Word: vote
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...constitution to ban same-sex marriages. In the most recent public poll in the Honolulu Advertiser, in September, the amendment led 52% to 40%. Still, the side that supports gay marriage has more money in the bank, and everyone expects that the campaign will end in a close vote...
...anything involving gay rights. In 1994 it backed a modest change in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation while permitting an exemption for churches. Two years later that amendment was defeated in the Senate by just a single vote...
Thus the upcoming vote has divided the gay community, which has been forced into a wrenching choice--not so much over whether to vote no but over what to tell family and friends about the vote, about themselves, about their lovers. Local gays sometimes resent white transplants who are so open and easy with their homosexuality. For years, the small Hawaii group paying for the lawsuit that preceded this vote was almost entirely white, many of them men and women who moved to Hawaii to escape their own closets on the mainland...
...emotionalism of the campaign is clear even in quieter settings. Before a group of Japanese-American seniors, Jackie Young of Protect Our Constitution, the group fighting the amendment, offers a reason to vote against it: "Never before have we amended our constitution here in Hawaii, a land of aloha, to specifically discriminate against one group of people. What if that group were you?" These are people who remember the internment camps, and Young--a former vice speaker of the state house of representatives and longtime activist--expects her argument to resonate. But during Q and A, a man asks...
...election may turn on how voters respond to such bile. Feingold says he plans to go "intensely positive" with his own advertising blitz in the next weeks, banking on backlash votes from reform-minded moderates turned off by Neumann's negative ads and the campaign-finance system that supports them. Neumann, elected to Congress in 1994 as a number-crunching budget cutter, has aimed his recent TV spots at Feingold's vote against a ban on partial-birth abortions and at his opposition to a constitutional amendment outlawing flag burning. The idea is to whip social conservatives into a holy...