Life Church in Colorado Springs and resigned his post with a national evangelical group after he was linked to a former gay male prostitute.
