Aug. 11—There will be two new citizen-initiated amendments circulating around Ohio following a state board’s decision to split a proposed initiative guaranteeing equal rights under the law and formally remove the Ohio Constitution’s gay marriage ban into separate amendments.
The initial proposal was cleared by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost last month, pending further clearance from the Ohio Ballot Board, which has the responsibility to determine whether proposed constitutional amendment initiatives contain one or more proposals.
On July 9, the board determined the organizer’s petition contained “two distinct proposed amendments: (1) a proposed constitutional amendment that would create more than a dozen protected classes, and (2) a proposed constitutional amendment related specifically to marriage.”
Now that the proposal has been split in two, organizers officially have the state’s permission to begin collecting signatures, Yost announced Friday.
The first proposed amendment, titled the “Ohio Equal Rights Amendment,” would amend the state’s constitution to expressly forbid the state from abridging someone’s rights under the law “on account of race, color, creed or religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression regardless of sex assigned at birth, pregnancy status, genetic information, disease status, age, disability, recovery status, familial status, ancestry, national origin, or military and veteran status.”
The second proposal would strike out the portion of Ohio’s constitution which says: “Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions.” It would replace that text with a mandate that the state “shall recognize and treat equally all marriages regardless of race, sex, or gender identity.”
The amendment would, however, give individual clergy the option to refuse to “solemnize” marriages of their choosing.
Ohio has recognized same-sex marriages since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, an Ohio-based case that directly struck down the state’s constitutional and legal bans on gay marriage and guaranteed it as a federal right.
Yost’s office explained that, in order to get these proposals on a statewide ballot, petitioners will now need to collect “signatures from registered voters equal to at least 10% of the vote cast in the most recent gubernatorial election.”
“Those signatures must come from voters in at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, and for each of those counties the number must equal at least 5% of the vote cast in the most recent gubernatorial election,” a Friday press release from Yost’s office reads.
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