HONOLULU — A same-sex civil unions bill in Hawaii likely is dead for the year after the Democratic-controlled House bowed to pressure from Christian conservatives and voted to table the measure.
It’s the second year in a row that opposition from religious conservatives has helped defeat the bill.
House members, via voice vote, voted Jan. 29 to table the bill (HB 444), postponing the issue indefinitely unless a two-thirds majority votes to bring it back up, which is highly unlikely. The vote came nearly two weeks after approximately 15,000 religious conservatives descended on the state capital Jan. 17 in opposition to the bill, most wearing white shirts and sporting “iVote” buttons and stickers. Many of them also contacted their representatives and senators in the ensuing days.
The bill would have granted homosexual partners all the legal benefits of marriage, except the name itself, and would have made Hawaii the sixth state with a similar law.
Rick Lazor, pastor of OlaNui Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Honolulu, told Baptist Press (BP) the outcome was pleasantly surprising.
“We can come up with some good procedural reasons [for why it failed], but I don’t have a doubt in my mind that it was prayer,” Lazor told BP. “We can’t figure out how seven or eight representatives switched [in the last year], and some of these who became ‘no’ votes or didn’t want to vote were folks who were extremely passionate about passing it last year. It was pretty amazing.” (TAB)
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