The Blood Bath that Wasn’t Supposed to Happen

• Post by: Peter Costea
• November 24, 2018

Romania's Marriage Referendum In a span covering less than three weeks, from the end of September through the beginning of October 2018, the European Union, Romania’s main political parties, politicians, mass media, and social media trolls succeeded in annihilating the greatest democratic endeavor in Romania’s post-communist era: the defeat of the citizens-initiated constitutional amendment to enact natural marriage in Article 48 of Romania’s Constitution. I was there for the last two weeks of the campaign crisscrossing the country[1], campaigning in earnest and witnessing for myself the collapse of democratic intercourse and the blood bath left behind by the concerted attacks against the referendum by the European Union and its lackeys in Romania. How did this come to be, and what motivated the aggression of the opponents? By way of background, Romanians have attempted since 2006 to amend Article 48 to make it consistent both with their tradition and with the natural meaning of marriage. In 2006 they launched a similar constitutional amendment, which was supported by 650,000 signatures, well in excess of the half a million needed to trigger a national referendum. However, in July 2007 Romania’s Constitutional Court halted the process because the geographical dispersion of the signatures fell short of the legal requirements. According to law, at least half of Romania’s 40 counties had to provide at least 20,000 valid signatures each for the process to move forward.[2] A second attempt was initiated in November 2015 when a group of Romanian citizens initiated the same constitutional amendment to enact the institution of natural marriage between a man and a woman in Romania’s Constitution. Though they only needed the backing of half a million valid signatures for this purpose, they instead obtained three million in the required six-month period. In the summer of 2016 the amendment was ruled constitutional by Romania’s Constitutional Court, and i