SAME-SEX MARRIAGE SUPPORTERS FILE INITIATIVE TO REPEAL PROP. 8

A coalition of groups supporting same-sex marriage submitted ballot measure language for a proposed initiative to repeal Proposition 8 to the Attorney General's office today.

The move marks the first official step toward asking California voters to repeal the law prohibiting same-sex marriage, which was approved with 52 percent of the vote during the 2008 election. If the proposed initiative is approved for circulation by the Secretary of State's office, proponents will have to collect nearly 700,000 valid signatures by April 2010 to qualify the measure for the ballot.

"We need to get our rights back. It's really just that simple," said John Henning, executive director of Love Honor Cherish, which is leading the effort. "People can't get married right now. Kids are growing up being told they cant get married. That's just wrong and we need to change that as soon as possible."

More than 40 groups, including the Los Angeles Chapter of Stonewall Democrats, the Latino Equality Alliance, the Mexican American Bar Association, and the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality have signed on to the campaign, according to a press release.

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Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ’Wait.’ But . . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; . . . when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963)