Word: multnomah
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...Oregonians had actual marriage licenses--Canadian ones, but still. And everyone knew the Massachusetts high court was wrestling with its marriage decision, one that many activists were predicting would be favorable. They knew their constitution, like the one in Massachusetts, included sweeping guarantees of equal protection. So while Multnomah gays had won health benefits and other rights through domestic partnership just four years before, now they wanted full-on marriage, and the task of getting it fell to Roey Thorpe, B.R.O.'s executive director...
...past few months have brought soaring comparisons between the recent gay weddings in Multnomah and elsewhere and the civil disobedience of the '60s. The Boston Globe called the U.S.'s 2004 gay marriages "acts of disobedience [fueling] the engine of social change." But the story of how Oregon managed to sneak ahead of Massachusetts in the marriage drama is not a story of outsiders fighting the system but of insiders using it. It is a story of how favoritism and influence work in politics just as well when liberal women run the show--the four Multnomah commissioners who orchestrated...
...story begins not in Oregon but in Canada, where last July the top court in British Columbia--just an afternoon's drive from Multnomah County--legalized same-sex marriage. Hundreds of gay Oregonians began traveling north to wed. When they returned, flush with emotion, scores called Basic Rights Oregon (B.R.O.), the state's biggest gay group, demanding to know what it was doing to win marriage rights at home...
Like Travis County in Texas (home of Austin), Multnomah lies far left of what is largely a conservative state. A year ago, Multnomah citizens actually voted to create a county income tax, the only one in Oregon. In 2000 Al Gore and Ralph Nader together won 71% of the county's votes; 28 of the state's remaining 35 counties went to George W. Bush...
...those so-crazy-it-could-work moments: Thorpe and her advisers came to the conclusion that if they wanted marriage, they would get ... marriage licenses. It could work, one of the B.R.O. lawyers explained, because Oregon gives counties authority over those permits. And of the five Multnomah County commissioners, four had been B.R.O. allies over the years--women who had supported a B.R.O. anti-discrimination ordinance, come to B.R.O. galas and luncheons and, in the case of commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey, accepted a B.R.O. civil rights award. When Thorpe and her lobbyist Maura Roche arrived at the county building...