Excited reactions in Sonoma County to gay marriage ruling

The news that marriage equality is the law of the land crackled out from the car radio Friday morning to the ears of 84-year-old Keith Kerr of Santa Rosa, a retired Army brigadier general who broke a 30-year silence to declare he is gay and to speak out against discrimination.

North Coast activists who have spent decades championing gay rights met Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court declaration that the Constitution guarantees a nationwide right to same-sex marriage with relief and elation and quickly began planning celebrations.

Kerr, who more than a decade ago joined other top-ranking military officers in declaring they were gay and spoke out against the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, said Friday’s decision was a profound step forward for civil rights.

“It’s a tremendous victory for LGBT people,” Kerr said, talking by phone while on the road to Sebastopol for a bonsai workshop after the decision was announced.

The ruling does not affect California laws, but it has paved the way for more than two dozen states to join the rest of the country in allowing same-sex couples to marry. The right to marry was restored for gay Californians in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a 2008 state law restricting marriage to straight couples - Proposition 8 - was unconstitutional.

Kerr said that while the ruling does not affect his rights in California, he is thinking about his friends in Virginia, New York City and the Midwest.

“This will make a tremendous difference for them,” he said.

At home in Glen Ellen, Joshua Rymer called out - “Yahoo!” - to his husband, Timothy Frazer, and the couple kissed. Rymer and Frazer were plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging a ban on same-sex marriage that voters approved in 2000, Proposition 22, but which was struck down in 2008 by the state Supreme Court.

“This has been a long process. … It started long ago with people in the 1950s and 1960s who were brave enough to come out, and (it continued with) all the movements that followed,” Rymer said.

He reflected on being a 13-year-old boy when his older brother came out as gay and how that gave him courage when he addressed his own sexuality. Years later, when Rymer and his husband joined the legal fight against Proposition 22, he was moved and surprised by how much support he received.

“It certainly felt wonderful to play a role and to contribute,” Rymer said.

In Santa Rosa, 14-year-old Daniel Martinez-Leffew reflected on how much he’s focused the past six years of his young life championing for his fathers and other couples like them to have the right to marry. His parents married in 2008.

The teen wrote letters, attended rallies and made a four-minute video in 2013 urging Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to strike down California’s Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The video went viral on YouTube and put the teen in the national media spotlight.

On Friday morning, he was seated around the breakfast table with his fathers, Jay and Bryan Leffew, huddled around a laptop computer, absorbing the news.

“When my dad told me, I was like … ‘What?’?” Leffew said. “It felt like a burden was lifted, like we finally finished.”

Sonoma County voters have rejected two same-sex marriage bans that were approved statewide in 2000 and again in 2008, Propositions 22 and 8.

But beyond the popular opinion, not all North Coast residents were buoyed by the high court’s decision.

Santa Rosa Bishop Robert Vasa has been an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, as well as other social issues such as access to abortion, since he took the helm in 2011 of the sprawling Santa Rosa Diocese that stretches from Sonoma County to the Oregon border with an estimated 165,000 registered members, including about 45,000 regular church attendees. On Friday, Vasa stated in a bulleted list that the court made “an egregious error in moral judgment.”

The bishop compared Friday’s decision to the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people were not U.S. citizens, and Vasa stated that “similarly, today’s justices have erred.”

“Just as Roe v. Wade did not settle the abortion question nearly two generations ago, Obergefell v. Hodges does not settle the marriage question today,” he said in his written remarks.

Religious freedom became the banner under which the governor of Indiana in April signed a law that would have made it possible for individuals and businesses to discriminate against customers for religious reasons. However, public backlash prompted lawmakers to backpedal, and Republican legislative leaders said they would change the law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fighting religious referendums and employment discrimination will likely continue to be a focus for civil rights activists going forward, said Petaluma City Councilman Gabe Kearney, who is gay.

Friday’s ruling “is just huge … but we’re not all the way there yet,” Kearney said. “There are still (more than) 30 states where, if I were to get married tomorrow, I could go into work tomorrow and get fired just because I’m gay.”

Still, Kearney, 33, said the Supreme Court’s decision unearthed a lot of emotion as he thought about all the people, including himself, who grew up “without the same rights as everyone else.”

Kearney, who grew up in Petaluma, said he became politically active at age 16 when he joined phone bank teams asking voters to reject Proposition 22.

“Many people will have been fighting for this right, equal rights, for a long time,” Kearney said.

Susan Jones, interim police chief of Cloverdale, said that she had been cautious with her optimism that the Supreme Court would rule as it did. She and her wife, Toni Lisoni, who live in Healdsburg, watched the news Friday morning while on vacation in Los Angeles. Jones said the decision will no doubt be celebrated at the family reunion they are attending this weekend.

“I was hoping; I was hoping it would rule in favor of allowing marriage in all 50 states,” Jones said. “It’s only fair. It’s equal justice, giving all Americans the same benefits.”

At home in Healdsburg, Stu Harrison, co-chairman of the ‘Wine Country Says No on 8’ group formed five years ago against Proposition 8, marveled at the reaction of corporations on social media.

“The thing that struck me is the number, not just of the straight celebrities, but of major corporations that are tweeting about it,” Harrison said. “MasterCard turned (its) logo to a rainbow.”

The staff at the Fountaingrove Lodge in Santa Rosa were already deep in preparations Friday morning for Saturday’s Hollywood-themed Pride gala hosted by the luxury retirement community tailored for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Gary Saperstein, who co-founded the LGBT-focused Out in the Vineyard tour and event company, said he called Sonoma Mayor David Cook on Friday morning and asked him to raise the rainbow Pride flag outside City Hall.

“It’s sending that message, ‘We’re not second-class citizens; we can love and be loved like everyone else,’?” Saperstein said. “That is all we’ve wanted as gay people.”

Cook said he was honored to partake in commemorating the ruling and asked city staff to raise the rainbow flag. Cook, Saperstein and about 30 others gathered to celebrate Friday afternoon outside the town’s historic City Hall on the Sonoma Plaza.

“There are still those struggles that we are going to have to pursue,” Saperstein said. “But we have this behind us now. We’re only going to move forward from here.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.