A state law
allowing Oregon's gay couples to register as domestic
partners belatedly took effect after a federal judge ruled
the state's process of disqualifying petition
signatures was consistent enough to be valid.
The state quickly
announced Friday that the domestic-partnership
applications were available online, and jubilant gay rights
activists predicted hundreds of couples would line up
on Monday morning at county offices to register.
''We're a family.
We've been waiting for this for a long time,'' said a
beaming Cathy Kravitz of Portland. She said she and her
partner of 21 years planned to be among those
registering on Monday.
The law passed by
the legislature in 2007 was to take effect when the new
year started, but U.S. district judge Michael Mosman
suspended it to hear testimony about a petition drive
that sought to put the law before voters.
The petitions
fell 96 signatures short of the 55,179 needed to refer the
law to the November 2008 ballot. The petitioners claim that
county clerks rejected signatures improperly.
Officials with
the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based group that
advocates for conservative Christian legal causes, said they
would appeal Mosman's ruling.
Fund lawyer
Austin Nimocks had argued that a signature on a petition
should have the same weight as a signature on a ballot, and
that elections officials should have made more of an
effort to contact voters whose signatures were
disqualified.
But Mosman said
signatures on a petition amounted to ''a call for an
election, not a substitution for an election.''
Testimony at the
hearing turned on whether Oregon counties had a ''common
standard'' to evaluate whether a voter's signature on a
petition was valid. Mosman said the state had supplied
enough evidence -- if just barely -- that a common
standard existed in all 36 counties.
Petitioners plan
to start another drive to put the domestic-partnership
law to a referendum.
''We want to vote
-- we think that our signatures mean something and it
was an arbitrary move by the secretary of state's office,''
said Carolyn Wendell, who was a chief petitioner in
the lawsuit.
Gay rights groups
said they were prepared to continue fighting, both in
court and on the ballot.
''The [Alliance
Defense Fund] is an out-of-state group that could care
less about the individual rights of folks here in Oregon,''
said Jeana Frazzini, executive director of Basic
Rights Oregon. ''They have certainly demonstrated that
through the harm they have caused to same-sex couples
across this state because of the delay they've faced for the
past month.''
Gay couples who
register as domestic partners will be able to file joint
state tax returns, inherit each other's property, and make
medical choices on each other's behalf, plus have
access to a host of other state benefits given to
married Oregonians.
In 2004 about
3,000 same-sex couples were granted marriage licenses in
Multnomah County, the largest county in Oregon. But Oregon
voters later approved a constitutional ban on gay
marriage, and the state supreme court nullified the
marriage licenses.
Oregon becomes
the ninth U.S. state to approve spousal rights in some
form for gay couples, joining Connecticut, Vermont, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California, Washington,
and Hawaii. Massachusetts is the only state that
allows gay couples to marry.
Meanwhile, in New
York State, an appeals court has ruled that a gay
couple's marriage in Canada should be recognized in New
York.
The appellate
division of the state supreme court on Friday reversed a
judge's ruling in 2006 that Monroe Community College did not
have to extend health benefits to an employee's
lesbian partner. The appellate judges determined that
there is no legal impediment in New York to the
recognition of a same-sex marriage. (Julia Silverman, AP)
