Skip to main contentWeddings are always risky--logistics are a nightmare, the guest list is a pain and someone's feelings end up getting hurt. Just ask Lonnie Roberts.
Last week's historic decision to allow gay and lesbian partners to get legally hitched in Oregon's most populous county stunned just about everyone: the public, the politicians and the press corps. Couples rejoiced. Critics cursed. Most just shook their heads in bewilderment.
While the local news outlets have more than made up for lost time, there are still many puzzling aspects of the story that have been unreported or, until now, largely unexamined.
After a week of putting the pieces together, we've come away with a few conclusions.
First, whether you like or lament Multnomah County's interpretation of the state constitution, you've got to give County Chair Diane Linn and her three allies on the county commission some credit. For weeks, in a building that has more leaks than the Chinese Garden, they kept their plans from Commissioner Roberts and the media.
Second, despite the carefully worded statements from the commissioners that they were only following their attorney's legal opinion, this was more than just a policy change. From the collaboration with a gay activist group to the (failed) efforts to postpone the announcement until after the candidate filing deadline, this was a political--aggressively political--act.
Third, in their pursuit of doing what they thought was right (the radical idea of treating people equally), Linn & Co. may have lost sight of the big picture. This matter was headed for the courts no matter what they did. Allowing more than a thousand gay marriages to take place without public debate shouldn't influence that outcome--but it did give critics the chance to rail against the process.
Finally, for many of the couples who joined Portland's velvet revolution, the political machinations were irrelevant. They were told they had the opportunity to do something they'd thought was impossible, and they seized the moment, with a mix of giddiness and fear--which isn't uncommon, in quickie weddings or others.
Here's our shorthand history of how they got that chance to say "I do."
Summer 2003: Blame Canada
While last week's whirlwind ceremonies and outbreaks of protest took most people by surprise, for Roey Thorpe, the activist most instrumental in Portland's gay-marriage uprising, the story starts months--even years--ago.
Thorpe, the 41-year-old lesbian who runs Basic Rights Oregon, the state's leading gay-rights group, still rues her experience as a city council member in Ithaca, N.Y., in the mid-'90s. There, she watched a gay couple launch an abortive--and politically disastrous--effort to win a marriage license.
So when gay marriage begins to percolate across North America last summer, she takes notice. And within scattered headlines, she detects seismic change.
June 10: Ontario's appeals court orders the province to open marriage to same-sex couples, effective immediately. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announces that Canada's federal government won't try to stop gay marriage, and by early July British Columbia begins marrying gays and lesbians. Soon, gay Oregonians begin returning from weekends in Vancouver with unusual souvenirs.
"We started getting calls from people saying, 'OK, we're married. What are our rights?,'" says Thorpe, who came to Portland to take over Basic Rights three years ago. "And we said, 'Well, we really don't know. Why don't we take your names?'"
Summer and Fall 2003: Black robes, the Bay State and the law books
The same month things start brewing in Ontario, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, quashing state laws against sodomy. Coupled with Canada, the 6-3 ruling galvanizes Thorpe.
"It was like: Boom! Boom!" she says. But the third boom doesn't come for another five months.
Nov. 18: Massachusetts' Supreme Court declares the Commonwealth has no constitutional grounds on which to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses.
"Have you read The Tipping Point?" Thorpe asks. Journalist Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller examines the often-explosive, epidemic spread of social trends. "Last fall, I start to think to myself, we're tipping."
Political pressure on Basic Rights from within the gay community ratchets up. National gay-rights groups turn an eye toward Oregon, one of few states without a so-called Defense of Marriage Act on its books. As the holidays approach, Thorpe begins quietly asking gay-friendly lawyers to look at Oregon's marriage statute and constitution.
"They came back to me and said, "Oh, my,'" she says. The legal research gives Thorpe hope that Multnomah County--the branch of government responsible for administering state marriage laws and a stronghold of elected allies of gay rights--might not fight a request.
"We thought it would be better if the county would agree we were right and save us the trouble of a lawsuit," says Oregon American Civil Liberties Union director David Fidanque, whose group consulted with Basic Rights. "If there's a way to avoid a lawsuit, we'll do it."
Before going any further, Thorpe calls national gay-rights organizations like Freedom to Marry and Lambda Legal. She wants to know if pushing for gay marriage in Oregon could imperil other political and legal efforts.
They tell her to do what she needs to do. And so Thorpe makes an appointment with two of the elected officials who hold the keys to Multnomah County's bridal suite: Commissioners Lisa Naito and Serena Cruz.
January 2004: The First Push
Jan. 27: At 10 am, Thorpe and BRO lobbyist Maura Roche walk into Cruz's office and meet with the two commissioners, neither of whom have been told exactly what they are meeting about.
"It was very mysterious," Cruz recalls. "Lisa and I were thinking, 'Are we in trouble for something?'"
Seated in front of the giant glass window separating Cruz's office from the hall, Thorpe and Roche plant the seeds for gay marriage in Oregon. Since the state has no Defense of Marriage act, no legislature in session and a sympathetic state court, the two suggest that the time is ripe to ask County Attorney Agnes Sowle for a legal opinion about whether the county should approve gay marriages.
After securing a promise to sic Sowle on the issue, Thorpe and Roche share the plan with Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey and County Chair Diane Linn. To avoid violating the county's open-meetings law--which requires advance public notice any time more than two commissioners meet to discuss policy--they visit each commissioner separately.
A few hours later, Cruz summons Sowle to her office. When she arrives, Naito hurries in behind her and shuts the door. After sufficiently imparting the gravity of the situation, the two commissioners ask Sowle to look into whether the county could issue same-sex marriage licenses.
"When we asked Agnes, she said that her initial impression was that we would be required, not just allowed," Naito recalls. "I was shocked."
And so the four commissioners begin their clandestine campaign, agreeing to keep the issue as quiet as possible, with one staff member each acting as a liaison. As Cruz says, each staffer would make sure they were "all in the loop"--except, of course, for Commissioner Lonnie Roberts. A Democrat who is conservative only by Multnomah County standards, Roberts favors civil unions but not full-on marriage for same-sex couples.
Why the secrecy? For one thing, on a commission not known for its members' mutual esteem, everyone gets bypassed occasionally. Roberts, for example, conspired last year with Naito and Rojo de Steffey to strip Linn of the power to grant library director Molly Raphael a salary some thought exorbitant.
But it's not Roberts' own political views that have the commissioners worried. Roberts staffer Gary Walker, a former sheriff's captain, is a good friend of Bruce McCain, a high-ranking sheriff's administrator who has served as an attorney for the Oregon Citizens Alliance. The group, led by Bible teacher Lon Mabon, spearheaded a series of anti-gay ballot measures in the '80s and '90s. If Roberts' office leaks the county's plans to gay-marriage opponents, the commissioners reason, negative press or even a court injunction might follow.
Throughout the winter, Basic Rights fields phone calls from gay and lesbian couples demanding to know what the group is doing to push for marriage rights. Besides counseling patience, BRO assembles a list of couples anxious to slip each other rings.
And from this list, they pluck their poster children, the couples they want to thrust into the limelight first, if the county's ruling breaks their way.
Basic Rights doesn't go so far as to do criminal-background or credit checks. But the activists talk to couples, talk to savvy, connected members of the gay community, and think hard on who would make the best symbols of a society-rocking revolution.
"They had to be comfortable with discussing their relationship and family in public, and be fairly articulate," Thorpe says of BRO's short list. "We were looking in general for people who were appealing, that you would feel you knew them if you talked to them."
February 2004: Stolen Thunder
As Basic Rights pieces together its plan--and County Attorney Sowle weighs the constitutional merits of its case--another tremor rumbles the West Coast.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom orders the city government to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on Feb. 12. As pandemonium erupts--and hundreds of couples marry--by the Bay, Thorpe takes notes.
"We realized there'd be huge lines of people," she says. "Our field staff started packing up boxes of everything volunteers would need. What would people need standing in line? What would they need to fill out the licenses? On the other side, the ACLU was ready for a negative decision. They were considering bringing a suit. We were ready in either event."
The next week, Sowle drafts a preliminary opinion in favor of granting marriage licenses, just as media outlets and gay-rights groups clamor to find out how the county would react to a "San Francisco-like" circumstance.
According to Sowle's interpretation of Oregon law, denying licenses is a violation of the state constitution's equal-protection clause--regardless of what any of the statutes say about defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. And if the commissioners ignore a flagrant violation of the constitution, Sowle claims, they could each be held personally liable in a lawsuit.
Sowle maintains that her decision is strictly based on the law.
"I'm not gay," says Sowle, who had a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. "My only personal agenda here is to do my job well and protect the county from liability. My reputation stands on this more than anything else."
Sowle immediately shares her findings with Cruz and Naito. Naito insists that Sowle get a second opinion from a constitutional lawyer at a prominent Portland law firm. Sowle decides on Charles Hinkle of Stoel Rives, a Yale Law graduate who has argued several constitutional law cases and serves as The Oregonian's First Amendment lawyer.
It's a risky choice. Hinkle is gay and has worked with the ACLU on gay-rights issues, which could expose the county to complaints of bias.
"Agnes' response to that was that she considered Charlie to be the premier constitutional lawyer in the state, and she wouldn't discriminate against him," explains Naito.
Most legal ethics experts would agree that one's personal beliefs don't always preclude professionalism; after all, no one would say that Thurgood Marshall shouldn't have argued the landmark civil-rights case Brown v. Board of Education just because he was black.
The commissioners are in no hurry to get an opinion back from Hinkle, though. In fact, county staffers try to push the timetable back beyond one date: March 10, the filing deadline for political candidates.
Rojo de Steffey, Naito and Roberts are all up for reelection, and the incumbents aren't eager to invite the hassle of campaigning for their seats by taking a stand on the issue when opponents can still file against them.
Late February: Burning Bush
Feb. 24: President George W. Bush announces his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Later that same day, WW columnist Byron Beck sends an email to Portland Mayor Vera Katz, hoping to sound her out on the subject. An aide calls back. Hold tight, the staffer says. Something big is going down on March 10 and the mayor will be glad to share her thoughts then. Beck, who knows that a prominent national gay-rights activist is planning a trip to Portland in the coming weeks, begins to piece together what is happening.
Word is also filtering through the county bureaucracy: get ready.
Feb. 25-26: County security staffer Tom Simpson emails a proposed action plan to Sowle and the commissioners' staffers in case the "trigger is pulled." Items on the agenda include "Staff up security," "Prepare signage" and--this being Portland--"Notify coffee cart." County employees who issue marriage licenses receive plans to cope with the extreme demand.
Nowhere on the list is "Hold public hearings." As Linn later explains, making administrative rules is something she does every day, without fanfare or backlash (except in the case of library salaries and snow-day pay).
Sowle agrees. "If this had been anything else, no one would have been the wiser," she says.
Yet this is something else, a point made not only by critics but by allies such as the ACLU's Fidanque. "What was Linn going to say? We're going to have hearings about whether we're going to continue to violate the rights of thousands?" he asks. "It would have been reckless of her not to do it. The action she took is now subject to judicial review, just as the actions of hundreds of public officials are subjected on any day of the week."
Basic Rights, meanwhile, has its own set of marching orders, including finding a public chapel big enough to corral the expected media storm. Though March 10 is still the unofficial target date, by Feb. 27 Thorpe begins feeling "like the decision was imminent." She inventories local venues. The criteria: size, security and the ability to be booked on a moment's notice.
While they don't yet know where the hoped-for nuptials will go down, advocates know who they want to wave the magic wand. Retired Supreme Court Justice Betty Roberts, they reckon, makes the perfect officiant: a prominent civil servant, safely retired and willing.
"We thought about ships' captains," Thorpe says. "We thought about all kinds of things. We asked Betty, and she said it all depended on her schedule. She said if the county is willing, she wouldn't second-guess them."
Meanwhile, Linn and Naito head to Washington D.C., for a conference for the National Association of County Officials. They're scheduled to return March 2, well before the big March 10 announcement. As John Ball, the county's chief operating officer, recalls, "When they left, the assumption was nothing would be done that week."
March 1: In Like a Lion
Still awaiting Hinkle's opinion, Sowle gets a call midmorning from WW. Asked if she had looked into the legality of same-sex marriages, Sowle replies, "If somebody came in today, I'd say I don't have an opinion" and adds that "I don't think there will be a policy decision until I look into it." (These statements lead WW to report in its March 3 issue that Sowle said she hadn't yet looked into the issue.)
As Sowle talks her way out of a jam on the phone (providing what she would later characterize as "very literal" answers), representatives of Basic Rights and the ACLU huddle with county staffers in the conference room next to Linn's office hashing out the timing of the county's upcoming announcement. Thorpe wants to wait. The politicians are getting antsy.
Immense pressure from gay couples itching to get hitched, plus the knowledge that their plans are leaking, leads the commissioners to drop the idea of stalling until the 10th. Anticipating Hinkle's favorable second opinion, the county officials decide they will push for an announcement that week.
The precipitous timing catches Basic Rights off-guard. Thorpe has envisioned a scenario where her group's handpicked couples would request licenses, and Sowle's ruling would come to light as the county agreed to the request.
At this point, however, Thorpe realizes that she is losing control over the chain of events.
March 2: The Dam Breaks
The Basic Rights staff is at it early, divvying up a to-do list. Final drafts of both legal opinions arrive at the county building, and Sowle walks upstairs to hand-deliver them to each commissioner's office. Roberts isn't in his office.
County staffer Becca Uherbelau calls Linn on her cell phone in D.C. and tells her the opinion is final. Linn then makes the famed "administrative decision."
From Sen. Ron Wyden's D.C. office, Linn calls Wyden (who is on the Senate floor) and the two congressmen with Portland districts, David Wu and Earl Blumenauer. As a courtesy, she also phones Washington County Chair Tom Bryant. The result is that unelected staffers in Washington, D.C., and Hillsboro know the county's plans before Commissioner Roberts.
By late morning, rumblings reach the office of Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, who inevitably will have to rule on the county's legal interpretation. But there is still no official word from Linn's office. Shortly before noon, WW gets a call from a political aide ouside of county government who's heard the county will issue licenses Wednesday. After ending his show at 3 pm, KXL talk-show host Lars Larson gets a similar tip. KXL news staffers flood the state with calls. One is to Mary Ellen Glynn, Governor Ted Kulongoski's press secretary. She's stunned: "It was the first the office had heard about it." Glynn and other aides start calling the county and gay-rights groups.
At 3:15 pm, a KGW-TV cameraman gets a call from a county source about the rumors. A Channel 8 crew joins KXL staffers and governor's aides in the race to confirm the news. The governor's office eventually gets to John Ball. "Is it true?" they ask. Ball promises to call back with an answer.
The timing baffles the governor's office. Kulongoski isn't up for re-election, but scores of fellow Democrats are, including Myers and several key state legislators. But most on their minds is Rives Kistler, the only openly gay state Supreme Court justice in the country, whom Kulongoski appointed last year and who, at this point, has no challenger in his first election bid.
Mayoral chief of staff Judy Tuttle gets a call from Cruz at about 3:30 pm: The wedding plans are on for Wednesday.
A half-hour later, state attorney general spokesman Kevin Neely calls the county. "I mostly called to say, 'Please, tell me it's not true,'" he says. They tell him it's true. Within minutes, KXL radio breaks the news.
Ball calls the governor's office back at about 4:30 pm to say a final decision has not been made. He later defends that answer, saying, "I accurately reported that we were still in discussion. Diane was on a plane somewhere and would have the opportunity to pull the plug up until the press conference Wednesday morning."
Commissioner Cruz finally calls Lonnie Roberts at 4:45 pm. It's too late; he's heard from the sheriff.
All local TV stations lead the 5 o'clock news with the story. Linn's office issues a media advisory an hour later, announcing a news conference on the matter at 9 am the next morning.
By the time TV stations go
"live to the scene" for their late newscasts, couples are lining up for marriage licenses at the county HQ.
March 3: Goin' to the Hilton, and We're...
Wandering the halls of the county building before the scheduled 9 am press conference, Rojo de Steffey runs into Mary Li, a lesbian county employee who's all dressed up. Rojo de Steffey asks why and is told, "I'm getting married today."
Surprised that someone she knows will be first to tie the same-sex knot in Oregon, Rojo de Steffey makes her way down to the Portland Hilton at 10 am, where, along with the Keller Auditorium, space has been rented by Basic Rights for wedding ceremonies.
In the lobby, guests are given either yellow snap bracelets or press passes and take the elevator up to a suite on the 21st floor to watch civil-rights history unfold.
The county gives out more than 400 same-sex marriage licenses today. Sowle, Linn, Naito, Cruz and Rojo de Steffey all receive threats by phone and email.
March 4-5: The Mourning After
In the words of Serena Cruz, the four commissioners "hit the trifecta": The Oregonian blasts them on the front page, the editorial page and in Steve Duin's column.
At 5 am, Sowle's 80-year-old fundamentalist Christian mother reads Duin's invective-laden denunciation aloud to her as she gets ready for another day at work. Duin fashions her "Saint Agnes, the patron saint of betrothed couples, Girl Scouts and various virgins" and suggests that every county official but Roberts be purged.
"My mother laid the paper down on the table," Sowle says, "and she told me, 'These people aren't smart enough to understand the difference between your legal opinion and you as a person.'"
By 3:45 pm Thursday, the Keller has shut down, but across the street, on the overlapping concrete planks that make up Keller Fountain, about two dozen couples are still lined up, filling out paperwork. Two gray-haired women in jeans stand before a justice of the peace, exchanging vows and rings, while other couples--some clutching spring flowers--stand shivering in the rain, waiting their turn.
Friday morning, Linn and her staff are still doing damage control. Disorder peeks out. In an interview with WW, for example, top aide Kathy Turner says she's unsure whether she'll release copies of Sowle's and Hinkle's legal opinions--documents posted on the county's website the day before.
"This isn't fun for us," Linn says. "This isn't what I'd choose for Multnomah County to be involved in right now."
Still, she expresses just one major regret: not having gone to the Oregonian editorial board and explained herself earlier. "The last thing I need is for anyone to think I'm sneaky and underhanded," she says.
Friday afternoon, just before 2 pm, James E. Leuenberger, a Lake Oswego lawyer who once represented OCA leader Lon Mabon, files paperwork to run against Justice Kistler.
The Aftermath:
March 6: On Saturday afternoon, Roey Thorpe does something that wouldn't have been possible four days before.
In a ceremony at their home, Thorpe and her partner of nearly three years tie the knot--in a moment of joy more rushed than Thorpe would like.
"It's a little bittersweet for me, to be honest," she says. "I would have liked to plan it so all my friends could have been there. But we felt like we needed to get married quickly. I think a lot of people feel that way."
The celebration doesn't mark the end of the maelstrom. On Monday, March 8, the county's decision survives its first legal challenge when Judge Dale Koch denies opponents' request for an injunction to stop the county from issuing licenses. The coming days will bring more threats, more scolding from the daily paper and a recall effort aimed at county commissioners. But for a moment, at least, the political becomes very personal, as Thorpe's nuptials underscore the high stakes for which she and the county chose to play.
WWeek 2015