Gay-rights activists rallied in Annapolis yesterday and met with dozens of lawmakers to lobby for same-sex marriage, predicting they are close to having the necessary votes in the legislature only five months after Maryland's highest court upheld the state's ban on such unions.
Several hundred people in Lawyers Mall held signs that read "Protect all families" and "Love does not discriminate." Organizers with Equality Maryland, a gay-rights group, said they dispatched participants to make more than 115 visits with lawmakers and urged them to tell personal stories and why their relationships need protections afforded by marriage.
The first hearing on legislation to legalize same-sex marriage will be held Thursday before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. The panel also will consider a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions as well as bills to create domestic partnerships that would replace civil marriage and to allow so-called covenant marriage, a legally distinct matrimony that's optional and limits grounds for divorce.
The fight for gay marriage moved to the legislature after the Maryland Court of Appeals in September upheld the existing state statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Activists said yesterday that civil unions would not be an adequate compromise.
"Politicians are trying to make the argument they are for your civil rights as long as it's not called marriage," said the Rev. Andrew Foster Connors, pastor of the Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore.
Deborah "Spice" Kleinmann of Towson said she attended the event because she worries about what would happen if she or her partner of 15 years died unexpectedly, and she worries about her legal rights to the daughter she helped raise. But she has been to Annapolis to lobby for gay rights in years past, and said that this year prospects for marriage seem better. "I'm feeling really hopeful," she said.
Legislative opponents are circulating a petition to take a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage directly to the full House of Delegates without a committee vote.
laura.smitherman@baltsun.com