Seattle, your ballots have arrived.

The Stranger offers up a voting cheatsheet HERE. It's kind of poetic, too. Worth a read.

This is a very important election for a few reasons, but let's just review one, with the case for ref 71 presented by our friends at The Stranger (edited by none other than Seattle's own Dan Savage):



Referendum 71
Approve


Earlier this year, the state legislature expanded the rights of a same-sex registered domestic partnership to include all the state-granted rights of marriage—except it's not called "marriage."

And if you thought Tim Eyman was fucked, the guys behind Referendum 71 are gaping assholes. They gathered signatures to put the state's domestic-partnership bill on the ballot—thereby allowing right-wing bigots to vote on the rights of committed same-sex partners. R-71 backers insist that they're protecting families and children. But that's a canard. This petition was the product of Gary Randall, a carpetbagging Oregonian who makes money running hate-mongering campaigns and, according to the Clackamas County recorder's office, owes $36,012 in unpaid federal back taxes. Also behind the measure is Larry Stickney, a thrice-married Christian extremist who allegedly beat his wife and refused to pay for his daughter's college education until a judge made him, according to records in Kitsap County Superior Court. The two lied every step of the way to get this on the ballot, claiming in television ads and on the petition that the measure was the same as gay marriage and that "public schools K–12 will be forced to teach that same-sex marriage and homosexuality are normal." None of that's true. Neither is their claim that this is about family: Stickney and Randall are deceptive bigotry-mongers.

But now it's on the ballot. A vote to approve R-71 is a vote to uphold the domestic-­partnership bill. If passed, it gives the state's 6,000 registered couples the right to take leave from work to care for a critically ill partner, the right for public-sector employees to share pension benefits with their partners, and dozens of other rights that straight couples enjoy—and all committed partners deserve.

Vote to approve Referendum 71.