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 Certification of Anti-Gay Petitions Save Dade & PFAW: Petition Gatherers Violated Florida Law Activists Vowing to Work on Two Fronts to Advance Equality |
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Compiled by GayToday People for the American Way
The decision to certify the petitions as requiring a referendum was based on a review of only 1,500 randomly chosen signatures out of about 51,000 signatures that were collected by the group Take Back Miami-Dade. The review by Miami-Dade election officials, the lawsuit contends, did not fully assess whether petition signatures had been properly collected and notarized in compliance with Florida law, whether petition signatures had been forged, or whether other irregularities violated the integrity of the process and governing law. Even under the random sampling conducted by the county, 27 percent of the 1,500 sampled signatures-at least one in four-were declared invalid.
"A small group of people want to turn back the clock to 1977, when Anita Bryant led a campaign of fear and intolerance that made it legal to discriminate against gay people," said Jorge Mursuli, who is Florida director for PFAW and former executive director of SAVE Dade. "We, the residents of Miami-Dade, aren't going to permit the progress of nearly a quarter century to be thrown away by those who wish to divide us." In 1998, two decades after the successful effort led by Anita Bryant to repeal an anti-discrimination provision, the Miami-Dade County Commission again approved an amendment to the county's human rights ordinance that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, financing and public accommodations . |
