The national media will be focusing on Massachusetts next week, and understandably so. What will likely be lost in the uproar and the weeping and gnashing of teeth is what started this ball rolling in the first place. Multnomah County, OR, where my former home, Portland, is located, has quietly become the capital of gay marriage, backed by a judge on the Oregon Circuit Court.
In a little noticed decision last month, overshadowed by the news from Massachusetts (not to mention Iraq), Oregon Circuit Court Judge Frank Bearden ruled for the first time in U.S. history that a state must "accept and register" marriages of same-sex couples. In March and April, Multnomah County issued marriage licenses to 3,022 gay couples, some of whom sued after the state then refused to recognize those marriages. Bearden's ruling in their favor means that until a higher court says otherwise, those 6,044 lesbians and gays are as married as any heterosexuals who have tied the knot.
The story, though, goes back even farther- to last July in British Columbia.
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.
This is the story of what can happen once the genie got out of the bottle. It's also the story of what can happen when one group decides that they've had enough of being treated as second-class citizens. Regardless of how you feel about gays and homosexuality in general, these folks are people in the same way that you and I are. You may not approve of their lifestyle, but does that give you the right to deny them the right to live life as they choose? I would submit that it does not, because most any reason used by Social Conservatives to "justify" such discrimination is based on fear and ignorance. Nice try.
