Thursday Q&A: Larry Stickney on why you should vote against Referendum 71

This week, I interviewed Larry Stickney, campaign manager of Protect Marriage Washington, which opposes Referendum 71. Below, you’ll find the complete text of our interview. When you’re done reading, check out Anne Levinson, on why she thinks voters should approve Referendum 71.

Q. Why should voters reject Referendum 71 (which would extend all state-granted rights and responsibilities of marriage to registered domestic partners)?
Stickney: On Nov. 3, we’re facing one of the most hotly contested bills ever. Why is it so controversial? In effect, Senate Bill 5688 will legalize homosexual marriage. Legalizing homosexual marriage would be the most profound policy change in our history.
The “Accept” folks and the homosexual activists are claiming that SB 5688 is not about marriage but their own leadership has said otherwise. As Sen. Ed Murray told the Seattle times on Jan. 10, 2007, when he announced the Domestic Partnership bill, “the goal is marriage equality. It’s an important statement that our eyes are on the prize and the prize is marriage.” Rep. Jamie Pedersen told the Times, “SB 5688 will give homosexuals a bridge until they can legally marry.” Murray again told the Times that the expansion 5688 is “an incremental approach, a strategic plan. And we believe 5688 is the last incremental step to same-sex marriage in Washington State.”
We believe that this whole homosexual marriage agenda is being promoted over the objections of a majority of Washingtonians. As presently, marriage is a common social good. If homosexual marriage becomes legal, the next step for homosexual activists is to teach children that homosexual unions are normal, to require churches to perform homosexual marriages.

Q: Last week I spoke to supporters of Referendum 71 who said those statements about school curriculum and churches are false. I want to give you a chance to explain how this will require schools to teach about homosexuality and churches to perform domestic partnerships. Will it?

Stickney: That’s a possibility. What we’re running into is a clash between what they claim to be a civil right and freedom of religion.
That’s happened in Canada. You’ve got examples from around the world here. You’ve had issues like a Knights of Columbus hall wouldn’t rent their hall for a homosexual marriage ceremony and eventually they were sued and fined $1,000 because they wouldn’t acquiesce. This is in British Colombia. This would be a violation of the very tannins of the Catholic Church.
In New Jersey, there’s a Methodist organization and in 2007 they refused to rent a facility to lesbians for a civil union ceremony. A complaint was filed with the state division of civil rights. It ruled against the Methodist group, the state revoked their tax exemption for the property because they refused to back down.

Q. Domestic partnerships do exist in Washington State currently – this would extend the benefits. Can you explain how expanding them would lead to that?

Stickney: Yes, I can. We have a national laboratory — it’s called Massachusetts — on the same-sex marriage issue. There in a recent case, parents of a young elementary school student objected to the curriculum and classroom discussion that was meant to inculcate the idea that there was no difference between marriages between a man and wife and same-sex relationships. The court upheld that public schools have an interest in teaching tolerance, including on the issue of gay marriage.
They’re saying that because there’s no specific language (in the bill to require schools to teach it), but they don’t need specific languages. All they need is the statute and they will develop the curriculum from there. I’ve got examples on our Web site of what has happened even here in Washington now. The site has many references to the activism we’re seeing here in Washington.
Much of the state curriculum is developed by some folks that are very much interested in promoting the homosexual agenda here. The first domestic partnership couple, one of the parties is a very active and a director of the Safe Schools Coalition in Seattle.

Q. Do you have examples of education curriculum being changed in Washington?

Stickney: Yes, there is. We have several examples. Go to www.protectmarriagewa.com and go to talking points and scroll down, you’ll see many reference about same sex examples in curriculum. And it goes into the early learning benchmarks of our state school system. You can reference documents – the F.L.A.S.H. curriculum is the top recommended curriculum for public schools to use. They recommend showing the video “We Are Family,” which teaches that same-sex relationships are the same as marriage.
There are also some oddities — they don’t currently add requirements for educating children, but it does force a new definition of the word “family.” It’s not about allowing choice for adult relationships. This law will result in children being taught that there is a different definition of “family,” so that same-sex partners will be a recognized norm.
Study after study after study has shown that that’s not best for children. That’s simply what we’re trying to uphold here is the standard of marriage as the very best for society. We understand there are occasions when you can’t achieve that, but we believe that it is the institution that should receive entitlements and benefits of marriage. We simply cannot go and raid the public treasury for every group that’s lobbied its way into getting civil rights.

Q. What do you think people don’t understand about Referendum 71?

Stickney: Earlier in the year, supporters called it “marriage equality.” Then they ran focus groups and called it “everything but marriage.” I assume they ran focus groups. Mostly they ignored them. There was almost a media blackout of the issue – none, zip, zero coverage. We put 300 people into hearing rooms, barely got an article out of it. We had a rally of 2,500 people on the capitol steps and I couldn’t even find one article about it. It only came to the forefront when we brought the referendum in. The media is quite in favor of this measure. It’s provable almost to a newspaper.
So we see a very liberal media promotion of this bill. Really, I would call the whole bill a perpetration of probably the greatest fraud in state history on the people of the state of Washington because they say it is not marriage but it is.

Q. Let’s talk more about the issue of curriculum.

Stickney: If Domestic Partnership becomes same sex marriage, which it ultimately will, they will have an obligation to teach that in the schools as traditional marriage. If it lacks that specific language then I would ask why did Rep. Jamie Pedersen and Sen. Ed Murray work to stifle the amendments that some of the conservatives put on the bill that would limit their ability to do that very thing. There were opt-out and religious freedom amendments that were not even considered.
Much of that they knew would be unpopular with the state of Washington. They know quite well when it comes to lawsuits and enforcements, you’re up a creek if you impose them. This is going on around the country, and they know it and we know it.

Q. You said something that surprised me: That, ultimately, you think gay couples will be allowed to marry. Can you say more?

Stickney: Absolutely. I think immediately you will see challenges to the state’s Defense of Marriage Act. It was designed to bring us to that point, and lob a softball to the court, to amend the Constitution.
We’re in the exact same scenario that California found itself in. Their legislature gave every right of marriage to Domestic Partnerships. And once that happens, the courts can come in and rule that you’re now violating separate but equal doctrines and civil rights laws. So you already have this precedent. So they threw out the California Defense of Marriage Act. So we’re at that very place that California was, if this is to pass next Tuesday. The difference being: We would have no more recourse, that’s why we’re promoting this as the last opportunity for Washingtonians to weigh in on this situation. Several senators said the same thing on the floor – this is marriage, this is our last chance to vote on it because it’ll be in the hands of the courts.
In California, you can begin a constitutional amendment process through initiative – like what was done through Proposition 8. We can’t here in Washington. That type of action has to originate in the Legislature and it would require a two-thirds majority of both houses and a Governor’s signature. If you’re familiar with the Legislature’s makeup, you’ll know that it’s actually about two-thirds liberal Democrats.

Q. Anything else you want to clear up about Referendum 71?

Stickney: I think the generally speaking people don’t understand what a Domestic Partnership is. That’s why the other side has worked so hard to flim-flam the public to say it’s only about Domestic Partnership expansions and firefighters. They’ve drug the seniors into these things as a rider. We believe that they’re duping seniors in order to enlist another voting block to help out and get this thing over the top.
And really, there’s little of consequence in SB 5688 that heterosexual partners can’t already get now from simple powers of attorney. It’s a simple backdoor scheme to legalize homosexual marriage.

Q. Can you say more about how voting on expanding domestic partnership rights will lead to marriage. I think it’s something people don’t understand, since they’re voting on an “everything but marriage” referendum.

Stickney: It will quickly lead to it. Maybe within a year, maybe within months.
There’s also some other oddities. It redefines things such as husband and wife to be gender neutral.
We’re getting all kinds of oddities and with the militancy we’ve seen with the homosexual advocate groups, we’re wondering where these things will lead as well. We’re thinking of the bake sale of the PTA meeting where they ask moms to line up on one side, dads on the other – and all the sudden you can’t use those words for fear of a lawsuit.
There are strange things that can come about on the fiscal side of things – all kinds of possibilities for double dipping on pensions and avoiding marriage to do it. It’s just a monstrous bill that attacks marriage and that essentially adds to the pressures that are already on the institution and could lead to its collapse as we’ve seen in some Scandinavian areas.

Q. You think domestic partnerships will cause heterosexual marriage to collapse?

Stickney: When a society starts to de-emphasize marriage and take it off the high level and the high standard and to essentially make a mockery of it and open it up to every flavor-of-the-month group that needs benefits to come in and raid the institution – and we’ve seen that in other areas – it becomes de-emphasized and eventually marriage is not even a big issue anymore. It’s not upheld by that society and it’s not in a high place and children begin to be born out of wedlock at rates of 60 percent or better and they’re not born in stable families that they try to promote in America and they become children of changing relationships, odd groupings and strange definitions of families. Study after study has shown that children of these lesser types of arrangements have more problems.
The average homosexual domestic partnership or homosexual relationship lasts only 1.3 years. With all the pressures that we’ve seen on marriage and all the divorce, the average American marriage still remains intact for 11 years.

Q. The average homosexual relationship or the average domestic partnership lasts 1.3 years?

Stickney: Domestic partnership is the 1.3 years – you have to look at other countries for that data.

Q. You said that study after study show that children benefit from stable families, not “changing relationships, odd groupings and strange definitions of families.” Proponents of the referendum have pointed out that heterosexual married couples can divorce, remarry, maintain mixed families. Can you address that?

Stickney: There’s a lot of things we would like to see improved as far as families go. No-fault divorce became huge thing. Since we’ve had it, we’ve had lots of divorce in this country. We think maybe that that ought to be revisited.
We’re concerned and you know, we have a worldview that’s affected by faith as well as I think our belief in the principles America was founded on. We think that the founding fathers of America, the original intent of the Constitution provided a strong set of statutes that should be respected and that there was much liberty and freedom within those statutes to live your life and yet you had to take responsibility and live within the framework not just of God’s law but of natural law. When you violate those principles, you begin to see societal degeneration. We’re quite a ways down the road in that department.
We’ve turned from not only looking at God’s law, but we’ve changed much of our U.S. Constitution around. We look at the sky and say the sky is green when we know the sky is blue and the courts say otherwise. We have a new secularism.

Q. Is there anything else you want to say?

Stickney: Redefining marriage to include same-sex unions poses significant threats to the religious liberties of people who believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman.
Our support for the rejection of SB 5688 on Referendum 71 is not about hate, it’s about love. It’s about loving our children enough to consider fully the long-term effects of such major social engineering on their futures. It’s about keeping the teaching of morals at home, not codifying into law what a majority believes to be immoral behavior. And lastly, the millions of dollars in new spending and costs of SB 5688 have still not been fully revealed. Our state is facing big budget deficits already, and new spending of this magnitude is simply irresponsible.

Tags: Domestic partnerships, R71, Thursday Q&A