Gay Marriage Case Plays Out Amid Ordinary Life

The Castle-Bauer household moves to a familiar rhythm.

Celia Castle wakes before dawn on a school day, starts the coffee, feeds the pets, and fixes her daughters’ lunches.

Bags filled with the day’s necessities line the front hallway like sleeping watchdogs. Family photos cling to the refrigerator, and a to-do list sits by the stove.

Soon the house will fill with light and the sounds of 12-year-old Nicola and 9-year-old Robbie waking up. There will be school and work, choir and piano practice, and when it gets dark again everyone will gather around the dinner table and share at least one good thing about their day.

Small dramas punctuate their routine: a hamster escapes, a science project deadline looms, the aging plumbing expires.

But Tuesday will be different. They’ll load up the minivan and head to Olympia, where lawyers will stand before the state Supreme Court and debate the family’s fate in the cold language of constitutional law.

Then they’ll wait for nine justices to decide whether Nicola and Robbie’s two mommies can be married.

Brenda Bauer frowns as she pulls up to the curb in front of Nicola’s school.

“There is a giant tree in the street,” she says.

“That is not a tree, Mother, it’s a branch,” Nicola says.

The girls call Brenda and Celia Momma B and Momma C, or BB and CC, but Nicola has lately taken to “Mother,” delivered in tones varying from frosty to fond.

“Well, I’m going to pick it up,” says Brenda, who as Seattle’s director of fleets and facilities feels a proprietary interest in city streets.

She moves the branch and says goodbye to Nicola, who offers a cheek to be kissed. Nicola then turns away and joins the flow of 7th-grade girls dressed in jeans, sneakers and sweatshirts.

Nicola’s fondest wish is to live in the suburbs, where, she says, she would live in a brick house that looks exactly like every other brick house and no one would ever notice her. Her parents, who decorate the lawn of their funky, south Seattle rambler with plastic pink flamingos, cannot decide if this stems from their being lesbians or from Nicola’s being 12.

Everything would be cool, Nicola says, if people just calmed down and didn’t make such a big deal about it.

“After a life of not being anonymous, it would be nice to be anonymous,” Nicola says wearily.

However, she acknowledges her parents’ role as lead plaintiffs in Washington state’s gay marriage lawsuit is “pretty cool.” Not as cool as it would be for them to stop doing such mortifying things as talking to her friends when they drive the carpool, but cool nonetheless.

“It’s like the civil rights movement,” which she has been studying at school, Nicola says. “Martin Luther King was fighting for equal rights, and it’s kind of the same vague idea. We’re fighting for equal rights.”

Brenda, 48, and Celia, 49, did not set out to become gay rights pioneers. They watched with interest, but little urgency, as gay marriage was legalized in British Columbia, Canada, in 2003, and then briefly in San Francisco last year. They wondered, should we go north? Go south? Or just wait until it hits Seattle?

When Oregon’s Multnomah County started granting same-sex marriage licenses last spring, Brenda and Celia decided it was time. They waited three weeks to find a day clear of scheduling conflicts, when no one had a crucial soccer game or an important meeting at work.

Nicola remembers that they had to drive for “like, 20 hours” and then wait in “like, 20 lines.”

Robbie thought the “I do” part in the judge’s office was exciting.

They enjoyed a honeymoon lunch at a mall food court -- the only place everyone could find something they liked -- and then drove three hours back to Seattle so the girls wouldn’t miss another day of school.

When they got home that night, Brenda and Celia ran back and forth through the yard as Nicola and Robbie pelted them with rose petals.

The Castle-Bauers’ Oregon marriage license is in legal limbo now, along with the unions of 3,000 other gay couples who got married there last spring. Oregonians, along with voters in 10 other states, passed a ballot measure last November banning same-sex marriage. The fate of the Multnomah County marriages lies with the Oregon Supreme Court, which is expected to rule soon.

While gay couples rushed to marry in San Francisco, Portland, Massachusetts and elsewhere, gay rights activists in Washington state were cautiously planning their next move. They decided to ask the courts to overturn a 1998 state law forbidding same-sex marriage.

The ACLU sought gay and lesbian pillar-of-the-community types across the state. A friend suggested Brenda and Celia, and they joined a list of plaintiffs that included a police officer, a judge, a college professor, a nurse and a high school teacher.

Celia, a Bellevue firefighter, had always been skeptical about marriage. One of the things she liked about being a lesbian was how it freed her from traditional gender roles.

But after that Portland trip, she had to admit there was something to marriage, even after 17 years and two children together.

“It was just a sense of permanence that was not there before. I thought, Naah, that’s absurd, how could a piece of paper and 10 minutes in a judge’s office change the nature of how you looked at things?” she says. “But it does.”

When Brenda looks back, she says the need for civil marriage crystallized for her at the birth of their first daughter. Brenda is the biological mother of both girls, who were conceived through artificial insemination.

Brenda started bleeding heavily the night she came home from the hospital with Nicola. As the medics prepared to transport her to the emergency room, Brenda tried to remember where she’d put the medical power of attorney papers, and wondered if the hospital would even honor them. Fighting unconsciousness, she worried that if she died, Celia would have no legal rights to her daughter.

“I was literally bleeding to death and thinking, we have no rights,” Brenda said.

Meanwhile, Celia knew Brenda was in really bad shape. Legal rights were the last thing on her mind.

“It didn’t occur to me anyone could take Nicola away from me,” Celia said, adding quietly, “I’d like to have seen them try.”

Brenda and Celia have built an approximation of civil marriage through a careful layering of legal agreements and adoptions. They realize not everyone can afford all that, which is one reason they agreed to join the case. And still, the pseudo-marriage patchwork they’ve created doesn’t fully protect them.

For example, Celia had to endure interviews and pass a court review to win permission to adopt Nicola and Robbie. If Celia rushed into a burning building to save someone and was killed, Brenda wouldn’t get her pension benefits like another firefighter’s spouse would.

They won their first court battle. Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard D. Hicks said the gay marriage ban violated the state constitution’s promise of equal “privileges and immunities” for all citizens. A King County judge also ruled in favor of gay marriage in a separate case. The state Supreme Court will hear appeals on both cases Tuesday.

Opponents of a Castle-Bauer marriage include Jeff Kemp, a former NFL quarterback turned traditional-marriage defender, whose organization, Families Northwest, filed a brief in the lawsuit.

Gay marriage wouldn’t destroy his 21-year marriage or warp his four children’s minds, Kemp says. But he believes it would hurt society as a whole, much the way he believes the rise of no-fault divorce did in the 1970s.

“I am not talking about individual couples damaging me,” Kemp says. “A non-marriage culture leads to a whole slew of problems.”

Kemp says the fundamental nature of marriage is its union of two opposites, the male and the female. Same-sex marriage, in his view, changes the definition so much that it isn’t really marriage anymore.

It is easier to oppose gay marriage in general, Kemp acknowledges, than to tell specific people that their relationship damages society, although he believes that to be true. In fact, he believes he and the plaintiffs probably share similar motivations, even though they come to opposite conclusions.

“They too care for the health and well-being of children and families,” Kemp said.

In the eye of this storm are Nicola and Robbie, bright and kind and funny girls with halos of wavy blond hair. Everyone claims to have their best interests at heart, whether it’s ACLU lawyers arguing that their parents deserve the protections of marriage, or Kemp arguing that the state should try to ensure children are raised by a mother and a father.

“It’s like hopscotch, and this is the third to last hopscotch, and you don’t know how to do the others,” Robbie said, relating her anxiety about the court case to a more familiar nerve-racking experience. “It’s like, ‘OK, I don’t know if I can do this ... ‘ “

Robbie does not share her older sister’s mixed feelings about public attention. Her mothers’ quest to marry appeals to her 9-year-old sense of fairness. She leans forward and frowns a little to emphasize her point.

“I want this to happen. I want my moms to be safe and have a happy life,” she says.

If they do win this case, the Castle-Bauers’ routine will not change dramatically. Brenda and Celia will have a Washington marriage license to hang on their bedroom wall next to the Oregon marriage certificate and the city of Seattle domestic partner registration. Perhaps they will celebrate with a flurry of rose petals in the twilight or another trip to the food court.

But the next morning, there will still be lunches to make and pets to feed. There will be school and work, choir and piano practice. And when it gets dark again, everyone will gather around the dinner table and share at least one good thing about their day.