How Oregon Eloped

ROBBIE MCCLARAN FOR TIME
The First Couple: Newlyweds Mary Li and Rebecca Kennedy at home with their daughter Ava in Portland

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The Oregon constitution dictates that "no law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges or immunities which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens." Sowle largely based a quick preliminary opinion on that language: the county not only could offer marriage licenses to gays. It had to.

Sowle's speed she made up her mind on gay marriage by mid-February presented a delicate problem for Thorpe and the county officials, since they were aiming for March 10. Fortunately, Sowle had not yet written a formal opinion calling for licenses for gays, so there was nothing to make public. Sowle denies she was deliberately stalling to help politicians get past the filing deadline. "I was working 12-, 14-hour days. I was working weekends," she says, "on a lot of things," including a review of the county charter. Sowle also wanted a second opinion, which was still being drafted.

For Thorpe, everything was going as planned until Feb. 12. On that day, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who in 1955 founded the nation's first major lesbian group, exchanged vows at San Francisco city hall. Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had taken office the previous month, had ordered officials to license same-sex marriages; eventually thousands of gays showed up. Even though Newsom was acting in defiance of a California "defense of marriage" law defining marriage as one man, one woman a law that doesn't exist in Oregon the marriages he engineered became huge news.

Thorpe was shocked by how many gay San Franciscans showed up to wed. "We had actually thought we should identify some couples who would want to marry," she says. "We had no idea." Now they knew: hundreds would come, maybe more.

But Thorpe had to keep them from coming until March 10. For weeks, Oregon's leading gay activist discouraged gay people--"around the clock"--from going to the county to demand marriage licenses. Thorpe told couples that B.R.O. was planning to submit a sheaf of license applications at once--"Would you be willing to just wait a couple of weeks?" she would ask. If they were persistent, she told them about the filing deadline, "and people got that."

At least one same-sex couple showed up at the county building anyway, and they ended up in the office of county attorney Sowle. Even though Sowle had decided that Multnomah must grant same-sex marriage licenses, she did not provide one. Instead, she obfuscated. "I said, 'You know, I'm working on this opinion, and if I could prevail on you to wait a couple of days, I would appreciate it a lot. It would be a very good thing,'" she says.

Sowle laughs nervously. I ask whether she felt uncomfortable with that reply.

"You bet I did," she says. "I felt very uncomfortable ... I had had conversations with individual board members the ones that were in on it to say, 'If a couple comes, what do you expect me to do? I can try to talk them out of it, but what if I can't?'"

"You knew the commissioners were delaying for a political reason, right?" I ask.

"I knew that," she says. "Of course I knew that."

Sowle's justification for her secrecy is that she had not yet finished the final version of the opinion, which needed to be just right. Also, she says that as an attorney, she had to keep her discussions with her clients the county and its commissioners private.

But she also failed to divulge the truth to another one of her clients, the fifth county commissioner. Lonnie Roberts, a pro-life former truck driver, represents the conservative eastern Multnomah exurbs. A big man with large-frame glasses and a wide plane of a face, Roberts told me he would have gone to the media if he had been told of the marriage plan in advance. He dislikes the idea of gay marriage, but the way the county enacted it bothers him even more: "I would not have stood for the clandestine approach."

In the end, however, the clandestine approach failed. Sowle had her uncomfortable meeting with the lesbian couple the last week of February, and by March 1, rumors of the impending marriages had somehow leaked to reporters. That morning, Thorpe and the county officials who were in on the plan held a contentious five-hour meeting over when to begin issuing licenses. Thorpe wanted to delay, but others were worried that a gay couple would sue the county or that conservatives who had heard the leaks would pre-emptively sue. An exhausted Thorpe finally conceded.

On March 2, commission chair Linn was in Washington on a college-scouting trip with her son. A county official called Linn on her cell phone to tell her that Sowle's final opinion had been issued. Linn gave the go order. Back in Portland, commissioner Roberts who had successfully been kept in the dark since January heard about the impending marriages on his pickup truck's radio.