Read a summary of brutal intimidation by CLICKING HERE (including tactics by the homosexual advocates against the Christians).
The below is a list of the attacks by the opposition, and lack of support by many Christian institutions to a grassroots effort attempting to petition for a citizens vote on the repeal of a 1913 law that has, for the past few years, been cited to forbid homosexual couples from outside of Massachusetts to be married in Massachusetts.
The Christian petition effort failed because:
- Many people were afraid that if they signed, their names would end up on homosexual web sites and they would be harassed. As we all know, this happened with the Marriage Amendment petition signers, and a lot of people were harassed.
- Homosexual activists terrorized our petition gatherers across the state. They would come up to them and scream horrible things, and then call the police (or store managers) with phony complaints and charges. It happened constantly. Homosexual websites sometimes tracked our signature-gathering activities. And they even tried to intimidate the MassResistance office by sending us a stream of obscene emails.
- The Archdiocese of Boston opposed the effort and took extraordinary steps to thwart it. They contacted every Catholic church in Massachusetts and told them not to allow petitions to be gathered there. Priests spoke from the pulpit against it, and ordered petition gatherers off the property. (Ironically, in July the Archdiocese had publicly denounced the Legislalture's repeal of the 1913 law -- and the Cardinal himself signed our petition!)
- The pro-family group Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) publicly opposed the effort, discouraged people from participating, and refused to help us contact churches they were affiliated with. (Basically, we were told, they were afraid that if we forced a statewide election, it would be too difficult a fight and they wanted to avoid that.)
- Since this actually only affected people in other states, we were counting on out-of-state donors to help us out. For example, we were all ready to mail petitions to 80,000 people who had signed the Marriage Amendment. This would have been a huge boost! But we needed money to at least pay for postage. Unfortunately the out-of-staters we asked (including the American Family Association) all turned us down. What we learned is that, basically, they've given up on Massachusetts. But we haven't.
- Our friend Larry Cirignano, who helped run the Marriage Amendment petition drive, had agreed to come in run this petition drive (for reasonably generous pay). But after taking the first few weeks off to attend the Democratic and Republican national conventions and then a values voter convention, Larry suddenly abandoned this effort to work instead for the Jeff Beatty US Senate campaign. Larry never explained to us why he did this, but he did mention that a certain MFI director had pressured him not to work with us. (This was very hard for us to recover from. But over the last few weeks a stalwart group of people stepped up and did yeomen's work.)
- Unlike with initiative petitions and constitutional amendments, we didn't have months to plan this. We had to act within days of the repeal of the 1913 law, and immediately get to work.
