The
War
Within

By Bonnie Tinker

The Director of Basic Rights Oregon has resigned. It’s hard to know what to make of it. Local queer journalists are somewhat at odds with one another.

Just Out editorialized that it was nice to see that a community leader knew it was time to move on. The gay boy columnist at Willamette Week, on the other hand, was in a bit in a dither, a mite put out. Whatever shall we do? he worried, now that we’ve bitten off the marriage issue and our leader has left us in the lurch?

Both reactions are understandable and show a misunderstanding of organizations, leaders, and movements. The issue is not whether it is time for the Executive Director to move on; the question is, “How is the organization moving on?” Will the change in staffing help Basic Rights Oregon move from being the dominant Oregon gay rights organization to being an organization that shares leadership by empowering the LGBT people and organizations who built the movement for marriage equality to share in strategy decisions before they are enacted?

Basic Rights Oregon was born of a community need. After the second statewide anti-gay ballot measure in 1992 was followed by about 28 local anti-gay measures, the community realized that we were going to need to fight these things for the foreseeable future. A number of strong community organizations had come together to defeat Measure 9. At a community meeting following the victory it was decided that the database that had been built should not be fractured, but should be retained in an ongoing political organization. It was also decided that this database should be shared by all of the community organizations who had worked together to defeat Measure 9.

That never happened. No on 9 turned into SOC PAC (Save our Communities) which led to No on 13, which evolved into Basic Rights Oregon (BRO). Home grown leadership was replaced by a political expert from California. The database and donors became proprietary. Basic Rights Oregon merged with Right to Privacy/Pride, which disappeared in short order. For a while the local group that produced the annual Human Rights Campaign Fund dinner remained strong with the support of a national organization, but eventually it, too, was superseded by Basic Rights Oregon. The BRO Executive Director who came from California was replaced by a man (of Color) from California. He didn’t last long and was soon replaced by the most recent E.D., a former City Councilor from Ithaca, New York.

The marriage issue was percolating throughout this time. At first, the political gays wanted nothing to do with marriage because “it” was just what the right wing attackers feared. By 1996, however, Basic Rights Oregon had joined the Oregon Freedom to Marry Coalition to begin discussing the matter. The group was chaired by a lawyer, Jon Terry, who contacted me after I’d written an op-ed piece about marriage equality. He wanted to work with Love Makes A Family to get everybody together and he was ready to chair the effort.

Jon was, of course, also in touch with “the lawyers,” which meant ACLU and the Oregon Gay and Lesbian Law Association. In 1996 the Oregon Freedom to Marry Coalition discussed a plan which was remarkably similar to what eventually happened in Multnomah County in 2004. My recollection is that the idea first came up in some of the national lawyers groups, which would have included the ACLU and Evan Wolfson, who worked for Lambda until he broke off to form the Freedom to Marry Project. There were two significant differences between what was discussed as an idea then and what actually happened in 2004. The original plan was just one potential idea, and there was an assumption that the local strategy would eventually be determined by all of the partners in the Oregon Freedom to Marry Coalition. Any action would be a community effort with full participation in planning and publicity by all of the members of the Oregon Freedom to Marry Coalition.

The recently departed Executive Director of Basic Rights Oregon came into Oregon long after this plan was discussed and temporarily put on hold because the timing was not deemed right given the make-up of the Oregon courts. When it was time to revive the discussion, other groups were somehow left off the meeting invitation list; and the community organizing to win marriage freedom went the way of the community database — it became the property of Basic Rights Oregon. In 2003 when I asked my friend Frank Dixon, formerly the BRO Board Chair and currently the acting Executive Director, about BRO’s thinking on addressing the rapidly rising marriage issue I was told that BRO sometimes worked in coalition, but other programs were “proprietary.”

When Multnomah County ran their secret marriage strategy 2004 it was presented as BRO’s property; a fundraising letter mailed in February 2004, and a subsequent full page ad in Just Out announced that Basic Rights Oregon had brought gay marriage to Oregon. I believe that although BRO provided the face and the mouthpiece, the strategy was essentially under the direction of the Freedom to Marry Project run by Evan Wolfson and the ACLU.

In February 2004, the Love Makes a Family office received a call from someone on the east coast telling us we should find out what BRO was planning.

They had heard from the Freedom to Marry Project that nothing must happen in Oregon before March 9; something very important was planned by BRO for that day. The day before the big event — which was moved ahead to March 3 for fear that someone else might move first — a BRO insider talked to someone who happened to be sitting in the Love Makes A Family office, told them the plan and then added, “but don’t tell Bonnie Tinker.” BRO and Evan Wolfson knew that I would disagree with their strategy.

When I met Evan Wolfson in 1993 and we had one big difference of opinion about strategy. He believed that “marriage” was only a legal term and we could win by discussing only “civil marriage” and avoiding all reference to religion. I believed that the movement for marriage equality had actually begun and been nurtured in various faith communities. Culturally it would be difficult for the general population to divorce marriage from religion. I thought we should use the history and strength of our gay-positive faith communities by supporting families and clergy from these communities to openly request and speak for marriage equality. The plan enacted by BRO in Multnomah county in 2004 reflected the gay political strategy to simply leave the churches out of marriage. In February 2004, when Love Makes A Family met with BRO and the ACLU to outline our proposed strategy they were shocked that we intended to include faith communities and clergy. We later learned that their plan was to highlight the first marriages of two carefully selected couples by a judge, and only then to open marriage licenses to everyone. In spite of their original plan not to involve churches, they did organize clergy the day before to facilitate speedy marriages of the many couples who would seek licenses.

Such is life in the era of global politics and global markets. It is not only our oil supplies and food sources that are controlled by national conglomerates. The leadership of “grassroots” movements is also increasingly outsourced. It not only happened to the LGBT community in Oregon; our local opposition, the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, was also replaced by a national mega-corporation. Focus on the Family was the power behind the Defense of Marriage Coalition’s win in Oregon in 2004, and ten other states for that matter. One important difference was that Focus on the Family supported a statewide Coalition that brought together diverse church leaders and relied on the grassroots power of local congregations to pass Measure 36, a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to “one man and one woman.”

Our campaign against measure 36 matched, and surpassed, the money of the anti-gay campaign. We called in a lot of support from Oregon corporations and politicians, but the strategy and the No on 36 ballot measure campaign were essentially run by national organizations with support from BRO.

Why is this relevant to the current change in staffing of Basic Rights Oregon? The first question to ask is “is this really a change?” Has the former Director really moved on? as suggested by Just Out? Or as the new Program director of the Freedom to Marry Project based in Portland, has she just moved into a more direct working relationship with the national organization that was really directing the Oregon campaign to begin with? Will the statewide organization and movement be left leaderless? Will it continue with a new ED to take direction from national organizations? Or will it develop local leadership to empower a coalition of community based organizations to work together to win equality for LGBT people and families?

We are a part of a national — and international — movement. We do want to recognize the strength of these ties, the ease of functioning as an extended community with the electronic communication that is a standard part of life in the twenty-first century, and the wealth of human resources available through these networks. We would also be wise to consider that sustainable movements require a local base. That means local papers like The Portland Alliance, local radios stations like KBOO, local progressive funders like McKenzie River Gathering, and local coalitions of grassroots queer activist groups.

Basic Rights Oregon has proven that it is the biggest and the wealthiest gay rights organization in Oregon. Can it use the current transition in staffing to go to the next step and use that wealth to empower a diverse, local, progressive LGBT movement? Does the growth of Basic Rights Oregon represent a corporate take-over, or does it contribute to a sustainable movement? Is it grown locally? Is it organic, free oftoxins? Do its profits go back into building a strong community?

Bonnie Tinker has been a lesbian activist in Portland, Oregon since 1971. She is the founder and Director of Love Makes A Family, Inc., an organization that is coordinating a “Family Faith and Marriage Equality” booth at the Oregon State Fair. People interested in volunteering to staff the both contact Cecil {(at)}LMFamily.org.