Then Comes Marriage
Seattle Says "I Do," King County Says "We Won't."
Tools
Until last week, the fight for same-sex marriage rights had only one toehold on the West Coast. Then suddenly, in the span of five days, the movement shot northward from San Francisco. First it scored a big victory in Portland, where feisty county officials decided to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and then it arrived in Seattle, where a lawsuit destined for the state supreme court was filed Monday, opening yet another front in the national battle to end legal discrimination against homosexuals.
This week, gay rights protesters here have been marching in the streets, bible thumpers have arrived shouting about God's anger, and elected officials have been contorting themselves trying to seem both gay-friendly and law-abiding at a time when the spotlight is on Washington State law and its decidedly unfriendly attitude toward gays. Here's a look at how the opening round of Washington's gay-marriage fight unfolded--from the behind-the-scenes planning to the city sidewalks--as well as a look at the next steps:
Stranger Personals
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3 Having heard that same-sex marriage licenses might be issued, hundreds of gay and lesbian couples stood under a cold rain outside the Multnomah County administration building in Portland. When county commissioners announced their conclusion that Oregon's constitution requires same-sex marriage rights, people such as John Doyle, 39, were ecstatic. Doyle walked into the marriage license office and emerged triumphantly with legal recognition for his relationship of 13 years with Sean Brown, 41. Tears in his eyes, Doyle declared, "I finally feel like a full citizen."
The images of gay marriages from Portland resonated in Seattle in a way that similar images from San Francisco and New Paltz, New York, had not. Here was our neighbor to the south, a city we like to think of as nice-but-not-quite-Seattle, now ahead of us on the civil rights issue of our time. Overnight, Washington gained the ignominious distinction of being the last state on the West Coast in which gay and lesbian couples had no legal way to marry.
Gay community leaders here were immediately inundated by angry and frustrated callers demanding action. "My phone started ringing off the hook," said Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women's Law Center, one of the groups that filed the landmark gay-marriage lawsuit in Seattle this week. State Representative Ed Murray, senior among the legislature's four openly gay members, says his office was receiving more calls than it has fielded on any issue in years. People were telling him he was a coward for not doing something.
That night leaders of seven groups working to advance gay rights in this state met at the Seattle LGBT Community Center on Capitol Hill. The Women's Law Center dropped its bombshell: It was planning to go to court to overturn Washington State's laws against gay marriage--and it was going to do it in five days, on Monday, March 8. "We just decided it couldn't wait," Stone said.
The assembled group was told to keep the news quiet.
THURSDAY, MARCH 4 While those who had attended the meeting stayed mum, just about every news outlet in town was asking, "Could what happened in Portland happen in Seattle?" The answer from King County Executive Ron Sims, who has authority over issuing marriage licenses, was simple: No.
Sims claimed his hands were tied by Washington's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage in the state as between one man and one woman. This was an argument that The Stranger had already been questioning for more than a week. Fact is, California has the same type of state law against gay marriage, and yet the mayor of San Francisco, rather than saying his hands were tied, was willing to break the law in order to change it. Sims wouldn't budge, but he was starting to feel the type of heat no politician likes, especially a politician running for governor.
Some of it came from his own backyard, with Democrats on the county council, like Dwight Pelz, kicking up dirt in the form of a possible ordinance ordering Sims to act. A plan was set to bring the ordinance up soon, but local gay rights leaders found out and pressured the council to hold off. Their concerns were the same as those that led them to keep quiet about the lawsuit that was in the works:
First, gay rights leaders didn't want to provoke the state legislature, which was entering the closing days of its session, into passing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (Such a move would set gay rights here back for years, as state courts would no longer have the opportunity to interpret the state constitution as supporting gay rights.) Second, with the gay community already riled up about the lack of marriage rights here, there was a growing danger that some angry gay couple would decide to file a lawsuit on their own. The Women's Law Center, along with the local chapter of the gay legal group Lambda Legal, had spent years studying state marriage law and planning legal strategies for challenging it in court. They didn't want some pissed-off bozo, stirred into action by a vetoed county-council ordinance, to get there first.
And if Sims was pressured into breaking the law and issuing same-sex marriage licenses, some of the gay rights lawyers felt it could hamper their legal strategy.
"Having the genesis of a legal challenge be with an act that is outside of the legal authority of the county could be problematic," said Jamie Pedersen, co-chair of Lambda Legal. Even more concerning to Pedersen--at least on this day--was that the case not appear as if it were Civilized Leaders in Seattle/King County v. Backward, Bigoted Heathens in the Rest of the State. "It's going to be critical for us in terms of getting a victory in the end game--which is the state supreme court--to have some geographic diversity," he said. "One of the worst things we could do strategically is to have everybody coming from Seattle, or even King County."
The council ultimately decided to hold off on the ordinance, but pressure was building on Sims elsewhere. In its March 4 issue, The Stranger published a call to arms, noting a planned protest in New York and asking someone--anyone--in the local gay community to organize a similar protest at the county marriage-licensing office in Seattle.
FRIDAY, MARCH 5 Brian Peters, 24, was at Capitol Hill's Vivace coffee cart on Broadway getting some caffeine, chatting with the baristas there about his plans to head down to Portland to marry his boyfriend of three years, and also complaining about the fact that they couldn't get married in Seattle. "I picked up The Stranger and I read it. We're sitting here and we're complaining, and it's like, 'Get up off your butts and do something.' I've never gotten up and done something. I was like, 'Okay, let's go.'"
So he did something: He spread the word that there would be a march on the county licensing office Monday morning to press Sims to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.
Meanwhile, Rep. Murray, who didn't yet know about the coming lawsuit, decided to call for civil disobedience from the state's county executives, including Sims, on Monday morning. He wanted them all to stand up and break state law by issuing marriage licenses.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, MARCH 6 AND 7 Over the weekend, the final groundwork was laid. Murray found out about the lawsuit and pulled out of a planned press conference, worrying his call for civil disobedience would distract from the news of the legal challenge to the state law. Both daily papers ran items about the planned march--"Gays to march here, demand marriage licenses," in the Seattle Times. And word leaked out that Mayor Greg Nickels was planning to recognize out-of-state legal gay unions.
Also over the weekend, Pedersen got over his worry about the suit only involving King County residents (his fear of a "rogue suit" being filed first had come to trump his desire to go slow in order to get people from around the state involved). Murray assured people that the bogeyman of a backlash in the legislature was no reason to wait--he felt the legislature could be kept from amending the constitution if need be. With those two concerns out of the way, Lambda secured its role as co-counsel in the lawsuit and Ron Sims worked out a plan to welcome the six carefully chosen gay and lesbian couples to the county marriage office early Monday morning--at least an hour before the march got going.
The rejection of the couples' applications for marriage licenses and the filing of the lawsuit immediately afterward would provide a great opportunity for Sims on several fronts. He could deflect calls for him to issue same-sex marriage licenses by pushing the whole issue swiftly into the courts before the marchers even started walking. He could answer critics who were saying Sims of all people--a black county executive with a passion for minority rights--should be championing the gay rights cause. And perhaps he could change the subject, at least as far as he and gay rights were concerned, in time for his gubernatorial campaign kickoff on Wednesday.
MONDAY, MARCH 8 The day began with a bit of carefully choreographed symbolism. Sims himself opened the door to the marriage license office, welcoming the six couples so their marriage license applications could be officially rejected. Message: Sims is not standing in the doorway blocking the quest for gay civil rights the way those racist politicians he remembers from his youth stood in doorways to block the integration of blacks.
Sims then spoke passionately about the need for acceptance of gay marriage and said his breaking the law to push gay rights now would set a dangerous precedent. What happens, Sims asked, when a county exec whose politics are unfriendly to gays decides to do the same thing? Then in a sign that the governor's race was on his mind along with his principles, he took a thinly veiled swipe at his democratic opponent, Attorney General Christine Gregoire.
Gregoire has said she opposes gay marriage and doesn't believe Washington is ready for it, angering gay leaders. At his press conference, Sims said, "There are those who say that Washington is not ready." In response to those people, who clearly include his opponent the attorney general, he quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: "The time is always right to do what's right."
A few blocks away at city hall, Nickels was telling reporters about his plan to do what's right by recognizing marriages of gay and lesbian couples performed outside Washington State. Nickels' executive order and proposed ordinance would require city departments and contractors to give same-sex married couples the same rights and privileges as straight married couples. It was a move that seemed to violate state marriage laws, which bar jurisdictions from recognizing same-sex marriages granted elsewhere. But the response of Nickels and City Attorney Tom Carr was quite different from Sims': If someone wants to sue the city, Carr said, "We will take this as far as we have to." Carr said the state marriage law "would seem to violate" the equal protection clause of the state constitution, which bars discrimination on the basis of gender. "We believe this is right and consistent with the state constitution," Carr said after the press conference.
"I would personally encourage that [Sims issue marriage licenses]," Nickels himself said when asked about Sims' simultaneous press conference. "We all take an oath to follow the laws of the state and federal governments, and we all have to follow our conscience."
By day's end, a Florida group, Liberty Counsel--which has already filed a lawsuit against Mayor Jason West of New Paltz, and another in California--had threatened to launch a suit to stop Nickels.
The coming days will play out an intense political and legal drama between Nickels, Sims, and Gregoire. The attorney general has the right to intervene in lawsuits--like the one filed Monday--that deal with state constitutional issues. Will she intervene to defend the state and risk being painted as intolerant of gay rights by Sims? Or will she leave the county lawyers to handle the first round of the lawsuit before it is kicked up to the state supreme court? Will she come down on Nickels for breaking the law? Will Sims follow Nickels' lead in recognizing gay marriages from out of state? If he does--if he's willing to engage in that act of law breaking--why not also break the law by issuing marriage licenses?
Only Nickels comes out of this looking like he's leading purely with his convictions. Like San Francisco's Newsom, he knows what's right, and he's doing it now to challenge what he believes is an unjust law.
That left Sims standing on top of a cement planter in front of his office building Monday, trying to convince the crowd of protesters who had demanded to see him that he was on their side. Taking their bullhorn, he said, once again, that his duty to uphold the law in this case comes before his duty to do what he thinks is right, a comment met with jeers from the pumped-up crowd. He quickly assured the protesters that the courts would bring justice to gays in the end, and that in Andersen et al. v. Sims et al. he would be, he joked, "a doggone good defendant."
Additional reporting by Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit.
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
Comments (0)