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The 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.
The answer: nothing. Though a few B.R.O. members had been pushing marriage for years, until British Columbia's decision, same-sex marriage didn't seem to be a viable possibility to many gay activists. But now some gay 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.
Thorpe is a warm, Falstaffian 41-year-old who paints her nails fire-engine red. She has a mop of frizzy, streaked hair and a tree-of-life tattoo above her enormous left breast. Even adversaries acknowledge that Thorpe runs a shrewd, deeply entrenched organization. "B.R.O. has usually been on the defensive, but they have also been persistent," says Kevin Mannix, who chairs the state G.O.P. "This is an example of persistence paying off. Then again, nobody should expect to have the kind of secret access to public officials that occurred here."
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.
It was in this context that Thorpe and B.R.O.'s informal group of legal advisers began pondering how to approach the marriage issue. What about a ballot measure? Too expensive; too risky. Legislation? Impossible with a Senate split 15 to 15. So why not do what they did in Massachusetts: sue the state and let the case work its way up? "We felt that was too time consuming [and] might bring on a backlash without us having actually gained something," says Thorpe. "We knew that anything that happened would end up in court at some point." With that outcome in mind, Thorpe says, the question became, "How do you position yourself in a way that's both general and personal? [The answer] would be to actually marry couples. It would be to use couples to illustrate what this would mean ... We realized there was great advantage in having people get married. Then we wouldn't be talking about a theoretical set of rights. We'd be talking about rights that people already had, and our opponents would be"--Thorpe pauses, savoring the thought--"in a position where they had to argue why they should take those away."