In Washington State, Referendum 71 Supporters Start Collecting Signatures to Overturn Domestic Partner Bill

As many as three referendum proposals also are in the works, topped by an anti-gay rights effort pushed by Protect Marriage Washington, which is made up of evangelical Christian groups. Its Referendum 71 campaign was hampered early on by a lack of organization and later by requirements that it print all 114 pages of the domestic-partnership law that passed the Legislature this year. The group surmounted those problems a little more than a week ago, printing the ballot measure’s contents on a large sheet of paper, the size of a 2-by-3-foot bath towel. An intern at the Secretary of State’s Office was given the task to read the text, which took him nearly two hours and 25 minutes, Ammons said. Larry Stickney, the leader of the Washington Values Alliance and the Protect Marriage Washington political committee, said he printed 60,000 of the R-71 jumbo petitions June 5 and circulated all but 2,000 by Friday. “We don’t deny that we see it as a daunting task. But we are gaining confidence in this effort daily by the way we are seeing these going out by the tens of thousands. I’m going to have to print more,” he said. “We’ve been in the neighborhood of 200 e-mails a day requiring them. We can’t keep up with the demand for them.” Full Story from The Olympian

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