Missouri to vote on gay marriage ban

ST. LOUIS -- Voters in Missouri will become the first in the nation tomorrow to decide on a gay marriage ban since the Supreme Judicial Court ruling in Massachusetts, and polls indicated the amendment to the state's constitution is expected to pass even though opponents have raised more campaign money.

After the SJC decision last fall, Missouri legislators concluded that the state's Defense of Marriage law was vulnerable to court challenges and that only a constitutional amendment could preserve the traditional definition of marriage. They approved a referendum on adding 20 words to the constitution: ''That to be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman."

Louisiana votes on a similar amendment Sept. 18, as will at least eight other states on Election Day, Nov. 2.

Recent polls on the Missouri amendment indicated it would receive the simple majority it needed to pass. The Kansas City Star's survey in late July indicated 62 percent favored banning same-sex marriage, and 29 percent opposed. Another done for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last month indicated 56 percent in favor, 38 percent opposed.

Four states -- Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska, and Nevada -- had amended their constitutions to ban gay marriage before the SJC ruling.

In Missouri, the public debate on the proposed amendment has resembled some marriages: bursts of passion and large pools of complacency or indifference. For weeks, both sides focused on quiet door-to-door campaigns, which went largely unnoticed. Then, in late July, they cut loose.

The Coalition for the Protection of Marriage in Missouri, the main group pushing the amendment, planted thousands of yard signs, distributed inserts for church bulletins, and planned a ''protect marriage chain" spanning the state. On the eastern side of the state, Missourians for Marriage, a parallel group, was printing and mailing with energy.

The alliance of advocacy groups opposing the amendment, the Constitution Defense League, released its first television advertisement last week in the state's four major markets. An earnest, bespectacled Navy veteran appears in the ad and calls the amendment discriminatory and unnecessary, given that a Missouri statute already bans gay marriages.

Eight days before the referendum, the alliance opposing the amendment had raised more than $300,000 from individuals and national gay rights groups; the other side had brought in less than $10,000.

''For the first time ever, we've been going up to total strangers, knocking on their door, and saying, 'I'm here to talk to you about gay marriage,' " said Jeff Wunrow, deputy manager of the campaign against the ban. ''It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. But this is an issue on which people can change their minds. The best indicator of whether someone is going to support marriage rights for gay and lesbian people is whether they know a gay or lesbian couple."

To overcome their financial disadvantage, amendment backers said they are counting on bedrock religious and social values to prevent change in a state whose voting population mirrors the nation's -- a mix of conservative Christian rural areas and immigrant-settled cities, liberal Democrats in St. Louis and Kansas City, and increasingly, Republicans in the suburbs and beyond.

Supporters of what is known as Amendment 2 said their campaign is based in part on a deep distrust of a judicial system that does not represent the will of the people, a reference to the SJC decision.

But Matt LeMieux, executive director of the ACLU-Eastern Missouri, which opposes the amendment, said, ''The will of the people should be expressed in legislation. The purpose of the constitutional Bill of Rights is to protect people, especially minorities, from the will of the majority. This turns it on its head."

Missouri's four largest newspapers -- the Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Columbia Daily Tribune, and Springfield News-Leader -- oppose the ban. ''We denizens of the Show Me State are in no danger of suffering perdition if we leave our blessed constitution alone," wrote Henry J. Waters III, publisher of the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Leading backers of the ban said they regard homosexuality, expressed in a relationship, as a lifestyle choice that need not be protected against discrimination. They fear that any loosening of the traditional definition of marriage will damage the institution.

''What's at stake is the stability and the future success of our whole society," said Vicki Hertzler, a spokeswoman for the proamendment coalition and a former Republican legislator. ''This is an untested social experiment. In other countries, it has damaged the meaning of marriage. . . . If anybody can just marry anybody, it's destabilizing."

Wunrow said he agrees marriage ''does stabilize society," so his alliance does not want gays and lesbians in the state permanently excluded from more than 1,000 rights, responsibilities, and benefits of marriage. Supporters of gay marriage may run out of time to change enough minds to defeat Amendment 2. ''I think passage is a certainty, and I think the legal consequences are minimal," said Ken Jacob, leader of the minority Democrats in the state Senate, who successfully filibustered a version of the amendment that would have also banned civil unions.