Nearly 100 people are signed up to speak during the D.C. Council’s much-anticipated hearing on gay marriage, which will be the culmination of two days in the District where the issue of same-sex unions will be at the forefront.
The speaker’s list for the Oct. 26 public hearing before the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, chaired by at-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, was 91 people long as of Monday. The hearing starts at 3:30 p.m. in the council chambers.
“I look at the hearing as the opportunity for the public to speak out,” Mendelson said. “This is going to be about hearing from the public, not like other hearings when it’s more about rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arcane language.”
Mendelson is a strong proponent of same-sex marriage, as are most of his colleagues. At least 10 of 13 council members are expected to support Councilman David Catania’s bill to legalize gay marriage.
A preliminary speaker’s list was not released. The public can sign up until 5 p.m. Thursday.
At 10 a.m. the same day, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics is scheduled to hold its hearing on a proposed voter initiative to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The elections board is expected to reject the initiative as discrimination under the D.C. Human Rights Act, just as it ruled earlier this year in the case of a proposed referendum on the District’s gay marriage recognition law.
Both hearings will be preceded by the so-called “People’s Rally” at 2 p.m. Sunday at Freedom Plaza. Organizers of the rally are demanding that D.C. voters have the final say on the definition of marriage.
Bob King, a Ward 5 advisory neighborhood commissioner and a leader of the initiative effort, said the two hearings were “obviously” scheduled on the same day “to inconvenience our people.” If the elections board rejects the initiative, King said, they will go to court. If the council adopts a same-sex marriage law, he added, they will take their case to Congress.
“The rally is just to let them know that the people are demanding that they be heard,” King said.
