As I read that tweet tonight in the wake of New York's historic vote knocking another shard off the brick of bigotry, I couldn't help but think of my friend Clela Rorex, who I have written about here before.

It's astonishing how fast the decades fly by. It was 36 years ago, in March 1975, Rorex issued one of the nation's first-ever licenses for a gay marriage. During the following month, she issued five more to gay and lesbian couples.

Not surprisingly, she caught a barrage of brimstone from clergy and editorialists and politicians and the majority of citizens. No surprise since less than a year earlier, Boulder had engaged in an electoral and media civil war because the city council had passed one of the country's first ordinances protecting gays from discrimination. A referendum had reversed the law a few months later and a young city councilman had been recalled and replaced after an election campaign that was just short of tar and feathers.

So what could Rorex have been thinking?

At the time, many who had supported the repealed gay rights ordinance — the same kind that hundreds of communities from Corvallis to Cape Cod (as well as Boulder) now enforce — were arguing that any fresh attempt to push something having to do with gay equality would fail and possibly give the right wing another cudgel with which to undermine left and liberal goals in other arenas. The argument was, basically, that gays should wait and "go slow," just as some liberals had argued that black people should do 20 years earlier.

In Rorex's office, however, was a gay man, Deputy County Clerk N. Patrick Prince, who raised questions with her about the state's marriage law. He and his lover obtained one of the six licenses Rorex issued after obtaining a memo from the district attorney's office saying that doing so wasn't specifically prohibited by Colorado law.

"There is no statutory law prohibiting the issuance of a license, probably because the situation was simply not contemplated in the past by our legislature. The case law is strongly on the side of the public official that refuses to issue a marriage license in these situations, and a public official could not be prosecuted for violation of any criminal law by such marriage licensing," the assistant D.A. wrote. The law did not permit marriage between close blood relations, nor bigamy, but it didn't say anything about the sex of the partners, he said.

So Rorex had started issuing licenses, telling clerks to cross out "man" and "woman" on the documents and insert "person."

It didn't take long for the Colorado Attorney General to step in with a legal opinion calling same-sex licenses misleading because they falsely suggested that recipients had obtained all the rights the state afforded to husband and wife. The Boulder District Attorney deferred and the licenses became void. The matter was never contested in court.

Meanwhile, some license foes who weren't busy writing Rorex hate mail and looking for rope were having themselves a good laugh.

On April 15, Roswell "Ros" Howard arrived with his mare, Dolly, at 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.

Now 67, Clela Rorex today is the treasurer and law office administrator for one of my favorite organizations, the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund. In a phone interview three years ago, she told me she'd changed her mind:



"If I had the opportunity to do it over again, I would do it with more conviction this time. Then I knew nothing about gay and lesbian relationships. I only knew one gay man. But I knew it was the right thing to do. "My only regret in this is that people with long-term loving relationships still can't get married. I now know several gay and lesbian couples who have been together for years. They reaffirm to me that this is an issue of human rights, civil rights. All the fanatical hatemongering about it is frightening and infuriating."

Indeed. My ex-wife and her long-time companion live just a few blocks from Rorex. A physician’s assistant and an acupuncturist, they've been together for 22 years. These two women who deeply love each other and have shown the kind of commitment that the right-wanker hate tribe claims is crucial to being an acceptable human being still can't get married, can't file a joint tax statement, can't even be certain that in the future some miscreant bureaucrat will, in perfect legality, keep one of them from visiting the other in the hospital should they wind up so confined.

One couple who married after getting a license from Rorex remains together today. Their Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case, Adams v. Howerton, provides another example of why gay marriage isn't some frivolous tangent in the culture war. They wrote in a letter in 2004 to a Boulder paper:



"One of the problems that many of our own community have had when dealing with the issue of same-sex marriage is that it goes beyond the battle for sex rights. It is a battle about love and many of our own community as a result of the environment brought about by the insidious accumulative effects of homophobic oppression are cynical and reactionary when it comes to Love. Love is an extraordinarily powerful force. That is why the enemies of Lesbian and Gay Liberation do not want to see our relationships recognized. Once Same-Sex Love is recognized the strength of the opposition will begin to wither away. It is inevitable."

Throughout U.S. history, on one side have been those who say that tradition, scientific studies, common-sense, public order and divine revelation all dictate that this or that second-class group should remain unequal, not quite legally human, and therefore subject to laws that nobody else is, unshielded by laws that everybody else is. Black people, women, Indians, immigrants have all found themselves legally assigned to these “other” categories. Other than fully American. Other than fully a person. Arrayed against them have been those who say everyone deserves the same rights. At first, only a minority says so. At first, anyone who seeks to make things right is told not to be too pushy, not to be shrill, not to cause a backlash. Eventually, it becomes clear that obtaining equal rights, like every other reform, won't happen without pushing, without shouting, without making it clear the status quo is intolerable.

Tonight, in New York, foes of same-sex marriage were defeated. Just as they will ultimately be defeated everywhere. Because this fight is not at its root about gay marriage. It's about civil rights. Equal rights. Everybody's rights. Not a luxury. Not an add-on. Bedrock, bottom-line, fundamental. That was so when Clela Rorex issued those licenses 36 years ago, and it still is today.

Here's an interview with Rorex: