be "between a man and a woman". An amendment was also passed stating that the Romanian state would not recognise foreign same-sex marriages. Article 259(1) of the Civil Code states that marriage is "the freely consented union between one man and one woman". In addition, Article 277(1) of the code emphasizes that "marriage shall be prohibited between persons of the same sex". Attempts to amend the Constitution Article 48 of the Constitution of Romania states: Amending the Romanian Constitution requires approval by the people through a referendum. Until 2014, referendums required a 50% voter turnout to be valid, but changes to electoral law subsequently reduced this to 30%. June 2013 attempts On 5 June 2013, a parliamentary committee tasked with reviewing the Constitution voted to include sexual orientation as a protected ground against discrimination. The same committee voted, the following day, to change the text on marriage from "the family is founded on the freely consented marriage of the spouses" to "the family is founded on the freely consented marriage between a man and a woman alone", thus banning same-sex marriage. Green MP Remus Cernea described the move to ban same-sex marriage as "clearly a democratic setback; Romania should now be included among the most homophobic countries in the world." Many NGOs opposed the move to ban same-sex marriage and released a common statement arguing that the provision prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation should remain in the Constitution. Florin Buhuceanu, the executive director of ACCEPT, said: "We see the scale of schizophrenia: one day you accept sexual orientation as a constitutional protected ground [against discrimination], the next day you act discriminately on the basis of sexual orientation proposing a different treatment for these citizens of Romania of this sexual orientation." Csaba Ferenc Asztalos, president of the National Council for Combating Discrimination, thought that the new amendments "are brought to the table just to manipulate, just to incite, just to serve other goals then a real problem (...) [and] that at this point we are channeling the societal hatred through acts like the Constitution only, for example, to have [political] quorum (...) and this is not normal". Faced with backlash from civil society and domestic and international organizations, the committee retracted both amendments. Save Romania Union was the only party with parliamentary representation that positioned itself against a potential referendum to amend the constitutional definition of the family and ban