By Meteor Blades
I just got off the phone with Clela Rorex. We talked about old times, this year’s unusual weather and gay marriage.
I know, I know. Gay marriage is so passé now. Eleven states shot it down in the past election. And quite an astonishing number of Democrats I know actually believe it’s because the issue came up at all during the 2004 campaign that George W. Bush still squats in the White House.
So why bring it up again what with Iraq and Iran, the environment and Social Security, federal judgeships and mid-Census redistricting, the tax code and tort reform, academic freedom and freedom to live or die all big items on the rightwanker priorities list? We had our fling with gay marriage, the results were sour, so let’s get back to business. Some day, we’re told, in a decade or two or three, we can reconsider whether gays and lesbians should have the same rights as straights, but right now, give it a rest.
Astonishing how fast those decades fly by. Indeed, it was just 30 years ago yesterday that Clela Rorex, the county clerk in Boulder, Colorado, issued the nation’s first-ever licenses for a gay marriage.
During the next month Rorex would issue five more licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Not surprisingly, she caught a barrage of brimstone from clergy and editorialists and politicians and the majority of citizens. After all, less than a year earlier, the city of Boulder had engaged in an electoral and media civil war because the city council had passed one of the country’s first ordinances protecting gays from discrimination. A referendum had reversed the law a few months later and a young city councilman had been recalled and replaced after an election campaign that was just short of tar and feathers.
So what could Rorex have been thinking?
At the time, many of us who had supported the gay rights ordinance – the same kind that hundreds of communities from Corvallis to Cape Cod (as well as Boulder) now enforce – were arguing that any new attempt to push something having to do with gay equality would fail and possibly give the right a cudgel with which to undermine left goals in other arenas. We were arguing, basically, that gays should wait and “go slow”just as many liberals had argued that blacks should do 20 years earlier.
In Rorex’s office, however, was a gay man, Deputy County Clerk N. Patrick Prince, who raised questions with her about the state's marriage law. He and his lover got one of the six licenses Rorex issued after obtaining a memo from the district attorney’s office saying that doing so wasn’t specifically prohibited by Colorado law.
"There is no statutory law prohibiting the issuance of a license, probably because the situation was simply not contemplated in the past by our legislature. The case law is strongly on the side of the public official that refuses to issue a marriage license in these situations, and a public official could not be prosecuted for violation of any criminal law by such marriage licensing," the assistant D.A. wrote. The law did not permit marriage between close blood relations, nor bigamy, but it didn’t say anything about the sex of the partners, he said.
So Rorex started issuing them, telling clerks to cross out “man” and “woman” on the documents and insert “person.”
It didn’t take long for the Colorado Attorney General to step in with a legal opinion calling same-sex licenses misleading because they falsely suggested that recipients had obtained all the rights the state afforded to husband and wife. The Boulder District Attorney deferred and the licenses became void, the issue never being contested in court.
Meanwhile, some license foes who weren’t busy writing Rorex hate mail and looking for rope were having themselves a good laugh.
On April 15, Roswell "Ros" Howard arrived with his mare, Dolly, at Rorex’s office…
… flanked by reporters and demanded, "If a boy can marry a boy and a girl can marry a girl, why can’t a lonesome old cowboy get hitched to his favorite saddle mare?" He then asked Rorex to marry him and his horse. Rorex hardly missed a beat. She denied Howard’s application, explaining the 8-year-old Dolly was too young to get hitched without her parents’ written consent.
Now 61, Clela Rorex today is the treasurer for one of my favorite organizations, the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund. About her actions 30 years ago, she’s changed her mind she told me today on the phone:
“If I had the opportunity to do it over again, I would do it with more conviction this time. Then I knew nothing about gay and lesbian relationships. I only knew one gay man. But I knew it was the right thing to do.
“My only regret in this is that people with long-term loving relationships still can’t get married. I now know several gay and lesbian couples who have been together for years. They reaffirm to me that this is an issue of human rights, civil rights. All the fanatical hatemongering about it is frightening and infuriating.”
Indeed. My ex-wife and her long-time companion live just a few blocks from Rorex. A naturopath and an acupuncturist, they’ve been together for 16 years, one year longer than my current wife and I. These two women who deeply love each other and have shown the kind of commitment that the rightwanker hate tribe claims is crucial to being an acceptable human being still can’t get married, can’t file a joint tax statement, can’t even be certain that in the future some miscreant bureaucrat will, in perfect legality, keep one of them from visiting the other in the hospital should they wind up so confined. Imagine, if you can, the shrieking of CNN and Fox if Michael Schiavo’s girlfriend were a guy.
One couple who married after getting a license from Rorex remain together today. Their Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case, Adams v. Howerton provides another example of why gay marriage isn’t some frivolous tangent in the culture war. In a letter they wrote last year to a Boulder paper:
”One of the problems that many of our own community have had when dealing with the issue of same-sex marriage is that it goes beyond the battle for sex rights. It is a battle about love and many of our own community as a result of the environment brought about by the insidious accumulative effects of homophobic oppression are cynical and reactionary when it comes to Love. Love is an extraordinarily powerful force. That is why the enemies of Lesbian and Gay Liberation do not want to see our relationships recognized. Once Same-Sex Love is recognized the strength of the opposition will begin to wither away. It is inevitable.”
Three decades have passed since those first licenses were issued, then rescinded. Some say it will take another three before the majority of Americans see the light. Cripes, I hope they’re wrong. I hope that in five or ten more years, most Americans will look back on the reluctance to extend equal rights to gays – including marriage rights – as another unfortunate discrimination consigned to the benighted past, thus proving once again America’s wonderful ability to perpetually transform itself simply by fulfilling its earliest ideals.
Throughout our history, on one side have been those who say that tradition, scientific studies, common-sense, public order and divine revelation all dictate that this or that second-class group remain unequal, not quite legally human, and therefore subject to laws that nobody else is, unshielded by laws that everybody else is. Blacks, women, Indians, immigrants have all found themselves legally assigned to these “other’ categories. Other than fully American, other than fully a person.
On the opposite side have been two groups: gradualists and maximalists. Every civil rights movement - every social movement in America - has included a tug-of-war between them. Almost always, the gradualists concede that they agree with the maximalists in principle: They know there’s no such thing as half-equal, you either are, or you aren’t. But politics is the art of the possible, the gradualists say, and reform takes time.
I’m a maximalist, but who can disagree with the gradualists? They’ve got the referenda of last year to prove their case. Success in this matter will be either gradual or not at all.
But to those - both left, right and center - who think this issue will go away, forget it. It can’t go away. Because it’s not about gay marriage. It’s about civil rights. Equal rights. Everybody’s rights. Not a luxury. Not an add-on. Bedrock, bottom-line, fundamental. That was so when Clela Rorex issued those licenses 30 years ago, and it still is today.
Bravo.
Posted by: Chris Clarke | March 28, 2005 at 10:51
MB--Not all traditionalists are anti=gay marriage. In fact a lot of people believe that tradition is revealed over time and is to be examined in the light of reason.
Posted by: Abby | March 28, 2005 at 19:17