According to the article, the amendment forbids laws that intend to "approximate the design of marriage." It's creative lawyering, but I think there are a couple of big problems with the public defenders' argument.
1. Marriage comes with a bunch of legal rights and obligations (people have no idea what they're getting into). You've got things like the right to inherit property--even if your spouse writes a will leaving everything to someone else--automatic parental rights for the husband when the wife bears a child irrespective of whether it's "his," the right to make decisions on behalf of an incompetent spouse (that is, a spouse who has become mentally incapable of making important decisions through disease, age, or accident, not someone who's bad at being a spouse), etc. To "approximate the design of marriage," I think you'd have to give unmarried couples many or most of these rights and obligations, not just one. Just having a right to get a protective order against your partner doesn't turn you into anything legally resembling--or "approximating"--husband and wife.
Whatever was intended, the amendment's text (as quoted in the article) seems to be aimed at civil unions, i.e., something that's legally just like marriage except for the name. Compare the proposed federal Hate Amendment, which prohibits giving unmarried people the "legal incidents" of marriage. That text is much more amenable to the construction the public defenders are pushing, which is that no law can provide any of the legal benefits or obligations of marriage.
2. Even if the Ohio amendment is not limited to everything-but-the-name, or at least most-things-but-the-name, a judge might conclude that protection from domestic violence isn't the sort of thing the amendment prohibits. Before you get married, you don't have any legal rights with respect to your beloved's property, children, etc. But you do have a right not to be assaulted by anyone, including the person you're sleeping with. You also have a right to a protective order against people who repeatedly assault you (or even stalk you without laying a finger on you). The additional procedural right to get the same protective order automatically, rather than on a case-by-case basis, might not be seen as akin to getting entirely new substantive property rights, parental rights, etc.
Even if I'm right, a) the Hate Amendments really suck and b) there will be unintended consequences somewhere, and soon--my guess is the hospital-visitation or child-custody/adoption fields.
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