If this were a joke, I’d laugh, if it were funny.
The Portland Tribune has a front-page piece this week about the apparent 57% majority here in Oregon who favor Measure 36, which will amend the state constitution to define valid marriages as being only those “between one man and one woman.” The headline reads: “Voters back off from big changes.”
Sorry. Should have warned you to put your coffee down, first.
Look, there’s a sense in which this is true: for over 150 years, the Oregon constitution had language explicitly privileging whites, and retained outdated sections which set up such prohibitions that “no free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ, or harbor them.” —We ripped that language out back in 2002, with Measure 14; so, in a sense, in this one sense, Measure 36—returning, as it does, a measured dollop of discrimination and bigotry to our state constitution—can be read as voters backing away from that 2002 change.
But in every other sense. The obliteration of the legal status of thousands of marriages. The willful imposition of a majority’s bigotry, hatred, and fear on a harmless minority. The appalling ignorance with which we’re setting out to second-class our friends, our neighbors, our families. The conversion of the state certificate that seals my marriage from an implicit mark of privilege to an explicit badge of shame.
These are very big changes indeed, that 57% of the state apparently wants to visit on the rest of us.
And so, in all these other senses, the Portland Tribune ought to hang its collective head in shame at such a misleading lede.
I’ll guarandamntee you this, though: if it passes, it’ll be one hell of a lot less than 150 years before we rip this putrid amendment out. It’s gonna make your head spin, how fast we dustbin this bullshit.
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