TLIAW: Who could ask for more?

I'll give you an example -- in February 2004, the Ohio legislature passes one of the most sweeping marriage protection measures in the country, even going so far as to tell state agencies they can't treat "domestic partners", homosexual, heterosexual, or otherwise, like married people. The Daily Show does a little segment on it, Bill O'Reilly fires back, their little spiff is covered in various media, the law stands; issue is over, right? Well a couple of months later, we started looking at securing our gains by having a ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to ban same sex marriage in the state, and start to gather signatures; immediately, the homosexual alliance starts leveling lawsuits at us, trying to challenge our signatures and a lot of other baloney. Meanwhile, our people struggle to gather signatures because every other person we try to get to sign, even if they support us, says "Wait, isn't already the law?", and now our pitch has an extra step; and for weeks, dumb as it sounds, our canvassers didn't have a prepared answer to this question, and we lost a good number of people who just didn't have time to talk it through. And while this is happening, our lawyers are fighting to keep the signatures we gather, made harder every time we draw an unfriendly judge. And yadda yadda, the deadline comes up, and just enough signatures get thrown out that we don't have enough.

So, all told, the question of amending the state constitution to protect marriage doesn't make the ballot. No big deal though, right? We've still got the law passed by the elected representatives of Ohio. Well, maybe that's true; but a law can be overturned. And there's some evidence to suggest that, had this measure been on the Ohio ballot, the 2004 Presidential Election might have turned out differently...​