January 16, 2005
(Updated) 'Communique' Talks Civil Unions On 'Oregon Crossfire'
Early Sunday Morning Politics (Egad!)
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Getting up at 7:00 AM on a Sunday morning is a horrible thing to do to ourselves, but for the second week in a row, we struggled out of bed in order to listen to Oregon Crossfire, the new talk radio show hosted by Randy Leonard and Larry George.
We first mentioned the program a couple of days before its premier, which became a two-hour commercial for the Right, with Leonard left to defend more liberal perspectives by himself while no one (ourselves included) came to his aid via the call-in line.
This morning, one of the issues at hand for Oregon Crossfire was the prospect of civil unions legislation out of the Oregon Senate in the wake of the the passage of Measure 36, and whether or not this would be tantamount to thwarting the will of the voters.
Which prompted a fair amount of pacing around our apartment. We have, of course, written more than our fair share of material on the issue of same-sex marriage since Feburary of last year. But without having yet had the benefit of coffee, did we really want to call in and pitch some views of our own?
But then they began specifically discussing the civil unions package being drafted by Senator Ben Westlund. And the bells went off. Coffee or no coffee, we had to get on the phone and drop a data point missing from the conversation.
As reported by The Portland Mercury late last year, Westlund apparently is working on his civil unions proposal with input from on Tim Nashif -- head of the Defense of Marriage Coalition (otherwise known on this website as the Special Rights for Heterosexuals Coalition), the very group which brought Measure 36 to the voters of Oregon to begin with.
How then, we asked the hosts and listeners of Oregon Crossfire, is this bill tantamount to thwarting the will of the voters, when Nashif in fact was the champion of the will of the voters who passed Measure 36?
Our pitch shoudn't be surprising: Whatever one thinks of civil unions, this bill won't be true civil unions, because Nashif will make sure that it's merely some subset of rights and benefits rather than the full package of rights and benefits automatically bestowed upon married couples.
What we didn't say on the air was our other suspicion: That when supporters of equal rights begin hammering the Westlund/Nashif proposal as inadequate, that will allow Nashif to start crowing to the press about those uppity liberals and how they are never satisfied.
Now, it is certainly important to also note (and we didn't have the chance to get this far into the issue on the radio) that there likely will be other civil unions proposals, intended to be more direct corrolaries to the rights and benefits of marriage, although they may be delayed until after the Oregon Supreme Court issues some sort of decision on the same-sex marriage lawsuit.
But what Oregon Considered kept discussing was the Westlund proposal, so we thought it important to point out that his proposal appears to have the implicit support of Measure 36's creators. So how much of a thwarting of the voters' intent could it be?
And yes, as it the norm for radio talk shows, that observation eventually sank away under the weight of moving on to other calls and sticking to the issue as it was originally framed, even if it had a hole in it. But hey, at least the data point made it out onto the air at all -- the show's listeners now can't (legitimately) claim that they didn't know.
Our other contribution was to quickly introduce the idea of "civil unions for all" as a partial solution to the heat generated by the same-sex marriage debate.
The premise being (as most readers here already know) that much of this discussion is caused by an unfortunate confluence of semantics. Under "civil unions for all" we would do just what it says: Regardless of sexual orientation, the license you get from the state is for a civil union. If you want to call your union a marriage, go down to your neighborhood church and get married before God.
It wouldn't solve the entire debate. But it would remove from the equation the alllegation that state-sanctioned same-sex unions are a threat to religion.
We've spent some time here filling in the edges of our comments on the air because Randy Leonard and Larry George kept going out of their way to make sure this website got a plug. So we may have some people coming in looking to see what this Portland Communique thing is that they were talking about, and we figured it might be helpful to offer some further thoughts on the issue.
For the Hell of it, later today we will add as an update to this item the transcript of our call into Oregon Crossfire, for those who missed it, or those who for some reason might want to relive the moment.
Update
Above, we mentioned that our contribution (and we don't mean to focus on us, it happens with many contributions in this format) vanished into the ether as the show progessed. Well, just before the 9:30 AM commercial break they received a call from a caller identified as Steve, who according to Larry George's introduction was going to argue against something we had said.
Unfortunately, when they went to him, he apparently was no longer there. So if Steve does a search to find this site, we invite him to give his response in the reader comments here.
Update
Note: We join this transcript a little bit after our call began, because we forgot to hit record on our tape deck. All that's missing is some preliminary introductory business, such as us explaining that we were calling in to come to Randy's aid this week, and us being asked if it was fair to say we're like Portland's version of Matt Drudge. Our response to that was something along the lines of this: "Oh God, if we have to."
Randy Leonard: He's the guy that, and b!X knows this well, that he's the guy that if you're not following what he's saying you don't know really what's going on in downtown Portland.
Larry George: b!X, why don't you give a plug for your website, because you're a great blogger from the Left, from the political Left...
Leonard: Hey I can do that for him.
George: Go ahead.
Leonard: communique.portland.or.us, is that right, b!X?
Portland Communique: That is correct, yes.
Leonard: What do you know.
George: All right, b!X, and uh...
Leonard: That's how much I like this guy.
George: Yeah, no, and believe me I...
Leonard: And he's had me for lunch more than once.
George: And I appreciate the fact that he plugged our show on his blog. b!X go ahead, you should fire away if you would.
Communique: All right. Randy knows that I've written probably way too much about this subject since February of last year, so I'll try not to go on for the next thirty minutes, here...
Leonard: Good stuff, though.
Communique: But I do want to make two points. One is...
George: b!X, I hate to do this to you, can I put you on hold? Because we actually looked down and the clock is...
Communique: It's 8:30. Go right ahead.
George: All right, we're gonna put you on hold.
[Break]
Leonard: Right now, on the line, we've got The One True b!X, who has his own website that is a must-to site. I don't care if you're liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between, it's fascinating reporting. I go to it two or three times a day myself to see what's going on. It's communique.portland.or.us, that's c-o-m-m-u-n-i-q-u-e dot portland dot o-r dot u-s. b!X, welcome.
George: b!X, you need an easier...
Leonard: I know.
George: ...website. If you don't mind me saying.
Communique: Well, you know, the short version is just tell people go do a web search for "Portland Communique" -- you'll find it.
Leonard: There you go.
George: Go ahead, b!X.
Communique: But anyway, two real quick points. The first is, the pitch on this issue about how Westlund's civil unions bill may be thwarting the will of the voter. The issue there for me is, it was reported several weeks ago here in Portland that one Tim Nashif is working with Westlund on the language of that bill. Tim Nashif is the head of the Defense of Marriage Coalition -- the very group that pushed Measure 36.
Leonard: How interesting.
Communique: So this is not a real civil unions bill, it's a fake civil unions bill because you know Nashif is going to say don't put too many rights and benefits in, we don't want to give them too much. So...
Leonard: You know, that's a good point. I haven't actually seen... have you... is the bill published yet, b!X. Do we know?
Communique: I don't think... As far as I know there's no real draft text yet, at least I haven't seen that reported anywhere.
Leonard: So your message is we should probably wait to see the bill before we decide whether or not we're going to support it or not.
Communique: Right.
George: But the question still is, b!X, I mean, the question is if you went with a straight civil unions bill, that's say for instance we get it from the... what's the group?
Communique: Basic Rights Oregon.
George: Basic Rights Oregon. If they had a bill, is that a betrayal of the voters' will and is that something that the Legislature should just pass up yes or no -- thumbs up, thumbs down -- or should it be a referral out to the voters?
Communique: Well, I mean... at the base level I basically agree with Randy on this, that it is a civil rights issue to me. Even if you put it up to a vote of the people, I think that the courts would have every right to say, well, you know, the people don't get to say this class of people doesn't get any rights. That comes around to the other thing I just want to throw out for listeners to think about, which is a lot of this debate is the result of unfortunate language similarities. My suggestion, and a lot of people's suggestion, is the real solution is civil unions for everybody. Take the word "marriage" out of what the state licenses altogether, give everybody civil unions, and if you want a marriage go down to your neighborhood church, get a marriage before the eyes of God, and we take the religious element out of this debate altogether. Take the state out of the word "marriage".
Leonard: Isn't there a concern, b!X, that the state sanctioning marriage is getting into the business of religion.
Communique: Well, I mean, I don't know how much it's getting into the business of religion, but we end up having to have that discussion because we use the same word.
Leonard: Right.
Communique: It's all because we use the same word. If we just change the word, the religious aspect of fighting over what benefits the state give to who is removed from the debate.
Leonard: Excellent point.
George: b!X, thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Comments (2)
allehseya on 17 Jan 2005
Bravo!
Good Form. Well articulated. Now if only we could get the transcript up from the other radio show you were on.
The One True b!X on 17 Jan 2005
I'd like that transcript as well, but it's going to take far more concentrated effort than this one, more than I've yet been willing to commit to the task.