While most of the noise in Florida these days surrounds the heated presidential contest, a less noticed -- but no less profound -- battle looms for the future of equality, fairness, and even pocketbooks in the Sunshine State.
On November 4, Florida voters will choose whether to pass Amendment 2, the ballot initiative that proposes to ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. And much like the presidential campaign that tends to overshadow it, the outcome of Amendment 2 remains uncertain, as observers attempt to understand what role African-Americans inspired by the Obama candidacy might play in the decision.
“It’s not clear it’s going to pass, it’s not clear it’s going to fail, and it’s also not clear how the presidential race is going to affect it,” says Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which handles Florida polling.
Quinnipiac’s latest poll released on September 8 suggests that Amendment 2 remains short of the 60% approval it needs from voters to pass, though it’s still within range. The poll showed that 55% of voters support the ban, and 41% oppose it, with a margin of error of +/- 2.6 percentage points. Those findings are down slightly from the 58-37 majority that favored the amendment in a previous poll in June.
But Brown isn't drawing any conclusions from the change in those numbers. “That doesn’t really tell me anything,” he said of the shift.
Nationwide, Florida joins Arizona and California as one of three states with constitutional amendments aiming to ban same-sex marriage on the ballot. But unlike the proposals in those states, which seek strictly to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, Amendment 2 includes an additional clause that would essentially preclude the provision of any other type of legal recognition that approximates marriage for same-sex couples.
The full text of Amendment 2 reads, “Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”
Given its vague wording, opponents fear the amendment could have a potentially devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of Florida couples -- gay and straight -- who live in legal arrangements other than marriage.
“The amendment could interfere with health care benefits, hospital visitations, inheritance -- virtually any concrete area in which a couple might wish to provide for their partner to have some rights,” said Joseph Jackson, associate director of the Center on Children and Families at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville.
Jackson compares Florida’s initiative to the 2004 amendment banning same-sex marriage in Michigan, where in May the state supreme court decided that the measure prevents public institutions from offering health care benefits for same-sex partners.
Though Florida already has laws prohibiting same-sex marriage and preventing recognition of such unions performed in other states, supporters of the so-called Florida Marriage Protection Amendment contend the proposal is a necessary guard against “judicial activism” of the sort that prompted gay marriage victories in Massachusetts, California, and as of last week, Connecticut.
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