By The Twin Cities Daily News Blog
Leominster Mass. News.- LEOMINSTER -- When Karen Aveyard signed a petition last fall, she had no idea it involved the status of gay marriage in Massachusetts.
Aveyard said the person who asked her to sign said nothing about the proposed amendment.
"I think it was in front of a grocery store," the Leominster resident said. "I was asked to sign something else, I didn't know it had anything to do with marriage."
Workers from Vote on Marriage, a ballot question committee formed to promote an amendment defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman, collected signatures from all over the state from Sept. 21 to Nov. 23, spokesman Kris Mineau said Tuesday.
The signature collector asked her to sign a petition regarding an amendment to allow grocery stores to sell wine, Aveyard said.
She was surprised to learn her name turned up on the Vote on Marriage list.
"I don't remember the exact conversation," she said. "I don't think grabbing someone while their arms are full of groceries is a good way to get support for something, because they're probably in a hurry. It bothers me because that does not reflect my opinion at all."
Vote on Marriage was formed to create the petition by 19 organizations who seek to include the definition of heterosexual marriage in the Massachusetts constitution, Mineau said.
Mineau, the president of the Massachusetts Family Institution, said state Supreme Court justices changed the constitution in 2003 when they ruled that gay couples could marry.
"The petition is to clearly define marriage in the state of Massachusetts," he said. "The court cannot change the constitution unilaterally, only the people can. Every dictionary I check and every law book I check says marriage is between a man and a woman."
State law required Vote On Marriage to collect 65,825 signatures in order to get the amendment on the 2008 ballot.
Although they collected thousands more, a gay and lesbian legal rights group filed a lawsuit Tuesday in order to stop the amendment on the grounds that a petition cannot change a previous court ruling.
Forty thousand of the 170,000 signatures were collected by out-of-state employees from Arno, a political consulting group based in California, Mineau said.
More of Locals unaware of signing anti-gay marriage petition @ Fitchburg Sentinel.
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