Gay rights activists target Ore. lawmaker

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Brad Cain, Associated Press
Tuesday, October 25, 2005 / 04:30 PM

TROUTDALE, Ore. -- Gay rights activists are going to be looking for payback when Oregon House Speaker Karen Minnis comes up for re-election next year.
Over the summer, the Republican enraged gay rights supporters when she refused to let the House vote on a civil unions bill that had been passed by the state Senate with the blessing of the Democratic governor.
Now state and national gay rights groups are targeting Minnis for defeat in 2006 as part of an effort to elect more gay-friendly legislators. The effort could turn this tourism-oriented town east of Portland into a battleground.
A spokesman for a national gay rights group in Washington, D.C., said Oregon is one of several states where bills to provide more rights to gays have faltered and where activists will be working to defeat lawmakers who stood in the way.
"There are a handful of states where a change in a couple of seats could make a big difference," David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign said recently. "And you could choose no finer example of that than House Speaker Karen Minnis."
The civil unions controversy is the latest chapter in Oregon's gay marriage debate that began in 2004, when Multnomah County issued marriage licenses to 3,000 same-sex couples before a judge ordered the county to stop. Last fall Oregon voters approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage. It was one of 11 states to pass similar ballot measures.
Minnis knows she is in for a tough re-election fight in her Multnomah County district because of her stand against the civil unions bill, which would have allowed same-sex couples to gain most of the benefits of marriage.
"They're coming after me," she said in an interview in Troutdale. "I think they are going to attack me personally at every given turn."

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