Oregon Town Embroiled in Gay Rights Controversy

City Manager Mike Kelly feels like a farmer who looks out his window to see two armies drawn up to fight in his fields.

Springfield this month became the nation’s first municipality to include anti-gay language in its City Charter. Passage of the measure has turned this blue-collar timber town of 45,400 into a battleground in a national debate.

“This was not something that Springfield itself was wrestling with,” Kelly said. Civil rights groups and the measure’s sponsor, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, “have drawn a line in the sand, and the line goes through Springfield.”

The amendment, which took effect June 15, bars the city from protecting homosexuals from discrimination. It also says the city cannot “promote, encourage or facilitate” homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.

“We expect this is the testing ground, as it were, for hate initiatives across the United States,” said Martin Hiraga, a civil rights organizer for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C.

The alliance, which hopes to amend the Oregon Constitution this fall with a similar measure, says it wants to prevent San Francisco-style tolerance of homosexuality from spreading to Oregon.

The state constitutional amendment would go further than the charter amendment, requiring schools to teach that homosexuality is wrong. The alliance needs 89,000 signatures to put it on the November ballot.

Colorado also will vote on a state constitutional amendment in November that would deny homosexuals protection as a minority.

Fearful the Oregon amendment could pass, opponents began a two-week walk last Sunday from Eugene to Portland.

“Gays and lesbians are a target, and a pretty easy target,” said walk coordinator Anne Galisky. “The far right wants to push back all the gains of the civil rights movement.”

The Springfield measure passed May 19 with 55.4% of the vote.

“They still have every right I have guaranteed by the United States Constitution. We are just saying we don’t think it is right that an advantage should be granted to someone based on how they have sex,” said Loretta Neet, a Springfield homemaker and OCA board member.

Not so, says the American Civil Liberties Union, which hopes to overturn the measure in court as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection.