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Thursday, March 04, 2004

At 10:45AM after my 11:00 meeting cancelled, I pretty much spontaneously walked out of the office, jumped in the car. At 11:15 I had picked up my daughter from school, at 11:30 my son from his school, and by 11:40 we were at Safeway buying 4 dozen pink and white roses. Parking downtown was a bit tricky, but sometime near 12:15 or so we were walking up to the group of people lined up outside the Multnomah County Building making history. My daughter was nervous about protesters, she's been the personal target of some pretty mean spirited and bigoted yelling at Pride parades in the past, but I explained that part of the reason we were going was to make sure that for every one person that was negative and hateful, there were at least 2 or 3 that were positive and loving. She was relieved to find that they had "fenced in" both sides of the demonstrators and there were lots of police visible. I was in tears by the time we were a block away, I could hear the whoops of joy, the cheers, and people were coming down the sidewalk with their manila envelopes in hand, smiles on their faces. I did a mental calculation and figured there were about fifty couples waiting outside the building, and probably there was another third again inside the building. We started handing out the roses to the people in line, because if you are going to get married, you should have flowers to go with your hard won marriage licence.

As we walked back to the car, the kids talked about each of the pairs of demonstrators having a dog with them. The border collie with the religious folks clearly wanted to go over and play with the golden retriever with the gay folks and neither dog cared much about who believed what. I couldn't help but think they were the smarter species.

The kids were back in class at 1:00. I guess my son missed a math test, but I don't much care.

# posted by Susan @ 4:28 PM

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