Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 11:45:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Rex Wockner Subject: WOCKNER/INTERVIEW/FORMER ORE. GOV. BARBARA ROBERTS WITH STRAIGHT FRIENDS LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS GAY ACTIVISTS? An Interview with Former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts by Rex Wockner (870 words) Copyright (c) 1996 Rex Wockner. All rights reserved. Barbara Roberts was governor of Oregon until 1995. Now she works at Harvard and serves on the board of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political organization. A better friend to gays and lesbians you will not find. I caught up with her in the gay activism suite at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. ***** Rex Wockner: Usually when celebrity politicians pass through gay hospitality suites, they are in and out in five minutes. You've been here for over an hour. Barbara Roberts: I'm on the Human Rights Campaign Board of Directors and I am absolutely committed to this cause. I believe strongly that straight people must take a stand on this issue. It's a civil-rights issue, it's a human-rights issue and if people who are not personally impacted by it stand silent, then maybe they're going to be in the group that gets chosen to be battered next and I'm just not willing to do that. I don't have to be a gay or lesbian to know that this issue is right. If we think as a country that we can discriminate against people on their sexual orientation this week, next week it'll be on some other issue. I don't believe it's right, I don't believe it's fair, I don't believe it's just and I think I have an obligation to stand up and say so. Wockner: A lot of people in your age group didn't know any openly gay and lesbian people in their formative years, in their early adulthood years. Did you have any particular personal experiences that caused you to see the light on this issue? Roberts: We did know people who were gays and lesbians, we just didn't know we knew them. No, I don't have members of my family. It really was just a very slow awareness for me. I had a couple of men who had been together about 25 years who lived down the street from me for a few years when I was a young woman, and met them and knew them and respected them. They were both very talented artists. That was sort of the first couple I knew. The political issue arose early and I can't remember when it didn't feel like the right thing to do. So it wasn't personal experience. It was just an overall commitment to treating people honestly and equally and openly. How could I care about all those other civil-rights issues and then find this one to be one that I could ignore? Wockner: Do you disagree with Bill Clinton on gay marriage? Roberts: Yes. For me, gay marriage -- as difficult as it is for our culture to accept, we have accepted a lot of other changes in marriage in this culture in the last 40 or 50 years. It was illegal in many states for blacks and whites to be married. There were many states where you could not have brought home a Japanese war bride after World War II or where you wouldn't have been able to marry a divorced person. So we changed a lot of our attitudes about marriage. This one will change too. I think the real issue -- when people say this discredits marriage as it stands in this country now, we have 50 percent of the people in this country being divorced now. There clearly is something wrong with the stability of heterosexual marriage in this country. We should be encouraging long-term relationships -- heterosexual or homosexual -- we should not be discouraging them. We should learn to think about how we encourage people who are in love to make a long-time, lifetime commitment in terms of the stability of families of all kinds. So, I feel very comfortable about my support of gay marriage. Wockner: Why do you think that so many otherwise-gay- supportive heterosexuals -- both people in public life and ordinary citizens -- just don't get it? Roberts: I think it's a new concept. I think people have not thought of lesbian and gay men's relationships as long-term. They haven't thought about inheritance and health issues -- that mean gays don't have the same rights as other couples. What's happening now is [the public] is learning and I think as they learn this issue will continue to change. It does cause people to rumble instantly in many cases, for reasons they can't quite identify -- maybe it's terminology more than reality, and our job is to help people think of it in human terms rather than terminology terms. Wockner: The first draft of my monthly opinion column for October has me speculating that heterosexuals are just hung up on the word 'marriage' rather than troubled by gay unions per se. I thought that was my original idea. Roberts: I think it is a terminology thing. The term marriage in this culture is one of religious connotation. We used to have long-term partnerships that after seven years they became a marriage legally when people were domestically associated and we didn't want to call them a marriage for those seven years. If we had another word that we could use for gay and lesbian legal commitments to each other, I think the public would be more comfortable. Wockner: Thanks very much. -end- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 1996 Rex Wockner. All rights reserved. Do not publish, broadcast, or cybertransport without permission. ----------------------------------------------------------------