The West Virginia House of Delegates on March 11 voted 96 - 3 to approve a bill both to restrict marriages within the state to heterosexual couples and to deny legal recognition to same-gender marriages another state may someday perform. The state Senate had already passed the bill unanimously, so it now moves to Governor Cecil Underwood, who instigated the bill in mid-January. In the previous three years, both houses of the legislature had passed differing versions of similar measures but could not agree on language.

Underwood's bill calls for adding to marriage license applications the statement, "Marriage is designed to be a loving and lifelong union between a man and a woman"; he said that, "As a former biology teacher, I don't see any other way." More than 30 other states have already enacted laws against recognition of gay and lesbian marriages, including California's successful referendum last week, in the wake of state Supreme Court rulings in Hawai'i in 1993 and in Vermont last December. Underwood did not want to leave the matter for the courts, according to spokespeople. He called the House's action "the right thing to do."

West Virginia Gay and Lesbian Coalition co-chair Chuck Smith responded to the vote saying, "I think this is a really sad day. The main purpose of the bill is to say, once again, that people who are gay and lesbian are second-class citizens." Smith previously noted it would have been hard to find any county clerk willing to issue a marriage license to a same-gender couple.

The three dissenting votes came from Delegates Barbara Fleischauer and Charlene Marshall, both Democrats from Monongalia, and Democrat Susan Hubbard of Cabell. Marhsall later told the Associated Press that she voted "no" by mistake, but Fleischauer's vote was no accident. Fleischauer doubts the bill's constitutionality as well as its fairness. "I think the right to marriage is a fundamental right," she said, "It's just like the racial laws that say you can't marry. I took an oath to uphold the constitution." Fleischauer called the bill "a solution looking for a problem."