2: Ballot Measure 9

“Amends Oregon Constitution… homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, or masochism… are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”

Remembering 1992

1992. This was the very end of the twentieth century. Most LGBT Oregonians still lacked any legal protection against discrimination. We could be fired, denied housing or public accommodations, if only suspected of being gay. Our relationships were not recognized for the sake of benefits or even hospital visitation. (See Timeline.)

Several attempts to provide protection against discrimination had been repealed by voters (Eugene’s city ordinance in 1978; Governor Goldschmidt’s order covering executive department employment, in the Oregon Citizens Alliance’s first ballot measure victory in 1988). A state law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, introduced in the legislature in 1973 and every session afterwards, wouldn’t pass until 2007; marriage rights for same-gender couples in Oregon wouldn’t be secured until 2014. 

It would be three years before AIDS deaths in the U.S. would reach an all-time high. Freddie Mercury had just died of AIDS. Magic Johnson revealed he was HIV positive. As we fought the Measure 9 campaign, the very first clinical trial of combination antiretroviral therapies had just begun. The radical direct action force ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) had been active for five years by then. The offshoot Queer Nation was merely two years old.

The umbrella term “queer” hadn’t been popularized yet at the level of the mainstream. If we were recognized as a community, or as a movement, we were “lesbians and gays” if not just “gay.” We were “homosexual” to those uncomfortable with us, or “the gays.” It was a big deal that the “B” for bisexuals was added to the March for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation; the inclusion of a T for Transgender and other letters in the long pan-community acronym that’s common today hadn’t happened yet.

During the long months we were campaigning against Ballot Measure 9, Bill Clinton was campaigning to deny George H.W. Bush a second presidential term. Clinton was the first presidential candidate to court the gay vote openly. In his first year as President (after failing to overturn the military’s ban on gay service members) he signed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protection for lesbians and gays in the armed forces – they could serve but only if they stayed in the closet.

For those of you not yet born in the early 1990s, or those too young then to remember, this was the landscape for LGBT rights when Oregon voters were asked to amend the Constitution to condemn homosexuality and take away the rights of their family members, neighbors, and coworkers. 

These were still early days for the LGBT movement, just a little over two decades since Stonewall. The Christian Right (aka the Religious Right or more recently by the term Christian Nationalism) was ascendant. Its attempts to see America governed by a “moral majority” had begun in opposition to school desegregation, grew through opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, and was now focusing on gay people. The months leading into the vote on Ballot Measure 9 featured Pat Buchanan delivering his infamous “culture wars” speech at the Republican National Convention. Back in Oregon, Oregon Citizens Alliance leader Lon Mabon bragged that the national convention could have been an OCA convention, it so closely aligned with their anti-gay agenda.

Oh yes, we also had a problem with anti-Black and anti-immigrant violence in those days. Oregon was fertile soil not only for the Christian Right, but for white nationalist groups attracted by what they called the Northwest Imperative. (See Act I: 1988.) 

This was the social, legal, and cultural landscape when the OCA succeeded in placing Measure 9 on the statewide ballot.

Amends Oregon Constitution

The words chosen by the Oregon Citizens Alliance were significant. As was the vehicle for the change they were seeking. This was not just legislation. This would actually amend the state Constitution, the foundational document meant to guarantee the rights of citizens. While many tremendous legal wrongs have been perpetrated against Indigenous, Black, immigrant and other groups of people in the history of the U.S., rarely were those injustices enacted by a vote of the people as part of a statewide election. Constitutions (federal and state) have been amended and interpreted to confirm rights to groups not explicitly named, but amending a constitution to explicitly require discrimination was – thankfully – without much precedent.

This attack on the state Constitution, and the extreme words used in the measure itself, led the No on 9 campaign to launch its first television ad with a visual depiction of what was at stake. 

“The ad opens with a camera panning the yellowed parchment of the Oregon Constitution as two hands slice the bill of rights with scissors. The hands then edit the constitution in red and black marker. The word equality is crossed out. A line is drawn through freedom of speech. The words state must discriminate are added, along with phrases from the language of the anti-gay initiative: abnormal, perverse and unnatural. The title of the document is changed to read Constitution of the state of the OCA.” (Brian T. Meehan, “Oregon Constitution stars on first No on 9 ad for tv,” The Oregonian, September 29, 1992) 

The Question Before Oregon Voters

The Official 1992 General Election Voters’ Pamphlet recapped for voters the question on which they would vote YES or NO, along with the text of the constitutional amendment (“Be it Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon…”) and a summary and explanatory statement prepared by a committee of proponents and opponents. 

BALLOT TITLE 

9: AMENDS CONSTITUTION: GOVERNMENT CANNOT FACILITATE, MUST DISCOURAGE HOMOSEXUALITY, OTHER BEHAVIORS.

BALLOT QUESTION: YES OR NO

Shall constitution be amended to require that all governments discourage homosexuality, other listed “behaviors,” and not facilitate or recognize them?

SUMMARY

Amends Oregon Constitution. All governments in Oregon may not use their monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, or masochism. All levels of government, including public education systems, must assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth which recognizes that these “behaviors” are “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse” and that they are to be discouraged and avoided. State may not recognize this conduct under “sexual orientation” or “sexual preference” labels or through “quotas, minority status, affirmative action, or similar concepts.”

EXPLANATORY STATEMENT (IN PART)

The effect of this measure is to establish the rights of citizens to challenge governmental protection, encouragement or facilitation of homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, or masochism. Examples include but are not limited to:

• The establishment of homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism as a minority classification for purposes of governmental affirmative action programs, quotas, or benefits; or for purposes of anti-discrimination statutes or ordinances.
• The expenditure of public funds either directly or through the free use of government property for purposes of sensitivity training related to homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism.
• The expenditure of public funds either directly or through the free use of government property for promotions, rallies, or parades supporting homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism by public or private entities or individuals.
• The employment in government, including public schools, of an individual whose primary job duties place the person in direct and regular contact with children or youth, if that individual publicly promotes, encourages or facilitates homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism.

Reading Between the Lines

The language of Ballot Measure 9 was bad enough on its surface. 

By equating homosexuality with pedophilia and S/M (neither of which are more common among gay people than in the general population), the OCA reduced gay people from family, friends and neighbors who are contributing members of the community, to appalling “others” – sexual deviants. The pedophilia propaganda harmed children by distracting from a more accurate understanding of who poses the greatest molestation danger (their own family members). 

The OCA hoped to make this a referendum on gay peoples’ sexual practices, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. 

But the more revealing language in the measure – that shows its deeper strategic goal – is far less titillating:

• “Quotas, minority status, affirmative action, or similar concepts…”
• “To establish the rights of citizens to challenge governmental protection…”
• “Specifically the State Department of Higher Education and the public schools…”

Ballot Measure 9 purported to be about homosexuality – and it was. It was about using homosexuality as a wedge to roll back America’s commitment to civil rights. 

This was more than an attack on the gay community. It was an attack on inclusive democracy.

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

Foreshadowing the spike in hate crimes that accompany Ballot Measure 9, in 1988 Mulugeta Seraw is beaten to death by racist skinheads.

There are moments that define each generation. 

Your writer Holly Pruett grew up with the orienting questions: Where were you when you heard the President had been shot? …when MLK was assassinated? 

I was too young to register those deaths directly, myself  – 11 months old with JFK’s death, five years old with Dr. King’s. 

The moment I remember is where I was when I got the call that Mulugeta Seraw had been murdered. 

November, 1988

November 12, 1988. I was living communally in an activist household in southeast Portland. We each paid $80 a month in rent. I’d spent the early part of the year homestaying around Europe and living off $7 a day in the boho guesthouses of Southeast Asia. An expected rite of passage for white middle-class liberal arts students, for me delayed by a few years of complete immersion into rape hotline and domestic violence work. The women’s anti-violence movement introduced me to the worlds of anti-racism, class politics, social justice advocacy, and mutual aid. It recognized me as a sexual abuse survivor. And it introduced me to lesbian feminists. I looked up to these women. I wanted to be just like them.

When I got off the plane from my international travels, I came out as a lesbian and joined my first-ever electoral campaign as a full-time volunteer. It was the final months of the No on 8 campaign to defend Governor Neil Goldschmidt’s ban against anti-gay discrimination in executive department employment. This was the first of the Oregon Citizens Alliance’s (OCA) many ballot measures. Polling showed the OCA didn’t have a chance. 

On November 8, a majority of Oregonians voted for Michael Dukakis for President over George H.W. Bush, the first time a Democrat had carried the state since 1964. And 53 percent of Oregon voters approved Ballot Measure 8. The rallying cry of “No Special Rights for Gays!” and the notion of a nefarious “militant homosexual agenda” had prevailed. The gay and lesbian community was devastated. Mainstream civic and political leaders were shocked.

Five nights later, I was in bed in my basement room, frightened by the double blows of the OCA win and a Bush presidency. The phone rang. It was Alma, my compañera from the battered women’s shelter. Something terrible had happened. 

“Civic Duty”

Mulugeta Seraw was born in 1960 in Debre Tabor, an historic town of many springs in northern Ethiopia that was heavily contested during that country’s 16 year civil war. The elder Seraw sold off the family’s livestock to send his son to America for an education. 

Arriving in Oregon, Mulugeta enrolled in business classes at Portland Community College while working two jobs to send money home to his girlfriend and their six-year-old son, Henock. They never got the chance to join him in Portland, as he’d planned.

In a foreshadowing of the white nationalist groups and far-right militias traveling into Portland to provoke street fights in recent years, Tom Metzger, the founder of White Aryan Resistance (WAR), had sent his lieutenant Dave Mazzella to Portland to organize racist skinheads. Their charge: to “clash and bash” those they called “mud people.”

That fateful night, three members of East Side White Pride had been drinking heavily and distributing Aryan Youth Movement recruitment fliers downtown. Mulugeta was getting dropped off outside his apartment, a building next to one occupied by a racist skinhead. Ken Mieske (aka “Ken Death”), Kyle Brewster, and Steve Strasser surrounded Mulugeta and his friend’s car, smashing in the windows. After the driver sped off for help, they crushed Mulugeta’s skull with a baseball bat. He died the next day.

Two months later Tom Metzger was recorded saying, “the Skinheads did a civic duty.”

Looking back on that night 10 years later, The Oregonian wrote:

“The killing sent three of Portland’s sons to prison. It launched a war among Skinheads. It prompted a series of hate crimes and a groundbreaking law to monitor them. It galvanized the horrified citizens of Portland against racism.  And it led to a landmark trial that pitted a famous civil rights lawyer against the West’s most notorious neo-Nazi.”

Reading the Signs

My housemates and I – everyone I knew, it seemed – turned out in protest and mourning to countless vigils. We marched by the thousands in 1990 the day before Mulugeta’s wrongful death trial. “Protecting the marchers were 150 state and local police,” The Oregonian reported, “the most ever assembled for a Portland event.”

But the attention from law enforcement and civil society came far too late. 

In the late 1980s, Portland was known as a haven for racist skinheads. They roamed the core of Portland unhindered…. Back then… Portland was a skinhead stomping ground.

~ It Did Happen Here, an 11-episode podcast revisiting the work of the Coalition for Human Dignity and “the unlikely collaboration between groups of immigrants, civil rights activists, militant youth and queer organizers who came together to successfully confront neo-Nazi violence and right wing organizing.”

Racist skinheads had been active in Portland since the mid-1980s. Oregon, like Washington and Idaho, was seen as the promised land for its predominantly white demographics – the result of decades of racist exclusion both de jure and de facto. Targeting the region as a home base for the anticipated race war was known by white nationalists as “The Northwest Imperative.”

In 1984 a revolutionary racist gang called The Order got into a gunfight with federal agents in Portland after assassinating a Denver talk show host for being Jewish. In 1986, two dozen racist skinheads marched downtown with axes, lengths of pipe, and baseball bats. That was two years before Mulugeta’s murder. Eight months before he was killed, an Asian man was nearly beaten to death by racist skinheads after leaving a restaurant with his family.

As The Oregonian noted later, “The Seraw murder stunned Portland, but it shouldn’t have.”

Vicarious Liability 

After an informant from inside East Side White Pride identified Mulugeta’s killers, the three pleaded guilty. But Morris Dees, from his office at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), had been listening to Tom Metzger. In 1989, SPLC brought a wrongful death suit on behalf of the Seraw family to hold the Metzgers and WAR accountable for Mulugeta’s death, using the novel theory of vicarious liability.

The jury found Metzger and WAR responsible for inciting the murder. As Mulugeta’s then 10-year-old son listened to the verdict, the Seraws were awarded the largest judgement in a U.S. racism case to date: $12.5 million. 

Metzger told reporters, “Stopping Tom Metzger is not going to change what’s going to happen in this country…. We’re too deep. We’re embedded now.”

When white nationalists marched through Charlottesville 29 years later, they wore polo shirts and khakis instead of shaved heads, bomber jackets, and steel-toed work boots. Integrity First for America followed in SPLC’s footsteps by winning a civil judgement against the far-right organizers for conspiring to incite the hate violence that resulted in Heather Heyer’s death and severe injury to others. 

The chain of causality is less obvious between what happened on November 8, when voters gave the Oregon Citizens Alliance their first statewide victory, and the deadly attack on Mulugeta Seraw on November 12. 

Did the OCA’s false and inflammatory rhetoric about a militant homosexual agenda demanding “special rights” for gays – “the same minority status as blacks and Hispanics, complete with hiring quotas” – contribute to the permission those racist skinheads felt to take the life of another human?

Were the voters who endorsed legal discrimination against gays motivated by the same fears and prejudices that fueled the growth of groups like White Aryan Resistance?

Racist and homophobic hate speech and hate violence, widespread indifference punctuated by shock in the face of predictable outcomes, and courageous organizing among unlikely allies – this is the scene that serves as Act I for the Ballot Measure 9 campaign to come.

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.