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As it turned out, Sowle, 55, proved one of the county's most enthusiastic gay-marriage proponents. (Later, people would whisper that the short-haired woman who lives with her mother is a lesbian. Sowle chuckles: "Both of my previous husbands would say I'm not.") On her own, she had begun to explore the marriage question back in November, when the Massachusetts court issued its pro-gay-marriage ruling. As the attorney who has to defend the county when it's sued for discrimination, she was keenly aware of the liabilities her jurisdiction could face if a gay couple demanded a license. "I looked at it from that standpoint of, What's gonna happen when the couple sues us because we say no? And I did my research, and I said, 'Gee, we're gonna lose.'"
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."