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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.
On March 3, 418 same-sex couples received marriage licenses. Nearly everyone was overwhelmed with emotion--not just the couples but also the reporters, cops and even snack vendors, many of whom were wiping away tears. "It was like a wall of emotion," says Thorpe, who three days later married her partner. "I've had civil rights victories. But I've never in my life experienced anything like this. It changed my life. I think it changed the lives of everybody who was involved with it."