Off to Bloomington for the Day

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.


Comments

Off to Bloomington for the Day — 3 Comments

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

    Nope. You’ll only find these petitions with groups interested in fighting losing turf battles – attempting to keep society at a comfortable level.

    Cal, you have some classy friends!

  2. Isn’t the most important thing about a union of souls or a family the love and support they give each other, rather than their genders?
    “Minds are like parachutes, they only function when open.”

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