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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Washington is a rare outpost of optimism in gay America, and that may be because the state is moving slowly on same-sex marriage.
May 2, 2005 | It's hard to remember, now that the mood of the country feels so different, but last spring was an incredibly optimistic moment for gay rights supporters. In the days leading up to the first legal same-sex marriages in Massachusetts, something unheard of was happening in America: Straight politicians around the country, beginning with Mayor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco, were deciding that full civil equality for gay and lesbian citizens was now so urgent and important that it was worth breaking state law to accomplish.
It was a thrilling time to be a gay American. And honestly, for me, it was also a bit of an embarrassing time. The lawbreaking by officials on behalf of gay rights was migrating quickly, from San Francisco to New Paltz, N.Y.; to Sandoval County, N.M.; to Asbury Park, N.J.; to Portland, Ore. It felt as if a Berlin Wall of legal discrimination against gay people was being torn down, and here I was in Seattle, gay, in favor of same-sex-marriage rights, and doing -- well, not doing anything nearly as gutsy as Mayor Newsom. I felt ashamed. When he proudly explained his actions to reporters by saying things like, "There are certain principles in life that transcend patience," I remember thinking: What am I waiting for?
Last month, when the Oregon Supreme Court nullified some 3,000 Newsom-inspired marriages performed for same-sex couples in Oregon in March 2004, I recalled those feelings from last spring, but without the sense of optimism. A year ago, more than 7,000 of these marriages were conducted in five states across the country. But with the Oregon Supreme Court's decision, and earlier similar decisions in New York and California, all of these "outlaw" marriages have now been either nullified or invalidated.
Whatever future generations end up calling last spring's spree of outlaw unions (is the "Gay Spring of Love" too corny for the history books?), the phenomenon is now officially dead. But perhaps we can learn something from its demise.
Here's what I did last spring after Newsom shamed me into action. In Seattle, where I work as a freelance writer, I began writing articles in a local alternative newsweekly encouraging politicians here to follow Newsom's lead. I wanted them to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in defiance of the state law banning same-sex unions, just as Newsom had done in California.
It turned out that Ron Sims, county executive for King County, which contains Seattle, was the man who controlled the local levers of marriage license power. That seemed promising. Sims appeared to be someone who could easily be persuaded to follow Newsom's example. A black politician who promoted himself as someone who always chose the right thing over the politically expedient thing, Sims had been active in black civil rights issues during his youth and now publicly favored same-sex marriage out of the same impulse toward social justice.
As I pressured Sims to break the law, I found that I had landed squarely on one side of a deep divide cleaving the gay rights movement. In one camp were activists, most of them in the higher echelons of the movement, who had been working steadily for years on changing this country, law by law, into a more friendly environment for homosexuals. They saw lawbreaking as risky, and even anathema, to gay interests, since respect for the law is often all that protects minorities. One of them, a prominent Seattle lawyer who is a leader of the national gay rights group Lambda Legal, told me last year that while he was drawn to the idea of breaking unjust laws that discriminate against gays, he worried about the precedent it would set. He wondered, What would stop people who oppose gay rights from demanding that laws protecting gays be broken by their politicians, based on a similar logic of righteous urgency?
In the other camp were gay activists who felt the same impatience as Newsom, or had been newly infected by it. These were the types of people who last spring had taken to quoting Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" ("Wait has almost always meant never") and wanted full equality for gays and lesbians, immediately and everywhere. Never mind that it took four years of plodding legal work for same-sex unions to become a possibility in Massachusetts -- the fact that one state had legalized gay marriage was a powerful antidote to the idea that it could never happen in America. And now that it had somewhere, the injustice of having to wait for the politicians in other states to come around was unbearable. This was the side I aligned myself with last spring, the side that was marching to the King County Administration Building and barraging Sims with e-mails telling him to act now or be considered a moral coward.
A year later, it seems I owe Sims an apology. The brief spree of "outlaw" marriages has not created more opportunities for same-sex unions. Instead, it has helped fuel a backlash against gay rights across the country. Constitutional bans against same-sex marriage now exist in 17 states, including, not coincidentally, Oregon. They will take years, if not a decade or more, to reverse. And now 18 other states are considering constitutional bans. Even the election of George W. Bush in 2004 may have been, to a degree that has been much debated since, a reaction to the television images of gays getting married in San Francisco and elsewhere.
