A few weeks ago, I wrote a post wondering if Harry Jackson, the main force behind efforts to prevent the District of Columbia’s city council from recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere, was even a DC resident.
It turns out that he is … and the Washington Blade reports that he has been for just over one month:
The pastor of a Maryland church who’s seeking a voter referendum in D.C. to overturn a city law recognizing same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions did not become a registered voter in the city until April 22, according to voter registration records.
Rev. Harry Jackson Jr., pastor of Christian Hope Church in Beltsville, Md., and the lead proponent of the marriage referendum, lists his D.C. residence on the city’s voter registration rolls as an apartment in the upscale Whitman Condominium at 910 M St., N.W.
The city’s election law requires that persons proposing a voter referendum be a District resident and a registered D.C. voter. People participating in the signature gathering process to place a referendum on the ballot must also be District residents and duly registered voters.
The interesting thing about this is that we wrote a post about how Jackson was going to lead the fight in DC weeks before he even registered to vote in DC. Apparently Jackson realized that his efforts to save DC might look a little suspect if they were being run by someone who didn’t even live in The District and so he quickly moved into town and set about establishing himself as a resident.
The Blade article also contains other interesting tidbits, such as this:
In a separate filing required under the referendum law, Jackson filed papers with the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance to register the campaign committee he created to advance the referendum: Stand4MarriageDC.
The finance papers identify Jackson as chair of the committee and list Brian Brown as the committee treasurer. The papers show that Jackson and Chuck Donovan, who is identified in the papers as an “executive” with the anti-gay Family Research Council in Manassas, Va., as each having contributed $50 to the Stand4MarriageDC committee, representing the first two contributions received.
It’s no surprise that Jackson would be working with Donovan, the Executive Vice President for Family Research Council, considering his close ties to the organization and its president Tony Perkins.
And Brian Brown, the committee’s treasure, just happens to have the same name as the Executive Director of the National Organization for Marriage … presumably because it is the same person.
