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Tuesday, Jul 08, 2008
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UPDATE - Domestic Partnership bill thrives in changing political climate |
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| UPDATE - Domestic Partnership bill thrives in changing political climate | |
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by Nick Ardizzone -
SGN Staff Writer With the passage of the Domestic Partnership Expansion bill through the House last week, members of Washington's GLBT community came one step closer to civil rights equality - a step achieved with surprising ease as the bill faced almost no opposition during its ascent to the Senate. On Thursday, the Seattle Gay News interviewed Josh Friedes, Advocacy Director for Equal Rights Washington, about the bill's seemingly unstoppable progress through Olympia. "At this time in this session & we are extremely pleased," Friedes said. "It's looking like we are going to have a third very successful legislative session in a row." "The last two years have been just phenomenal. Now we come into this legislative session - which is a very short legislative session, only 60 days - and this bill has, frankly, just sailed through the legislature. & [The bill] has had three hearings to date, two in the House and one in the Senate. They have gone remarkably well." As well as garnering the support of increasingly large percentages of the population, Friedes noted that one legislator who voted against the bill last year, Tami Green, supported the bill this year - a strong indication of the growing acceptance the bill has gathered in Olympia's upper echelons. "We've seen a real sea change, both in the legislature and in the electorate, with respect to recognition of Gay and Lesbian families," Friedes said. "In most districts, legislators are getting support from their constituents and not getting hounded by opponents." "There is a strong majority in Washington for Gays and Lesbians to have all the rights and benefits of marriage," Friedes said, citing the most recent Washington Poll - a non-partisan, academic survey conducted at the end of 2007 by Pacific Market Research and funded by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality. It reports 59% of Washington residents support same-sex couples having all the rights of marriage, with an additional 14% supporting only partial rights. Friedes sees the Domestic Partnership Expansion bill as a valuable step toward marriage, but cautions that there is still a lot of ground to cover. "Essentially what we see is that [the bill] provides Gay and Lesbian families with a little under half of the legal protections of marriage under state law," he explained. "It's very important to remember that - as exciting as the Domestic Partnership bill is - it's still giving us only a fraction of the protection that legally married couples have." "What is, I think, extremely exciting about the way that bill has been moving through the legislature & is that I think we're doing a very, very good job at explaining why, ultimately, we need marriage equality." BILL DODGED CUTOFF DATE "On [February] 19th, we had the first cutoff date, which meant bills had to be passed out of their house of origin," Friedes explained. What happens to bills that don't make the cutoff? "They die." Although the Domestic Partnership Expansion bill came in under the wire, another important bill for GLBT civil rights was not so fortunate. A bill which would have added a gender identity section to the malicious harassment hate crime bill was unable to pass before the deadline. Although the gender identity bill was unable to meet the cutoff date, "we were just very pleased that the bill got out of committee" to begin with, Friedes said. Fortunately, "the existing law is fairly broad, and sadly, the type of harassment that people tend to face brings [Transgender harassment] under current laws. We have not actually had a significant problem" with hate crimes that were unable to be prosecuted. "As there has been an increase in the level of hate crimes - especially in the Capitol Hill area - recently, I don't want people to feel any sort of attack because this bill did not go forward," he said, adding that the bill would be resubmitted in next year's session. ACCEPTANCE A "DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD" Oddly enough, increased acceptance of the idea of same-sex marriage brings its own set of problems. "I spoke to some members of the mainstream press and asked if they would be covering the hearing, and they tended to say, 'No, because there's no longer a story here; this is no longer controversial,'" Friedes recounted. "It really is getting harder now to get coverage of Gay and Lesbian issues in Washington State because [the issue] is no longer full of drama and tension, as it was a few years ago." "Acceptance is a real double-edged sword, because if people aren't aware of the deprivations we suffer, they aren't likely to address them." Friedes stressed the importance of putting a human face on the issue so as not to let the community's suffering go unnoticed. "It's particularly important that older Gays and Lesbians do this. One of the things that we find is that legislators very often haven't thought through the implications for not having freedom to marry if you're an older couple, or a surviving partner. It's extremely important that our heterosexual allies, parents, friends and co-workers contact their legislators & because we can so easily debunk the arguments that are put forward by our opponents." The most effective moments of the hearings were when "we asked people to testify and tell their personal stories. They were very, very powerful, and very, very compelling. It was hard, in fact, not to tear up when you heard these wonderful people telling their stories," Friedes recalled. "By contrast, Republicans who opposed civil rights [made] mean-spirited and silly arguments," he laughed. "You could actually see legislators reacting in horror and the audience - most of whom were there to testify about other bills - were just shocked at what they were hearing. In the finance hearing, for example, the primary argument [the Republicans] put forth & was that [same-sex marriage] would lead to a lower birthrate, a depopulation of Washington State, and a smaller tax base." He paused. "That's pretty silly." "I think our opponents really were consistently hurting themselves," he said. "You heard so many Republicans apologizing for those types of statements. ... A change in the legislature is that public Gay-bashing is not acceptable in that building any longer. "It's a wonderful thing to walk into these hearings and for them to be, by and large, so incredibly civil." COMMUNITY SHOULD "DOUBLE THEIR EFFORTS" Though encouraged by the charmed life the bill has led so far, Friedes said there was still one major hurdle to overcome. "We got it through the House, now we have to get it through the Senate," he said. "There's one more big vote. The good news is we have a majority of senators as co-sponsors of the bill. & Again, what that really represents is the incredible change we're seeing in Washington State. A few years ago, obviously there was no way we could have passed this bill, and now the majority of senators are co-sponsors. That speaks volumes to the change that we're seeing. The current Senate session ends on March 19, and the final vote on the bill will take place before then. "Things happen very, very quickly, so people have to pay attention," Friedes said. To ensure the bill makes it through the Senate, he urged the community to "double their efforts" while commending them on their help in getting the bill this far. "The volume of e-mails and phone calls and letters people have been sending is phenomenal," he said. "The story of our success is really, I think, the power of having openly Gay legislators in the legislature. I don't think there is any way to overestimate the importance of having six openly Gay legislators. & People see Gays and Lesbians as their colleagues, as their friends, and they think of the issue very differently." "Thousands upon thousands of people are contacting the legislators and saying, 'This affects my life, this affects my neighbors, my brothers, my co-workers,' so there's a huge groundswell of support for legislators who now see that supporting Gay civil rights is politically smart & and it's the right thing to do." |
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