Gretchen Miller and Sarah Hendrickson celebrated their first and 25th anniversaries on the same day in 2005. The anniversaries celebrated one year of marriage and 25 years of being a couple. Now they have another anniversary to celebrate, the legal recognition of being in a domestic partnership.
After 24 years of being a couple, the pair joined the throngs of same-sex couples that celebrated when offered the opportunity to apply for a marriage license. In 2004 Multnomah County became the first county in Oregon to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and Lane County quickly followed suit.
“We leapt at it. Like everybody else we heard it was coming just about the time it happened,” Miller said.
Gretchen Miller married Sarah Hendrickson three days after obtaining their marriage license. To their dismay however the license was invalidated when the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that Multnomah County did not have the authority to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Oregon residents also voted yes on Measure 36, banning same-sex marriages and then amended the Oregon Constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
“It was sad, very sad. They even returned the $60, the check we sent for the marriage license,” Miller said. “I know some people who framed their returned checks, but I cashed mine.”
The two had originally met in the early 1970s when Miller was a University of Oregon School of Law student, but their relationship was no more than friends.
Ten years later Miller ended a relationship with her boyfriend and Hendrickson divorced from her husband. The two met once again in the 1980s when Miller was serving on the Eugene City Council and Hendrickson was applying for a position at the Eugene Water and Electric Board.
We knew pretty quickly that we wanted to be together. We’ve been together now for 27 years with three kids, the youngest one just started his first year of college so it’s been a long time, Miller said.
From the time of their first meeting in the early 1970s to their marriage in 2004, gay and lesbian rights activists had been on many battlefronts fighting for the amelioration of their rights and protections.
When the two first met, the American Psychiatric Association still listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1982 Wisconsin became the first state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and it took another eleven years before the ban on homosexuals in the military ceased with President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Colorado Amendment in 1996 that denied gays and lesbians protection from discrimination and any claim to a minority status. The first state to legally recognize civil unions was Vermont in 2000 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that sodomy laws in the U.S. were unconstitutional.
Although it was not until 2005 when Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to legalize marriage that such an arrangement was actually possible. In the 2004 cases of Multnomah and Lane counties, many felt the marriage licenses would not hold up because they were not legally valid and only issued by a county clerk, not sanctioned by law.
Many same-sex couples felt even if the licenses were invalid, it was still a step in the right direction for a more accepting stance toward gay and lesbian partnerships.
“I know people for whom the recognition is very important, and I guess for me that has never been as important. I know that I have a commitment, and to me the public recognition is not so important,” Miller said.
Senate Bill 2, the Oregon Equality Act, and House Bill 2007, the Oregon Family Fairness Act, both passed out of the Senate recently, and Governor Ted Kulongoski is expected to sign them today, advancing gay and lesbian rights in Oregon.
House Bill 2007 grants domestic partners and same-sex couples over 500 of the same rights and responsibilities afforded to married couples.
Important family rights such as the ability to make health care decisions for a partner, to visit a partner in the hospital and the right to inherit a deceased partner’s estate will be granted to domestic partners.
“I have heard a number of stories where a couple lived together for years, they combined their resources, a house is in one of their names and maybe the other one moves in with that person. Then the [homeowner] dies and the family comes in and changes the locks.”
“The person can’t even get their clothes. He has to fight even to get just what are obviously his personal possessions, never mind the tinniest little bit of recognition of his home and life that are completely disrupted here. That happens more often than you think it ought to, and I have lived through that with clients and friends.”
“This is a situation where it enables people to have a way to say ‘this is a serious relationship and we intend it to be taken seriously and that kind of thing won’t happen.’ It is important not to underestimate how important those legal protections are,” Miller said.
Gretchen Miller’s roots stretch deep into the University. She graduated from the University of Oregon School of Law, and she was an adjunct with the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University for more than twenty years. Miller left the University in 2004 because her second job became too time consuming. Miller is the presiding Administrative Law Judge for the Oregon Office of Administrative Hearing, and Hendrickson is the County Public Health Officer.
“We have a lot of options that everybody doesn’t have. So it’s given us the freedom to sort of be able to speak out and it’s a great opportunity, and it carried with it what felt like sort of an obligation to do that,” Miller said. “But now we’re more concerned about things like elder care and end of life issues. If one of us got hurt, probably here in Eugene we’d get decent treatment and respect, would we get that somewhere else?”
House Bill 2007 is now in the hands of Gov. Kulongoski, and the rights offered to same-sex couples in that bill are on the verge of being Oregon law. After 27 years, Gretchen Miller and the love of her life Sarah Hendrickson will have the opportunity to care for each other and their three children with many of the same responsibilities and privileges legal married couples can provide for their families. The celebrations, anniversaries and troubles that exist in any relationship will still exist, but same-sex couples will have the peace of mind that they have rights to protect themselves and their families.
“I went to a Lavender Law conference, an annual convention of gay and lesbian lawyers and people interested in gay and lesbian law, and somebody in the front of the room said ‘what’s the best thing about gay marriage?’ and some anonymous person in the back of the room piped up ‘gay divorce,’” Miller said jokingly.
“From a legal point of view this is not so much that you’re married, but it is how you sort out all of the rights and responsibilities, which really only comes up when there’s trouble. You don’t really need lawyers when things are going well you only need lawyers when things are going bad, be it a divorce or medical problem. So this is good stuff, this is what we wanted.”
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