Skip to main contentLast Saturday, my neighbor, Mr. Dinsdale, stopped me on the street and wanted to know if I had filled out my ballot yet. I hadn't.
"Have you?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "I voted for Roosevelt, but this is the most important election of my life."
This is what I know about Dick Dinsdale, my two-doors-down neighbor: He's a second-generation Portlander who has lived in the same home for more than 50 years. He has three children and five grandchildren, one of whom is a former Rose Festival Queen. I know that his wife, Jane, passed away about a month ago, after the couple had celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary. I also know that Mr. Dinsdale, who is 82, recently found out he needs open heart and gall-bladder surgery.
Considering his circumstances, I didn't expect him to be worrying much about next week's election. But Mr. Dinsdale, a retired salesman, wanted to talk politics--and I was ready to listen.
"The war in Iraq was a big mistake," he said, as he expressed his strong support for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. He says he's concerned about upcoming Supreme Court appointments and the war on terror, but he's also focusing on state and local issues. "Have you ever heard the phrase, 'All politics is local'?" he asked.
Which brings me to Mr. Dinsdale and Amendment 36.
The issue of marriage rights for gay people, more than any other on the ballot, has caused a yawning generation gap, according to Roey Thorpe, director of Basic Rights Oregon. She believes it is age, more than any other factor, that separates supporters and opponents of the measure that seeks to write into the Oregon Constitution a definition of marriage as a legal bond between one man and one woman.
"Older voters have a difficult time expanding their concept of marriage to include same-sex couples," Thorpe says. "The younger the voter, the easier this is."
That sounds so simple, so definitive, until you meet my neighbor, Mr. Dinsdale, who says he doesn't know if he's ever had a close friend or family member who is gay. Yet he is strongly opposed to Measure 36.
"It's a folly to change the constitution over this," he says. "It will lead to other evils. I think personal behavior, as long as it within the law, is nobody's business."
He was infuriated by the phone call he received from the Yes on 36 campaign. "When I told them that I had voted no on the measure, the caller got mad and said, 'In Massachusetts, public-school teachers are teaching a pro-gay lifestyle to children starting in kindergarten.' I told him that I no longer wanted to comment and cut him off."
Mr. Dinsdale says it was his wife, a former legal secretary, who helped him open his eyes to appreciate the reality of discrimination. "She was denied the right to go to college due to the Depression," he says, "but she was smart and she educated me."
Which he, in turn, believes he can do for others. Including me.
After months of watching the issue of gay marriage tear apart communities, families and friends, I was reassured to hear an experienced voice of reason. Someone who is old enough to have seen the world change, yet who is willing to help change it, once again, with his vote.
WWeek 2015