Michigan Marriage Equality Supporters Launch Campaign for 2016 Ballot Effort

Marriage equality advocates in Michigan launched a new campaign yesterday to educate voters in order to launch a ballot effort should the federal legal challenge to the state's gay marriage ban fail in court, WZZM reports:

"Our roadmap to victory calls for work on two tracks," said Emily Dievendorf, executive director of Detroit-based Equality Michigan.

The first step is to continue with a court challenge "but if we don't get a favorable ruling, we intend on overturning Michigan's ban by ballot initiative in 2016," said Dievendorf in a news release.

Joining Equality Michigan in the campaign is the ACLU of Michigan and New York City-based Freedom to Marry, which is pushing similar "education campaigns" in a dozen states, said Richard Carlbom, the group's state campaigns director.

"Think of this as a presidential campaign, bringing this to the voters across the country," Carlbom said.

In news related to the legal case, the state of Michigan cited SCOTUS's recent Affirmative Action ruling in a brief filed this week:

"The district court’s decision, to use (U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony) Kennedy’s recent words, demeans democracy," the state asserted, referring to the plurality opinion in the case that Schuette argued in defense of the affirmative action ban.

"It denies each of those voters the dignity of a meaningful vote, labels each with the stigma of irrationality, and treats Michigan’s electorate as incapable of deciding this profound and sensitive issue."

Kennedy wrote in his opinion on Schuette vs. Coalition to defend Affirmative Action:

"It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds... Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people. These First Amendment dynamics would be disserved if this Court were to say that the question here at issue is beyond the capacity of the voters to debate and then to determine."

Also of note — in its brief, the attorney general also dropped all reference to the "research" done by discredited UT professor Mark Regnerus.