(Courtesy Washington Secretary of State)
It’s not that Larry Stickney wouldn’t welcome your support.
But if you live in the Seattle area, he figures his efforts would probably be better spent elsewhere.
“We get strong support in areas you can’t see from the Space Needle,” said Stickney, who characterized the political leanings of the city as “way outside the mainstream of the state of Washington.”
The Palinesque tenor of Stickney’s observation is in keeping with his overall strategy. Stickney is the director of Protect Marriage Washington, the group sponsoring Referendum 71, which challenges the “everything but marriage” domestic partnership law passed during this year’s legislative session.
Like the former Alaska governor, Stickney finds his most receptive audiences out where a full-size four-wheel-drive pickup might actually be a practical consideration.
“Little Colville pulled down 4,000 signatures,” Stickney said. “Rural areas came through in a big way for us.” Whether Stickney and company’s efforts were successful is still to be determined. But the nearly 138,000 signatures turned in just ahead of the deadline Saturday before last are a good deal more than many predicted.
Consider that a similar effort three years ago, the Tim Eyman sponsored Referendum 65, which also challenged a gay-rights law passed by the Legislature, reportedly gathered about 32,000 fewer signatures. And consider that this time around the evangelical community was conspicuously split on the issue, with prominent clergy in the suburban Seattle area declining to join the cause, citing its presumably slim chances as well as its potential for triggering an ultimately damaging backlash.
A minimum of 120,577 valid signatures are required to qualify Referendum 71 for the November ballot, where a majority yes vote would uphold the law as passed by the Legislature. The signatures submitted exceed that minimum by about 14 percent. Typically, about 18 percent of signatures are found to be invalid, although the range can vary considerably. In this case, the “pad” is thin enough for the Elections Division to conduct an every-signature verification process – matching all the names on the petition sheets with voter registration rolls – rather than a random sampling, a process that could take a few weeks.
The Secretary of State’s office reported Friday that its initial check of about 5,600 signatures showed an error rate of only 11.34 percent.
“There’s reason for optimism,” Stickney said. “We’re believers. We’re gonna pray this one in.” Prayer couldn’t hurt. Few would suggest that these are the best of times for social conservatives. Fortunes have changed since early in the decade, when the religious right had one of their own in the White House and many a sympathetic ear could be found in both houses of the Republican-controlled Congress.
Add to their recent setbacks at the polls the seemingly endless string of sex scandals involving prominent “family values” politicians and clergy and you might think a religious conservative would have good reason to stay out of the spotlight. So how to explain the relative success of the R-71 signature-gathering effort?
“We did a lot with less,” Stickney said. “We didn’t spend our time romancing the Puget Sound media. They weren’t friendly to our cause. We went straight to the people.” And those people, Stickney said, are found in higher percentages in the regions far removed from Seattle. He said the effort also met with disproportionate success in the smaller churches – “Bible-believing” congregations, in Stickney’s parlance.
With the exception of the support gathered in some large churches in the Spokane area, “the churches that carried this were the Bible-based churches with 400 people or less,” he said. “We lost the mega-churches in the more affluent areas,” which, he said, have taken softer stances on social issues.
“With affluence you can lose principle,” Stickney said. “You can lose touch with the tenets of the faith. You protect things, possessions, power.”
Stickney said that during the years of the Reagan presidency social and fiscal conservatives made common cause. But that coalition has since fractured. “Social issues were put on the back burner in the interest of issues dear to the Chamber of Commerce,” Stickney said. “Conservative Christians felt used.”
“Conservative Christians have always been on the side of Republican values of limited government and lower taxes,” Stickney continued. But these days, he said, “moral issues get more lip service than anything.”
Stickney’s views on the tenets of the faith may well differ from those held by other Christians, but there is little doubt that his anti-gay-marriage sentiments strike a chord with a significant percentage of the population, and not just in the rural areas. Witness the fate of ballot measures to legalize (or constitutionally ban) same-sex marriage (or anything substantially akin to it) across the nation. Polling trends indicate that the public may be gradually coming to support same-sex marriage, but resistance remains strong.
“The claims of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Russell Johnson, government affairs director for the Family Policy Institute of Washington, the state affiliate of Focus on the Family and supporters of the R-71 effort. The 23-year-old Johnson doesn’t need to be reminded that the local evangelical community was split on Referendum 71. And he can rattle off the names of the espousers of traditional family values whose own behaviors put the lie to their “sanctity of marriage” talk.
“The list goes on and on,” Johnson said. “It’s a problem of human nature, a problem of sin, which knows no political boundaries.” Still, when it’s a self-proclaimed religious conservative who gets caught with his pants down, it doesn’t help the cause. “It’s one of the most damaging things to our movement,” Johnson acknowledged.
But as times change, he added, so does the movement. As the old guard steps down, dies off or otherwise fades away, the message still resonates, and the movement carries on. For evidence of that, he only need point to the R-71 effort.
“All the commentators and talking heads thought it was impossible to do, especially with the fractured community,” he said. “It’s not dependent on the political leaders at the top. It’s a horizontal model. We’re not dependent on a superstar governor or a superstar senator. It’s individual driven, grassroots driven.” Not that mega-church pastors and aspiring political leaders need not apply. For even on the Family Policy Institute of Washington’s board is Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Assembly of God, who had publicly and quite notably advocated against the referendum effort early on, and Matt Shea, a freshman Republican state representative from the Spokane area.
Shea was among the few dozen people assembled outside the state capitol on that warm Saturday as the petition sheets came in ahead of the deadline. The 34-year-old was the only one in a suit and tie. “I think it’s a good day for the grassroots,” Shea said. “I’m really proud of what the grassroots have done as far as this is concerned, particularly their perseverance [in the face of] harassment and intimidation. They had the stick-to-itiveness and the determination despite all that happening.”
That last bit was in part an allusion to WhoSigned.org , a group that filed a public records request to have the Elections Division disclose the names and addresses of those who signed the R-71 petitions. Protect Marriage Washington went to U.S. District Court in Tacoma last Wednesday and walked out with an injunction halting the release of that information until at least Sept. 3, when a hearing is scheduled. And it was in part a reference to some vague and as-yet unsubstantiated rumors. “We have reports of threats, we have reports of intimidation,” Shea said. “There’s a couple of reports that we have received, we haven’t been able to confirm them, of physical assault. I think personally that we can all agree that sort of behavior is reprehensible. We all have a right, I think, to petition our government, to use the referendum process.”
Larry Stickney may have depended on the “Bible-believing” fundamentalists to drive the signature gathering part of his campaign. But, should the measure qualify for the ballot, it will certainly take more than that slice of the voting public to overturn the legislation.
He said he has “theological differences with Mormons and Catholics,” for instance, but that he expects to find support among the adherents to those faiths, if not necessarily from the church hierarchies.
Rev. Joanne Coleman Campbell, the senior pastor at Olympia’s First United Methodist Church, was among a handful of clergy opposed to the R-71 effort who also made their way to the state capitol the Saturday before last. “We were hoping to have a presence of clergy to say we support this bill [Senate Bill 5688, the “everything but marriage” law that the R-71 sponsors hope to strike down], so it wouldn’t appear the entire faith community was against it,” Coleman Campbell said.
Coleman Campbell said she expects the fight for gay equality to be won, sooner or later. “I think it’s inevitable that the gay and lesbian community will eventually get equal rights,” she said. “Same as with slavery, same as with women’s rights. It’s just a matter of time, but nationally there’s still a lot of strength to resist it.” Her own experience in the ministry, which has seen her move about some, perhaps gives her a sharper perspective and insight on the relative effectiveness of Stickney’s strategy to date. “I just came from Spokane,” she said. “If you want to look for conservatives, you’ll find them there. There, these issues are still alive and to be debated.”
Brouner is a reporter formerly with the Beacon Hill News, South Seattle Star and Ballard News-Tribune
