Couples shivered in the early morning chill, waiting for the
doors to the Multnomah County Building to open on Monday morning,
February 4. Makeshift clipboards circulated through the crowd, and
volunteers passed out pens. One by one, people filled out a form with
sections for “Partner A” and “Partner B.”
Moments before 8 am, volunteers with Basic Rights Oregon (BRO)
prepared the crowd: “Are you ready for your rights?” someone shouted
from the head of the line, kicking off a countdown until the doors
opened and the couples could officially register as domestic partners
in the State of Oregon.
Now, same-sex couples across the state have access to the same
rights and responsibilities that their opposite-sex married
counterparts do, at least when it comes to state laws like hospital
visitation, parental rights, and inheritance.
Those rights weren’t available as early as last Friday morning,
February 1. Thanks to a federal court challenge to Oregon’s signature
verification process, anti-gay activists had successfully held up the
domestic partnership law for a month, while attorneys for the state,
for BRO, and for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) prepared
to argue whether a referral petition about the new law had been
improperly barred from the November ballot.
For over five hours on Friday, attorneys cross-examined handwriting
experts, and grilled State Elections Director John Lindback about the
standards used to decide whether or not a petition signature matches
the signature on a voter registration card. Attorneys with ADF were
trying to show that the state tossed out valid signatures, and ignored
signers’ attempts to reinstate their signatures.
The lawyers spent the afternoon arguing legal theory: Is signing a
petition akin to voting, and if so, should constitutional protections
that apply to voting—a fundamental right—also apply to
whether the state has to notify someone whose signature is tossed?
Ultimately, Judge Michael Mosman said no, signing a petition isn’t a
fundamental right. “We don’t have signatures actually expressing the
will of the voters. We certainly don’t have a majority process, as [a
petition] calls for an election rather than substitutes for an
election,” Mosman said while ruling from the bench on Friday afternoon,
a move that surprised most people in the courtroom.
Mosman also addressed what he called “the most troubling of all the
arguments in the case,” one that examined whether “people who vote or
sign a petition in one county are far more likely to qualify than
people in another county because the evaluators, the people working for
the state, don’t have any standard by which to make their judgments,”
Mosman explained.
The closest a state attorney came to explaining the state’s
“match/no-match” standard for evaluating signatures was an analogy of a
restaurant server comparing a credit card receipt signature with one on
the back of a Visa card. However, Mosman found that “the state has come
forward with sufficient evidence to defeat the request for a permanent
injunction.” But he qualified that judgment with a “barely so,” saying
that “there are… many things heard today that should be troubling to
the secretary of state about the signature verification process.”
Mosman’s surprise bench ruling meant that the domestic partnership
law, on hold since January 1, took effect immediately. BRO Executive
Director Jeana Frazzini was so shocked by the sudden ruling that she
admitted she hadn’t discussed with her partner the logistics of
registering right away. Though the state and counties were prepared
just in case—domestic partnership forms appeared on the state’s
Center for Health Statistics website that afternoon—the ruling
came late enough in the day that registrations were pushed to Monday.
By Tuesday, over 150 couples had registered in Multnomah County
alone.
Meanwhile, ADF attorney Austin Nimocks said that the group would be
appealing the ruling. And the anti-gay activists behind the referral
effort have said they’d be launching a repeal effort, also aimed at the
November ballot.