Not quite cricket.
Jeff, the atrocity note-taker, raises a good point over on his other blog, and does so with more panache than the Oregonian’s editorial board: we probably ought to talk about how it is, exactly, that the commissioners of Multnomah County decided to start issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples.
Here’s the nutshell: Oregon’s open meeting law requires that if a quorum of commissioners meet to discuss a matter of public policy, they have to announce that fact to the public, so they might attend if they so choose. Diane Linn, Lisa Naito, Serena Cruz and Maria Rojo de Steffey all deliberately met two-by-two to discuss obtaining a legal opinion on , to avoid the quorum and the subsequent attention of the public. —They also avoided mentioning anything to the fifth council member, Lonnie Roberts, who is not so coincidentally opposed to gay marriage.
Oops.
So, yes: this is sneaky. It isn’t cricket. The letter of the law was followed, sure, but the spirit of the law got mugged, in broad daylight. Frowny faces and tsk-tsks all around. The Oregonian is not without its point, and the hinterlands have thrown up the sorts of bloody shirts that make me worried about backlash. (Sure, Lars Larson has [reportedly] been reduced to a hoarsely incoherent roar of drive-time apoplexy, but failing to secure the future of equal rights and our state’s [recent] reputation as a [relative] repudiator of bigotry is too high a price to pay for such admittedly juvenile pleasures.)
That said, there’s a broader context to keep in mind, here.
First, let’s be real: if the matter were solely up to the residents of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County, then there’d already be gay and lesbian couples celebrating their silver anniversaries. (Okay. Maybe tin.) The spirit of the law has been roughed up, but none of the Multnomah Four need to worry that they haven’t represented the will of the people who elected them.
But it isn’t (just) up to us, of course. The county can no more compel the state or federal government to recognize the weddings performed than it can, oh, turn back the tide, or convince people that the thing with the Klingon interpreter was a humorous example of something within the realm of possibility rather than someone’s serious idea of an actual need to be met right here and now. And while I’d certainly like to think Oregon is bigger than the bigotry exhorted by some clergyfolk who really ought to know better, it’s still pretty clear that a constitutional amendment welcoming homosexuals into fully legal wedded bliss—or anything more than a vague arms-length I-don’t-wanna-hear-about-it quasi-tolerance—has no chance of flying in the here and now, if it were put to a state-wide vote.
This is a point in favor of the council’s actions, though. Much like the same-sex weddings performed in San Francisco and New Paltz and Sandoval County (and Seattle? and Chicago? and?), the same-sex weddings performed in Multnomah County face a myriad of state and national hurdles: everyone from their employers to their insurance companies to the Social Security Administration is playing wait-and-see, and everyone from the cubicle-bound bureaucrats to the teary-eyed joy-struck newlyweds knows these weddings can be dissolved with the stroke of a judge’s pen. (The county commissioners certainly know it.)
And the pundits ought to know it, and so should the Oregonian; they just get frothing mileage out of pretending otherwise: the county commissioners are ushering in an era of gay weddings without any open, public debate! —Yet gays and lesbians have been marrying each other for decades, in a wide variety of churches, all over the country. And Multnomah County already has a domestic partnership registry; gay and lesbian couples can share health insurance and adopt children. Heck, the fee is the same sixty bucks for either the registry or a marriage certificate! The step of erasing the final separation from equality is hardly so big as it might first appear—once you look past the name of the activity in question. (And what’s in a name?)
So: far from suddenly overturning the rule of law, and the definition of marriage as we’ve known it for millennia (polygamy, dowries, insistence on virginity, and that bit with the brother-in-law notwithstanding), the county has actually made a (relatively) minor change to rights already granted (and, yes, a relatively major symbolic gesture) that is still entirely contingent upon the interpretation of the state’s attorney general and the courts and the state legislature and the voters. It’s an attempt to force a challenge precisely where that challenge should be made, and a challenge (again) supported by a comfortable majority of the county in question. The dialogue continues; the rule of law obtains; the system’s working just fine.
That it was planned in secret, though? Hidden from their not-so-supportive fifth? In violation of the spirit of the open meetings law? (This was the point in question, remember.) Well, as with any act of civil disobedience, your take in part depends on how you feel about the ends toward which these means have been applied. The immediate ends here are not the legal and secure marriages of same-sex couples: those aren’t on the table yet, and haven’t been, in San Francisco or New Paltz or Sandoval County. (New York City? LA? Vermont?) We’re engaged in political theatre, here: the secret meetings weren’t the means toward the end of legal same-sex marriages; the open celebration of same-sex marriages are the means toward the end of civil rights. And it’s brilliantly savvy theatre, at that—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed, again, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnizes in Unitarian and MCC congregations and liberal synagogues and in the sitting rooms of bed and breakfasts and barefoot on the beach; wherever straights have gotten married, gays and lesbians have as well, for all you did to manage not to see them)—every marriage on the sidewalk outside the county offices in the rain with a news camera present puts a human face on this (thus far) largely abstract battle.
Gays and lesbians are an invisible majority, after all; the only time most of the country has to see them is acting up in sitcoms, or on the news, where every year the coverage of the pride parade skips over the gay police officers and the gay librarians and the gay government clerks and the gay senior citizens and the straight allies and zooms straight for the freakshow eyebite: the drag queen in the feather boa, the bare-breasted diesel dyke. (To trade in unfortunately broad stereotypes, which they do, of course; ignoring the obvious benefits these individuals bring to the world, which we shall take as read: we’re all choir here, for the most part, and this is going on too long already.) —Instead, the media has to focus on long lines of people just like everybody else lining up around the block for the same rights and the same dignity enjoyed by everybody else. Professionals and parents, besotted college students head over heels and sober old folks seeking recognition for half a century together, all of them just like everybody else, except—gay. (Meanwhile, in the background, a scattered handful of protesters behind yellow police tape holds up hateful signs. Radio pundits scream incoherently about intangibles, pushing buttons that don’t work as well as they used to. Respected conservative pundits in the field tell us we must oppress these people because gay sex is so much better than straight sex. It’s like heroin. No, really!)
(Which is why I’m not yet that worried about backlash this fall: Oregon is bigger than that, honest it is, and if the sky hasn’t fallen in because of same-sex marriages, we’ll leave well enough alone. —Always reserving the right to be bitterly disappointed, of course.)
So: an act of civil disobedience (the violation of the spirit of the open meeting law I’m talking about here, not the resulting change in county policy) to make possible a challenge that joins the gathering momentum of challenges from more and more cities and counties across the country, forcing the problem to be confronted in all-too human terms. —All due apologies to Lonnie Roberts, the commissioner left out in the cold, but I can live with that.
(After all, where’s the harm here? What’s been taken away from anyone, anyone at all? Tell me, please! The county’s making money, wedding planners are scooping up new business by the truckload, and the city and county are cementing just the sort of reputation that looks good to the sorts of creative enterprises we need to keep moving up those Best Cities lists. Look into the faces of the people waiting on line for their marriage certificates and show me the damage done by this intemperate, carefully planned action. Where’s the harm?
(And if you still feel this is a dangerous precedent to set, nonetheless, in spite of it all, the greater good notwithstanding, slippery sloping road to hell and all that, well, there’s the usual consequences anyone engaged in civil disobedience must face: in this case, the loss of good will, opprobrium from the court of public opinion, and, of course, the ballot box. —Somehow, I don’t think the four commissioners are all that worried.)
When do we do the right thing?
It's late at night, and although I should sleep, I've had this piece brewing for a bit and it just has to come out. I'm often concerned about the moral lessons I'm teaching my kids - do they really understand...
Wonderful, wonderful post. Thanks!
Damn straight. Er, or something.
For more human faces to put on this issue, go here, here, here, here and here. Hey, gay people are just like everyone else! Who knew? (OK, all of us in the choir knew; but I agree that the pictures are an important way to swell our ranks.)
Ah, you beat me to posting about the less-than-democratic means by which gay marriage has been achieved lately. Great post and you do the subject justice.
My own take on it was going to answer critics that, yes, of course the process chosen by Gavin Newsome, Jason West and Diane Linn et al. has been "undemocratic." Because it's civil disobedience, a revolutionary tactic that breaks laws considered unjust. Yet because the situation being addressed is both a) undemocratic in its maintenance of an unequal status quo and b) impervious to democratic redress thanks to the "tyranny of the majority" (a phrase conservo-pundits ought to recognize), civil disobedience becomes the only method left towards attaining a more democratic condition. It would be nice if we could all play cricket, so to speak, but the game is fixed, so pardon us if we choose other rules to play by—or another game altogether. What's nice is that public officials are playing central roles in the acts of civil disobedience. Warms the heart, really.
Nah. I miffed some basic fundamentals on the workings of the open meeting law; since I’m not a lawyer or a political process junkie, that’s what I get for trusting brief write-ups in local papers of record. (The logic, I suppose, is sound enough nonetheless.) Luckily, there’s the One True b!X, who more than makes up for it: his three part series thrashing the lawsuit against is must-read blogging.