Splitting Headache

[February 21st, 2007] Oregon's newest court case seeking equal rights for same-sex couples has a plaintiff accustomed to the spotlight: City Commissioner Sam Adams.

But that spotlight is uncomfortable in this instance, because Adams is working with his former partner Greg Eddie. Together they're squaring off against an Oregon statute prohibiting Adams from sharing his public employee retirement benefits with Eddie.

With the support of Basic Rights Oregon, the state's highest-profile queer rights organization, Adams and Eddie announced their Multnomah County Circuit Court lawsuit Tuesday. Like relatives posing for a Civil War-era daguerrotype, Adams and Eddie stood stiffly behind the dais but hugged afterward.

Their lawsuit would formally dissolve the couple's dormant domestic partnership, but its intent is to challenge the state's rules guiding the Public Employees Retirement System.

The goal is to force the state to create new, nondiscriminatory regulations for dividing benefits between same-sex couples who break up, as Adams and Eddie did in 2004.

Married heterosexual couples who divorce have the legal ability to split one spouse's PERS benefits. But that's not an option for gay and lesbian couples. Since same-sex couples cannot marry in Oregon, they also cannot divorce. Adams says that's unjust.

"Public employees have a right to end their relationships with financial integrity," says Adams.

Adams and Eddie—a 41-year-old financial consultant—became partners in 1992. When the two men split up in 2004, they divided all their assets, including the home they shared in North Portland and Eddie's 401(k) retirement account. Adams, who worked for former Mayor Vera Katz as her chief of staff while he was Eddie's partner, accumulated a public pension during that time that Adams says is now worth about $90,000.

The lawsuit announced Tuesday is the fourth in recent months from Basic Rights Oregon that seeks to force state compliance with a 1998 Oregon Court of Appeals ruling in Tanner v. Oregon Health Sciences University. The appeals court determined that OHSU could not deny same-sex couples the health benefits given to married, heterosexual couples.

In a broad-based court strategy that lawyers liken to that employed by African Americans during the civil-rights movement, recent lawsuits for same-sex couples in Oregon have dealt with parental rights as well as retirement and health-care benefits (see "Lesbians and Gays Going Courting," WW, April 5, 2006).

Eddie loaned $25,000 to Adams' 2004 campaign for City Council, and Adams still owes Eddie nearly all the money his campaign borrowed. Eddie and Adams say now they're holding off on settling that loan until after they can divide Adams' PERS account.

"Oregon law stands in the way, and we believe that's wrong," Adams says.