At The Slog Josh Feit points to an initiative that would require married couples in Washington to reproduce.

The sponsors are gay marriage advocates who say they want to put in law what they think is the state Supreme Court's absurd argument in the Defense of Marriage Act decision — Anderson v. King County — that said it's a legitimate state interest to restrict marriage to couples who can procreate. As Feit wrote in his headline, it is "Taking Anderson Literally."

The ballot summary says:

This measure would restrict marriage to a male and a female who are capable of having children together. Couples would be required to declare their ability to procreate children together in order to obtain marriage licenses. If a couple failed to procreate children within three years of marriage, their marriage would be subject to annulment. All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized." Persons in unrecognized marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

You can read the whole initiative here.

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance — which opposes the Defense of Marriage Act — says it will have two more initiatives to follow, one to prohibit divorce or separation when there are children and one that would make the act of having a child the legal equivalent of marriage.

The group says on its Web site:

Absurd? Very. But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions which make up the Andersen ruling. By getting the initiatives passed, we hope the Supreme Court will strike them down as unconstitutional and thus weaken Andersen itself. And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

Of course in order to have the full-blown absurdist argument the sponsors of I-957 will need to get signatures from 224,800 registered voters by July 6.