When two men walked into Boulder County Clerks and Recorder’s Office on March 26, 1975, County Clerk Clela Rorex had no idea they would soon launch her into an international controversy decades ahead of its time.
The men, Dave McCord and Dave Zamora from Colorado Springs, asked Rorex for a marriage license. They’d been told by the El Paso County Clerk’s Office that "they do those types of things" in Boulder. Rorex consulted the Boulder District Attorney’s Office on the matter, which determined that same-sex marriage licenses were not specifically prohibited under state law.
So Rorex issued McCord and Zamora a marriage license–and all hell broke loose.
Word began to spread. Boulder had apparently issued the first same-sex marriage license in Colorado history. Other same-sex couples started showing up at Rorex’s office. Over the next month, Rorex issued five more same-sex licenses.
Editorials around the country condemned Rorex’s decision, including one in the Daily Camera. Rorex was deluged in hate mail, accusing her of creating a Sodom and Gomorrah in Boulder, or, worse, a haven for queers. Church congregations told her to burn in hell. And then things really got weird, courtesy of Roswell "Ros" Howard and his mare, Dolly.
On April 15, 1975, Howard, an aging news hound, walked into 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.
Spurred on by the state legislature, the Colorado Attorney General decided to put an end to the scandal. In late April he issued a legal opinion stating that the same-sex licenses were misleading, falsely suggesting the recipients had obtained all the rights the state afforded to husband and wife. Boulder’s district attorney difered to this opinion, and Rorex’s now-famous licenses became void.
Today, Rorex is a corporate officer for a national nonprofit organization based in Boulder. But she admits that on that fateful day 29 years ago, she was a naïve political baby, unaware of the animosity and confusion her decision would spur. But does Rorex regret issuing the licenses? Not for a minute.
"Of all the decisions I’ve made in my life, that was one of the ones I am most proud of," says Rorex. "I wish there was the support and ability to hold onto those decisions back then. I absolutely believe in [marriage rights], 100 percent."
If Rorex’s same-sex licenses had been allowed, the nation’s political landscape might look very different today. Instead, those heady two months in 1975 were relegated to an interesting footnote in the history books, and the fight that erupted around Rorex’s office nearly three decades ago is still very much alive, and very much unresolved. Socially conservative legislators, led by Colorado representatives, are swatting away attempts to guarantee marriage and family rights to same-sex couples and are pushing for a U.S. Constitutional amendment that defines marriage, once and for all, as the union of a man and a woman. But many people of all sexual preferences are building a grassroots opposition movement to fight for what they see as their civil rights. On Valentine’s Day people in Colorado and nationwide will stand up and demand that marriage becomes an equal opportunity institution.
Theocracy v. democracy
According to Robin Tyler, national lesbian activist and the first openly gay stand-up comic, we are living in dangerous times.
"It looks like we are a theocracy, not a democracy," says Tyler. "Are the courts going to become invalidated because they can be trumped by politicians changing the Constitution?"
Tyler is referring to the Federal Marriage Amendment, introduced by U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado. The amendment defines marriage as the union of a man and woman and bars unmarried couples from obtaining rights normally associated with marriage. Under the legislation, state employees’ same-sex partners may never receive health benefits, and same-sex couples may see their adoptions invalidated. In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush suggested that he might support the legislation. If it passes, it will be the first time, save Prohibition, the Constitution will have been amended to take away rights.
Some say the impetus behind the Federal Marriage Amendment has been building for years. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of the Marriage Act (DOMA), which stated the government only recognized heterosexual marriages. Today 37 states, including Colorado, have passed their own DOMA laws, and Ohio could soon become state 38. Recently the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Florida’s law prohibiting gay people from adopting children. Legislators in at least nine states are also pushing to amend their state constitutions to specify marriages must be heterosexual.
While it might seem like anti-gay marriage legislation is mounting all over the country, many say it’s a case of conservatives making one last, desperate charge in a losing battle. Last year the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ordered the state to start issuing same-sex licenses. Vermont now recognizes civil unions, and California will implement a similar system in 2005. While civil unions do not provide all the same rights as marriages, many marriage right advocates say it’s a step in the right direction. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, France, Germany, Belgium, Croatia, Great Britain, parts of Italy, Spain and Switzerland and most notably Canada now recognize same-sex marriages or types of civil unions. And many say the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision against sodomy laws last year will lead to future rulings protecting gay people’s rights.
To speed up the process, lesbian and gay rights activists are taking to the streets. From Feb. 9 to 15, scheduled in part to coincide with Valentine’s Day, "Freedom to Marry Week" activities will occur across the nation, ranging from same-sex couples flooding marriage bureaus with license applications to people traveling to Canada to get hitched, a la a present-day underground railroad. The events, co-sponsored by the website www.DontAmend.com, Metropolitan Community Churches and a network of civil rights groups, are the continuation of a fight that’s been waged for decades, says Tyler, Executive Director of www.DontAmend.com, which is also sponsoring an online petition opposing politicians who support anti-gay legislation.
Conservatives say their anti-gay marriage proposals are defending the sanctity of marriage. But the organizers behind Freedom to Marry Week argue that excluding certain groups from the wedding chapel won’t help to protect the foundering institution. Furthermore, they say, it’s not about same-sex couples needing the government to sanction their love; it’s about civil rights.
There are 1,049 federal benefits triggered by marriage, and more than 100 are triggered on a state level. These include pension, automatic inheritance, burial determination, child custody, joint adoptions, domestic violence protections and hospital visitations. In other words, for millions of same-sex couples and children with same-sex parents, there are hundreds of rights they can never enjoy because their government doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.
It seems fitting that the first state-sanctioned gay marriage could occur in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions striking down school segregation. Many say the gay rights movement is the child of the civil rights movement.
"People say, why do you do this? Why would you go to marriage bureaus if the law won’t marry you?" says Tyler. "It’s the same reason people sat in the lunch counters. Whether they are going to serve us or not, they need to know we will keep coming back until we get served."
Fighting the jihad
On Monday, Feb. 2, the Colorado House Information and Technology Committee quietly killed a bill that would create civil unions for same-sex couples, despite the fact over a hundred people showed up to support it. A week before, the same committee killed a bill that would allow homosexuals to become legal parents to their partners’ children. Similar bills suffered the same fate in 2003. The bills had nothing to do with information or technology–they were sent to the Information and Technology Committee, says gay rights advocates, because its chair, Republican Rep. Shawn Mitchell, is known for his strong anti-gay stance. In other words, the state legislature stacked the deck to kill the bills.
Colorado gay-rights advocates say they have grown to expect such dirty dealings from the home state of Marilyn Musgrave, sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment, and from the state that passed Amendment 2 in 1992, which nullified all local laws protecting people from sexual orientation discrimination.
"The legislature is controlled by social conservatives and religious fundamentalists, for whom any kind of legal recognition of non-traditional families is unacceptable," says Michael Brewer, legal director for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Colorado. "These issues for them are like a religious jihad."
Considering that Colorado appears to be the epicenter of anti-gay legislation, some people say the state’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) community, numbering in hundreds of thousands, isn’t providing enough opposition to these threats.
"The apathy around here just blows my mind," says Samuel Nelson, a Denver resident who says multiple GLBT organizations failed to help him organize local Freedom to Marry Week events. "Are we so smug in our existence to think we are safe?"
Currently there are no formal Freedom to Marry Week activities scheduled to occur in the Denver area.
Abby Coven, executive director of Civil Rights Now, understands Nelson’s frustration. Civil Rights Now is a statewide organization promoting community involvement in the family-rights movement. The organization was founded in the wake of the legislature killing the civil union and gay adoption bills last year.
"I don’t think people are apathetic," says Coven. "I think that, if anything, maybe it’s the history around Amendment 2. Maybe people have seen how ugly it can get when people speak out for their rights." Amendment 2 generated a huge upwelling of grassroots opposition, helping to spur the Supreme Court to overturn the amendment in 1996, but the movement also provoked anti-gay sentiment. The year after the amendment passed, gay bashing in Colorado increased 129 percent.
That said, Coven and others point out that the fight for marriage rights in Colorado has already begun and is quickly gaining momentum. Civil Rights Now is sponsoring an event in Colorado Springs in association with Freedom to Marry Week and is planning similar activities in the future. Equal Rights Colorado, a GLBT lobbying group, is pressuring legislators to recognize equality in marriage. Jack Finlaw, an openly gay man appointed to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s senior staff, is working to reinvigorate a mayoral advisory committee on gay and lesbian issues. And even without the help of public-education campaigns, a recent study found that 54 percent of Coloradoans support legally recognized gay and lesbian partnerships.
It looks like Clela Rorex’s same-sex marriage licenses may soon become much more common.
"The way I see it, equality for gay and lesbian families is going to happen," says Coven. "It’s just a matter of when."
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