Terrance Tom, in throwing a bone to the fundamentalists, may have widened the conflict to his own detriment. Room 8, Honolulu, HI 96822. What he proposed instead was a law stating that marriage should only be done for procreation reasons. Both major newspapers in Honolulu editorialized against Tom's proposed legislation. The proposed legislation would make it hard for sterile people or post-meopause women to be able to marry.
Nobody is really sure what the legislature is up to.
And, at the same time we are afraid of massive lobbying by the religious right. Eventhough, Hawaii has a smaller than average religious right community. This week the marriage project hired a program coordinator to help raise funds for our lawyer and to help to keep the case in the courts instead of the legislature. We believe that if the case is successful it would have major effects on the civil rights of gay people in the whole country. Marriage laws are generally recognized between the states.