Marina-based group launches signature-gathering effort to put initiative on the November ballot.

The room at the Shoreline Conference Center in Marina is bursting with chairs, but only a small handful of people have shown up for the meeting. A row of water bottles and coke cans sit untouched in the back. Thirty minutes after the scheduled start time, and with little fanfare, three college students stand up and start talking.

This isn’t part of a school project. These students are trying to amend the state constitution.

Elizabeth Ruccello, a student at Monterey Peninsula College and president of the Marina-based Organization for Fairness and Equality, opens the Feb. 16 meeting by talking about how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation last year that would have made marriage between same-sex couples legal. Then, she announces to the eight people in the audience that they will soon launch a signature-gathering drive to get a voter initiative on the ballot that legalizes gay marriage.

By the looks of things, they still have a long way to go. The group needs 600,000 signatures to place the initiative on the November ballot.

According to the initiative, “marriage is a personal relation arriving out of a civil contract between any two persons, without regard to the genders of those persons, who are eligible to marry.”

The idea behind it, Ruccello says, came as a strategic response to efforts by the anti-gay marriage group, Campaign for California Families, which is currently attempting to get its own constitution-amending initiative on the ballot. This one would limit marriage to heterosexual couples while banning gay domestic partnerships.

Republican strategists are expected to use gay marriage as a hot political wedge issue heading into the November elections.

As the meeting ends, after only 30 minutes, Ruccello answers questions and promises another meeting in the coming weeks.

On her way out, attendee Maj-Brit Eagle, a Monterey High School teacher, says she hopes that the students might get some traction from their efforts. “People have to stop seeing [gay marriage] for what it’s not and start seeing it for what it is,” Eagle says, “a behavior of love.”