On a Saturday afternoon at a Wal-Mart in Lemon Grove, as hundreds of shoppers enter and exit the store, two groups – paid signature gatherers and a dozen volunteers for a “decline to sign” campaign organized by the Equality for All coalition – compete for shoppers’ attention.

As they work practically side by side, tensions flare and subside.

On this particular day, in pursuit of a shopper, a paid signature gatherer for Protectmarriage.com, an organization attempting to qualify a November ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage, pushed an Equality for All volunteer.

“[A paid signature gatherer] and I went to the same group of people and as we were walking up to them, he kind of just bumped me out of the way,” said volunteer Michelle Morris.

Morris told her supervisor who then called the police. An officer arrived to talk with the signature gatherer, who declined to give his name.

“I’m over here trying to speak to a shopper [and] they’re coming up right next to me,” the paid signature gatherer said.

The officer told the man that he must not break the “threshold of physical contact” – but the aggressive behavior was indicative of what same-sex marriage advocates say has characterized the battle to educate voters.

As the April 21 deadline nears for Protectmarriage.com to collect 700,000 signatures to qualify the initiative amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, Equality for All, a new GLBT coalition educating the public on marriage equality, is working nonstop to prevent opponents from reaching their goal.

“Through this unprecedented effort, we have had hundreds and thousands of volunteers all across the state doing this work,” said Seth Kilbourn, campaign manager for Equality for All. “And the folks in San Diego, The San Diego LGBT Center in particular, have done an amazing job recruiting volunteers and sending them out there to talk to Californians about the truth of what this amendment does.”

The campaign started in late February after GLBT state leaders began seeing paid signature gatherers circulating the Protectmarriage.com petition.

“We sighted paid signature gatherers on the street in late January and we had our people out on the street by mid-February,” said Kilbourn.

“We assumed at that point that they had 200 signature gatherers on the streets,” said Sarah Reece, project director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and currently the regional organizing coordinator for the Equality for All campaign. “We think now that that number is actually higher at about 300 to 400, which is why we need such a big team of people out staffing the locations.”

Protectmarriage.com needs to gather approximately 700,000 signatures, but given that not all the signatures it collects will be valid, “the general rule of thumb” is that it needs to collect about 1.1 million to ensure it has enough valid signatures, said Kilbourn.

“If their Web site is to be believed, they’ve already gathered 817,000 signatures. That’s not enough,” said Kilbourn. “They need to gather a few hundred thousand more.”

Back on the ground, the challenge for volunteers is competing with paid signature gatherers for shoppers’ time and patience.

“Our job is to educate the public. Their job is to get their signatures collected on their petitions. And so those things, while they’re not mutually exclusive, they do create conflict,” Reece said.

Kilbourn said paid signature gatherers often mislead the public.

“The paid signature gatherers are providing misleading information. They are doing anything they can to get people to sign the petition because every signature they receive, they get a dollar,” said Kilbourn.

One of the paid signature gatherers, who was circulating a petition for a cleaner energy bill, asked shoppers if they wanted to lower gas prices.

“Their catch phrase is ‘Would you like to lower gas prices?’ It’s a clean energy bill so it’s not going to lower gas prices. That’s their catch phrase to get people suckered in to get them to sign” petitions, among them, the marriage petition, said Morris.

“Well first of all it’s kind of weird that they have to lie about the gas thing,” said one shopper from Orange County, observing the scene Saturday. “There is a bit of a manipulation. I mean if they would just say it…It’s just better to be honest.”

One Lemon Grover resident, a shopper who signed the petition, was misled. “I’m tired of the inflation and we’re on the brink of a recession. This [clean energy bill] petition here can hopefully get the Congress to make some changes to make affordable living for everyone,” he said. When asked about the marriage petition, however, he said, “I guess they’re [Equality for All volunteers] kind of pushing same-sex marriage and I’m against that.”

As Protectmarriage.com nears its number of required signatures, Equality for All volunteers are needed more than ever, Reece said.

“In order to saturate and really cover all of the turf that we need to be at in order to educate enough of the public, we really need about 100 bodies for each shift” but the reality is that “that on any given Saturday or Sunday we have anywhere between 25 and 50 volunteers in the field,” said Reece.

To volunteer for the Equality for All campaign, e-mail to stopthepetitionsd@gmail.com or visit www.equalityforall.com.