McHenry County Blog

Early on in the Protect Marriage Illinois advisory petition campaign the Illinois Republican Party was making supportive noises.

There was even a link on the main page of the state GOP web site.

But, as far as I know, no Republican organization helped gather signatures.

And the petition effort fell short.

Not a lot short, but not enough signatures were gathered where it was thought the petition could withstand a vigorous attack from well-financed organized homosexuals.

Now, it turns out that about the only bright spot on the conservative election horizon is the constitutional amendment banning of same sex marriage in California.

The ballot measure, labeled Proposition 8, is passing 52.3% to 47.7%. There’s over a half million vote spread.

Ironically, many of the same voters who pushed Barack Obama to victory voted to ban same sex marriage.

Exit polls taken of 1,200 voters in 50 Los Angeles precincts by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University found that “50 percent of Latinos voted for Proposition 8 and 39 opposed it, while 47 percent of African-Americans voted for it and 40 percent against it,” according to the LA Times

So, here’s my question?

Had the state GOP gotten the Protect Marriage advisory referendum on the ballot in Illinois, might someone like Elgin’s State Rep. Ruth Munson have eeked out a victory, instead of losing by an unofficial 322 votes?

Understand that I don’t know how Munson stands on the issue and she would obviously have to been against gay marriage and her opponent Keith Farnham would have had to have been in favor of it for my suggested strategy to have had a chance of working.

However, if they had been on opposite sides of the issue, Elgin could have been ready-made to have replicated how California voters behaved.

In 2000, Elgin had 34% Latinos and almost 7% African Americans. These Elgin minorities are concentrated in Munson’s district. The district also dips into Carpentersville, which has 41% Hispanics, most of whom live on the East side in the Munson district.

“Blacks voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8, and slightly more than half the Hispanic voters backed the measure, according to exit polls released by the National Election Pool,” the Washington Times reported.

And, Andrew Pugno of ProtectMarriage.com said, “Inner-city black neighborhoods voted stronger for Prop. 8 than the Republican suburbs. An amazing analysis.”

According to Mark DiCamillo, director of The Field Poll in California,

“The Field Poll, completed one week before the election, had Catholics voting at about their registered voter population size (24% of the electorate) with voting preferences similar to those of the overall electorate, with 44% on the Yes side.

“However the network exit poll shows that they accounted for 30% of the CA electorate and had 64% of them voting Yes. Regular churchgoers showed a similar movement toward the Yes side. The pre-election Field Poll showed 72% of these voters voting Yes, while the exit poll showed that 84% of them voted Yes…

“My take is that polling on issues like same-sex marriage that have a direct bearing on religious doctrine can be affected in a big way in the final weekend by last minute appeals by the clergy and religious organizations.”

Whether Catholic Church priests and black ministers in Munson’s district would have done what their counterparts are said to have done in California is unknowable.

But, if they had, and if Munson had a campaign staff astute enough to capitalize on the issue, maybe she would have been re-elected.

Since neither the State GOP nor House Republicans nor Senate Republicans showed any inclination to help get the signatures to put the referendum on the ballot this year, I somehow doubt Munson would have been able to grab the opportunity.

If Tom Cross or Frank Watson’s successor or Andy McKenna figure out this could issue could help some legislators or even the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2010, the time to be starting a petition campaign is now.

Early on in the Protect Marriage Illinois advisory petition campaign the Illinois Republican Party was making supportive noises.

There was even a link on the main page of the state GOP web site.

But, as far as I know, no Republican organization helped gather signatures.

And the petition effort fell short.

Not a lot short, but not enough signatures were gathered where it was thought the petition could withstand a vigorous attack from well-financed organized homosexuals.

Now, it turns out that about the only bright spot on the conservative election horizon is the constitutional amendment banning of same sex marriage in California.

The ballot measure, labeled Proposition 8, is passing 52.3% to 47.7%. There’s over a half million vote spread.

Ironically, many of the same voters who pushed Barack Obama to victory voted to ban same sex marriage.

Exit polls taken of 1,200 voters in 50 Los Angeles precincts by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University found that “50 percent of Latinos voted for Proposition 8 and 39 opposed it, while 47 percent of African-Americans voted for it and 40 percent against it,” according to the LA Times

So, here’s my question?

Had the state GOP gotten the Protect Marriage advisory referendum on the ballot in Illinois, might someone like Elgin’s State Rep. Ruth Munson have eeked out a victory, instead of losing by an unofficial 322 votes?

Understand that I don’t know how Munson stands on the issue and she would obviously have to been against gay marriage and her opponent Keith Farnham would have had to have been in favor of it for my suggested strategy to have had a chance of working.

However, if they had been on opposite sides of the issue, Elgin could have been ready-made to have replicated how California voters behaved.

In 2000, Elgin had 34% Latinos and almost 7% African Americans. These Elgin minorities are concentrated in Munson’s district. The district also dips into Carpentersville, which has 41% Hispanics, most of whom live on the East side in the Munson district.

“Blacks voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8, and slightly more than half the Hispanic voters backed the measure, according to exit polls released by the National Election Pool,” the Washington Times reported.

And, Andrew Pugno of ProtectMarriage.com said, “Inner-city black neighborhoods voted stronger for Prop. 8 than the Republican suburbs. An amazing analysis.”

According to Mark DiCamillo, director of The Field Poll in California,

“The Field Poll, completed one week before the election, had Catholics voting at about their registered voter population size (24% of the electorate) with voting preferences similar to those of the overall electorate, with 44% on the Yes side.

“However the network exit poll shows that they accounted for 30% of the CA electorate and had 64% of them voting Yes. Regular churchgoers showed a similar movement toward the Yes side. The pre-election Field Poll showed 72% of these voters voting Yes, while the exit poll showed that 84% of them voted Yes…

“My take is that polling on issues like same-sex marriage that have a direct bearing on religious doctrine can be affected in a big way in the final weekend by last minute appeals by the clergy and religious organizations.”

Whether Catholic Church priests and black ministers in Munson’s district would have done what their counterparts are said to have done in California is unknowable.

But, if they had, and if Munson had a campaign staff astute enough to capitalize on the issue, maybe she would have been re-elected.

Since neither the State GOP nor House Republicans nor Senate Republicans showed any inclination to help get the signatures to put the referendum on the ballot this year, I somehow doubt Munson would have been able to grab the opportunity.

If Tom Cross or Frank Watson’s successor or Andy McKenna figure out this could issue could help some legislators or even the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2010, the time to be starting a petition campaign is now.

Petitions to put the Protect Marriage Illinois advisory referendum question on the fall ballot should be filled out, notarized and mailed to

P.O. Box 6017
Taylorville, IL 62568.

At the upper right of the web site is a place you can click to find petitions for every election jurisdiction in Illinois. Usually that means people living in separate counties have to sign different petitions—one with the name of their county on it.

In places like Rockford and Aurora, for instance, where there are separate county and city election election jurisdictions, care must be taken to get people to sign the right petition.

I found this on the web site:

Deadline has been extended to April 30 for turning in your petitions! If you want to collect until next weekend (work and church), I recently learned that UPS delivers Next Day to everywhere within Illinois but not to a P.O. Box – please call me if you have to send it UPS at 217-377-6017. Please pass petitions out to your like-minded friends to collect also — or refer them to our site, of course.

Two years ago, the campaign came up one petition signature per petition passer short.

Petitions to put the Protect Marriage Illinois advisory referendum question on the fall ballot should be filled out, notarized and mailed to

P.O. Box 6017
Taylorville, IL 62568.

At the upper right of the web site is a place you can click to find petitions for every election jurisdiction in Illinois. Usually that means people living in separate counties have to sign different petitions—one with the name of their county on it.

In places like Rockford and Aurora, for instance, where there are separate county and city election election jurisdictions, care must be taken to get people to sign the right petition.

I found this on the web site:

Deadline has been extended to April 30 for turning in your petitions! If you want to collect until next weekend (work and church), I recently learned that UPS delivers Next Day to everywhere within Illinois but not to a P.O. Box – please call me if you have to send it UPS at 217-377-6017. Please pass petitions out to your like-minded friends to collect also — or refer them to our site, of course.

Two years ago, the campaign came up one petition signature per petition passer short.

From almost daybreak until well after dark is how long a trip to Bloomington for a board meeting of Protect Marriage Illinois took yesterday.

I didn’t even get to read the newspapers because I drove.

With having just missed getting enough petitions signatures to trigger an advisory referendum last year, the effort to allow voters to give an indication of whether they think legislators should allow a referendum on a constitutional amendment reserving marriage for men and women is off again.

You can get information and download a petition for your county on the Protect Marriage Illinois web site. We’ve made it easy to print out one for your county. Or, if you live in a city with a separate election commission, we have a petition for you there, too.

It is very important that signatures from different jurisdictions not be allowed on the same petition.

State law has made it more difficult to collect petition signatures for statewide advisory referendums than for local advisory referendums or statewide candidates. (My hypothesis is that this was done in order to keep Pat Quinn from getting enough signatures on an advisory petition to get on the ballot.)

In any event, if you want to help at your local county fair, the odds are good that the Republican Party would allow you to collect signatures at their booths or tents, based on the cooperation that the State GOP Chairman Andy McKenna has provided. (There’s even a link on the Illinois Republican Party web site.)

It seems that leading Republicans like McKenna and Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson have figured out that having the Protect Marriage question on the ballot next fall will encourage conservatives to go the polls. That was not the case last year, except in Cartwight Township.

As Senator Watson said recently after Joetta Deutsch spoke at a state GOP listening session in his home area,

“You won’t find these petitions at any Democratic Party function.”

(If that is not the exact quote, it is really close.)

In any event, this is a long way of explaining why blogging is light today.

From almost daybreak until well after dark is how long a trip to Bloomington for a board meeting of Protect Marriage Illinois took yesterday.

I didn’t even get to read the newspapers because I drove.

With having just missed getting enough petitions signatures to trigger an advisory referendum last year, the effort to allow voters to give an indication of whether they think legislators should allow a referendum on a constitutional amendment reserving marriage for men and women is off again.

You can get information and download a petition for your county on the Protect Marriage Illinois web site. We’ve made it easy to print out one for your county. Or, if you live in a city with a separate election commission, we have a petition for you there, too.

It is very important that signatures from different jurisdictions not be allowed on the same petition.

State law has made it more difficult to collect petition signatures for statewide advisory referendums than for local advisory referendums or statewide candidates. (My hypothesis is that this was done in order to keep Pat Quinn from getting enough signatures on an advisory petition to get on the ballot.)

In any event, if you want to help at your local county fair, the odds are good that the Republican Party would allow you to collect signatures at their booths or tents, based on the cooperation that the State GOP Chairman Andy McKenna has provided. (There’s even a link on the Illinois Republican Party web site.)

It seems that leading Republicans like McKenna and Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson have figured out that having the Protect Marriage question on the ballot next fall will encourage conservatives to go the polls. That was not the case last year, except in Cartwight Township.

As Senator Watson said recently after Joetta Deutsch spoke at a state GOP listening session in his home area,

“You won’t find these petitions at any Democratic Party function.”

(If that is not the exact quote, it is really close.)

In any event, this is a long way of explaining why blogging is light today.

I know editorial are opinion and the Northwest Herald’s endorsing of “gay civil unions in Illinois” is certainly in keeping with its promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality in McHenry County.

Just think of its outright promotion of the Gay Games, while ignoring the latest rowing regatta on Crystal Lake last weekend, if you think rowing had anything to do with the Herald’s support of the Gay Games regatta.

But, accuracy counts, even in editorials.

And, the first sentence of the editorial is, at best, incomplete.

The bill authorizes civil unions for heterosexuals, too.

The bill really guts the concept of marriage as the preferred relationship in society.

The best title of a book by a legislator was one written by now retired California State Senator Bill Richardson. Richardson founded Gunowners of America.

It’s title?

What Makes You Think We Read the Bills?

Where are those Protect Marriage petitions for an advisory referendum on gay marriage/civil unions?

I know editorial are opinion and the Northwest Herald’s endorsing of “gay civil unions in Illinois” is certainly in keeping with its promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality in McHenry County.

Just think of its outright promotion of the Gay Games, while ignoring the latest rowing regatta on Crystal Lake last weekend, if you think rowing had anything to do with the Herald’s support of the Gay Games regatta.

But, accuracy counts, even in editorials.

And, the first sentence of the editorial is, at best, incomplete.

The bill authorizes civil unions for heterosexuals, too.

The bill really guts the concept of marriage as the preferred relationship in society.

The best title of a book by a legislator was one written by now retired California State Senator Bill Richardson. Richardson founded Gunowners of America.

It’s title?

What Makes You Think We Read the Bills?

Where are those Protect Marriage petitions for an advisory referendum on gay marriage/civil unions?