Lon Mabon Sets 'Em Straight

POLITICALLY INVOLVED! A NORTH Dakota country girl! She wouldn't have imagined it - but here she is, Annette Everson, shy Annette Everson, who didn't have a date until she was 19, addressing the anxious men and women on folding chairs in a church meeting hall in Gladstone, otherwise known as Happy Rock, population 10,000, Clackamas County, Ore.

It's a muggy Thursday evening in August, and the attendees fan themselves with literature they've skimmed off the piles on the tables out back - "Pro-family answers to Pro-gay questions;" a 1987 magazine article titled "The Overhauling of Straight America;" a release announcing recalls on six members of the Oregon Senate. These are your average small-town, middle-class, allegiance-pledging, church-going Janes and Joes, and though you might not know it to look at them, they're folks whose patience has been tried for some time now, and they're ready to shout "amen" to the right guy in the pulpit.

And he's here tonight! A true patriot! Annette Everson, 48, remembers the first time she met him, during Al Mobley's 1990 gubernatorial campaign, when he planted those laser eyes on her and assured her that the Oregon Citizens Alliance was running to win. That's all it took. From Amway parties to political parties - before long, shy Annette Everson was director of the OCA's Clackamas County chapter, working the meeting-hall masses:

"As I look over the crowd," she says, "there's so many soldiers who have done so much work. But I want one person in particular to stand up." It's a woman from Molalla, Ore., who with her husband sold $500 worth of stuff, garage-sale-type stuff, to benefit the OCA. There is much applause. "They slept in their camper right next to the sale - it was outside, in the open air, right on a main drag. We can learn something from that. They made $500 selling stuff that wasn't worth a darn. Right next to the laundromat. Nickel and dime stuff. Nobody had to dig in their pockets for that." A pause. "You'll get that chance tonight."

The woman from Gladstone, working the crowd. In the back she can see Phillip Ramsdell of Marysville, Wash., who followed his dad to work for Weyerhaeuser, who home-schools his kids just like she does, who left Weyerhaeuser to be OCA's political director. Never mind the long days, the hours spent on the phone, the distasteful details of the battle they are fighting. This is history! In the making! She can barely contain herself.

"Get out your pencil and your paper and take notes," she says grandly, introducing the evening's main speaker. "Because people will ask you what Lon Mabon said tonight."

LON MABON, RED-WHITE-AND-blue American, husband, father, former hippie and missionary worker, 46-year-old chairman of the Oregon Citizens Alliance - the Northwest's premier offering of the religious right and sponsors of last year's Measure 9, which, for starters, would have prohibited legal protection for gays and lesbians against discrimination. Outspent six to one, opposed by everyone from Oregon's U.S. senators on down to the newspapers and city councils and gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant, they still got 44 percent of the vote and won 21 of Oregon's 36 counties. And that, says Mabon, is the power of grassroots politics.

Since then this battle - Mabon speaks in military terms - has taken on farcical proportions, with more softly worded "Son of 9" initiatives hustled through various shoo-in cities and counties, only to be challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and then nullified by a bill, quickly signed into law by Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts on Aug. 2, that basically cut their legs off, forbidding such action at the local level. This really stuck in Mabon's craw, and for days afterward he carted around a copy of Oregon's state constitution, reading to anyone who would listen the passage on local powers he said made such a law unconstitutional. The OCA filed suit and announced recalls on selected legislators who voted for the bill.

Mabon's supporters say he's tenacious, sincere, the hardest-working man in politics. Opponents like the Rev. Gary Wilson, former pastor of Portland's mostly gay Metropolitan Community Church, say things like this: "I've been in gatherings where he's there, and I don't want to be near the man. But I don't walk around town picking up sewer rats, either."

Sewer rat, huckster, bigot, Nazi - Lon Mabon has been called these things and more. The Oregon Citizens Alliance, which he built from the mailing-list remains of Baptist minister Joe Lutz's unsuccessful 1986 senatorial campaign against Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, includes education and land use on its agenda, but its real name recognition rests with gay rights, the most divisive and emotionally laden issue since abortion. The issue has risen, phoenix-like, in the wake of the Cold War and other obsolete religious-right issues, picking up nationwide momentum and giving Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition something to do with its money again. (The Coalition gave $20,000 to the Measure 9 campaign.) Colorado actually passed a milder version of the initiative, now being contested in Colorado courts, and similar campaigns are brewing from California to Michigan to Florida. Inspired by OCA's success, Lon Mabon's crusade will be coming next year to Washington and Idaho, too.

"If you look at the last three or four decades in this country, maybe even longer," Mabon says, "you have seen that those who believe in OCA's statement of principles, for example, have been losing the moral ground on a lot of issues, from pornography to abortion and gay rights and the importance of family. What we have said is that we're going to take a different posture, that we're going to be more aggressive and bold, along the lines of our Founding Fathers."

And what would the Founding Fathers have done with the gay-rights thing? Did they ever have to consider dilemmas of orientation versus preference, behavior versus identity, genetics versus choice? Or the question of what would be taught to their children, and who would teach it to them? Would they have labeled this a human-rights issue and scuttled the debate? Mabon says it's no longer that easy, because the very values they espoused are under attack.

"The commies are gone," says State Rep. Cal Anderson of Seattle. "The abortion issue is pretty much handled, and you can't get people too excited about environmentalists. But you can get people excited about gays and lesbians."

Gays, Mabon says, don't just want tolerance anymore, he says, they want acceptance. And not just acceptance, but "special rights," the catch phrase of the campaign, referring to protected minority status against discrimination. It's not like before, when you just figured these people could do whatever they wanted - that's the American way! - as long as they did it in the privacy of their own homes. It's different now. Domestic partnerships, the idea that schools might teach that being gay is a normal thing - these are direct assaults on the traditional family.

"But let's say I'm a Christian family man," says Mabon, "and I have an apartment building, and two guys come walking up to me with chains and rings in their nose and whips hanging out of their pockets and they say, we want to rent an apartment. I should have a right to say no." Employers should have the same right too, he says.

Peggy Norman, who led Oregon's No on 9 campaign, says people should ask themselves what kind of state they want to live in. "We want the debate to be public policy, not morals," she says. "Or do we want to say, `This is an Oregon state only for our kind of people?' "

Says Wilson, the former Portland pastor: "I lived the first 25 years of my life thinking homosexuality was deeply and profoundly wrong. I learned it at school and I learned it at home. It didn't change who I am. I think they have to ask themselves, do they want their children healthy, informed and productive, or do they want them uninformed and feeling self-loathing?"

Mabon, in his office in an unmarked building in Wilsonville, a Portland edge city, says between phone calls from the Portland Oregonian and Chicago Tribune that he doesn't hate gays, he just feels their lifestyle is sinful and unnatural.

Does he know anyone gay? "Not in the sense that I'm aware of." (A U.S. News and World Report poll published in July, by the way, found that those who don't know anyone gay are significantly less likely to support gay rights.)

"The thing that pushed me to be involved is, we felt our culture was degenerating morally. ... There's a lot of people who are deeply concerned about us as a society accepting homosexuality as a good and normal thing. And that's their motivation. It isn't to get homosexuals. In fact, most people are more than tolerant, just `live and let live.' But this isn't a live and let live issue anymore."

At the Clackamas County meeting, Mabon, who had appeared not to possess a sliver of charisma before, now develops the practiced, persuasive tone of a trial lawyer. He reads from Patrick Henry's famed speech. He holds up "Daddy's Roommate," a book designed for children about a gay couple. He predicts that if society accepts homosexuality as normal, pedophilia will achieve the same status by the end of the century. This is what the people have come to hear - a call to arms, because things have gone too far.

"And who has allowed this to happen?" he says to nodding silence, his glare unyielding.

"You and I," he says. "You and I."

AND SO THIS COULD BE the most bitter fight of the '90s, because so many have kept mum for so long. They thought they were being gracious - generous, even, with their tolerance. For gays and lesbians, on the other hand, it has been a slow, arduous road to equality, and Bill Clinton is the first president to grant high-profile acknowledgement to the community. Over the past two decades, eight states and 110 cities have passed laws providing protection against discrimination for sexual minorities. High visibility in Washington, more prominent media coverage, gradually increasing minority status, and what people like Lon Mabon and Florida's David Caton have discovered is an attitude that is screaming, "Wait a minute - you mean you want our approval, too?"

Oregon's Measure 9 would have nixed minority status for gays and required schools to teach that same-sex relationships are abnormal and perverse, along with sado-masochism and pedophilia. Mabon tapped the quiet country roads of rural Oregon for nearly $500,000 in mostly bite-size contributions.

The OCA now has a paid membership of 3,500, with 12,000 volunteers and a mailing list of 250,000.

"They're clearly regular people," says Norman, the "No on 9" campaign director. "You may not like their politics, but they live right down the street. ... Everything I thought of as progress, they saw as another step toward Armageddon."

Armageddon! Mabon often makes the point this way: Ever since America began to rethink homosexuality in 1948, when researcher Alfred Kinsey reported that sexuality was not simply black and white but a whole bunch of gray, the country has been going downhill - and all the statistics dealing with human misery (i.e. drugs, child abuse, divorce, etc.) have risen. Coincidence? Mabon doesn't think so.

And this is the kind of thing that drives his opponents crazy - these implications, these bits of selective information and appeals to emotion. OCA chapter meetings sometimes screen well-produced videos showing, for instance, clips from last spring's Gay Rights March on Washington that target extremes - men wrapped in leather and chains, bare-breasted women, gawdy transvestites, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. There are graphic definitions of sex acts, lots of talk about age-consent laws, quotes from gay radicals that threaten the sanctity of society's white picket fences. To them, this is what gay rights means.

So 1992 was all-out war in Oregon. Mabon himself received death threats. Tires were slashed, windows were broken and pink triangles were painted on the homes of Measure 9 supporters.

The effect on the gay community was assaultive, disruptive, unrelenting and divisive. Gary Wilson, the former Portland pastor, says that in the frenzied heat of the campaign, rifts grew among the community's mainstream and fringe elements as a process of deciding who was acceptable and who was not played itself out. "We got involved in the campaign and forgot to take care of our own people," he says.

"Once you've planted lies in people's minds around this emotional issue, you've gotten the debate onto another track," says Jean Hardisty, director of Political Research Associates, a Cambridge, Mass.-based organization that monitors the political right. "It becomes an effort to take on the lies and try to work around the emotion that makes people irrational. That's an ideal circumstance if you're trying to organize a social movement. Instead of talking to people as if you've just met them, you're talking to them as if they've just been through a weeklong seminar on how horrid gay people are."

The Oregon press wasn't sure what to make of the OCA. These people ... they seemed to come out of nowhere ... and yet - they were right here, all the time! And every once in a while they'd write some editorial that really ticked Mabon off and the OCA would declare a boycott. For two years the OCA wouldn't talk to the Salem Statesman-Journal; over time they zipped their lips to papers in Portland and Medford and Astoria too, citing misrepresentation. "I get fairer articles out of the San Francisco Chronicle than I do up here," Mabon says.

In January, anticipating an OCA offshoot, Washington gay-rights supporters grabbed legal rights to the name of Washington Citizens Alliance, pocketed it away and, flanked by Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, announced they'd formed Hands Off Washington, milking the notion that the campaign is the product of outsiders. (Mabon's anti-gay-rights organizers went with the name Citizens Alliance of Washington instead.) Charlie Brydon of Washington Citizens for Fairness, which sponsors Hands Off Washington, vows that CAW forces will not walk into the state's rural areas unopposed. "That was a major problem in Oregon, and it will not be repeated in Washington."

"THIS LITTLE TOWN never saw nothing like it. Demonstrations on the street. People marching up and down."

Herb Christensen, retired machinist, was director of the "Son of 9" campaign in Junction City, Ore. (pop. 3,000), where timber, once king, has deferred to the muraled motorcoach industry. The coaches line the road in herds on the outskirts of town.

The measure passed here in June by one vote, with several still under review. It was the only "Son of 9" race that was even close.

Christensen, a wiry man somehow reminiscent of an Old West prospector, had no idea how heated the contest would become. He got hate calls. Neighbors weren't talking. Christensen had voted for Measure 9, even though he didn't like the wording, the way the OCA lumped homosexuality together with pedophilia and sado-masochism and so on. But it was better than nothing.

"The issue, what it amounts to, is equal rights. What we were campaigning against was no special rights," Christensen says. "Because the agenda is to get special rights."

He didn't know that unless you're in Portland or Corvallis or Ashland, which took it upon themselves to grant such protection, that it's already perfectly legal in Oregon for gays and lesbians to be denied a job or a place to live on that basis. This is not something Mabon advertises while picking his battles in places like Sweet Home, Estacada and Cottage Grove.

"To me," says Christensen, "it's a matter of choice. And for whatever reason, whether it's biological or something traumatic in their childhood, they've made these choices. If it was a matter of trying to take their rights away from them, I'd be out marching right next to them. But I don't believe they have any special rights, or at least no more rights than I do."

Science, of course, continues to grope for an answer to the question of sexuality's origins, and until then, if ever, there's a whole lot of folks who cling to the belief that homosexuality is defined by a consciously chosen behavior. It could be that the Bible tells them so. It could also be that to believe otherwise would mean one serious reshaking of the Etch-A-Sketch.

LON MABON DOES NOT exude the personal electricity that often accompanies those in the spotlight. Put it this way: He is no Muhammad Ali.

Born in Minneapolis, he's still a boy when his father, a savings-and-loan officer, takes a job in Southern California. After high school, Mabon spends a year at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Calif., then is drafted in 1965. Two years later he goes to Vietnam, drugs and swearing and drinking, the whole shebang.

Not long after returning to Southern California and Led Zeppelin and long hair, he heads north to Eureka, Calif., where his parents have relocated, and enrolls at College of the Redwoods.

Meanwhile a guy from Oregon has bought an old Coast Guard station nearby and turned it into a Christian commune for hippies, and it isn't long before people are sitting in Eureka cafes and five or six guys with Bibles will come in and pretty soon the whole place is talking religion or philosophy in little coffee-drinking clusters. Mabon, in true beatnik style, is hitchhiking everywhere, and he finds himself running into these guys all over the road. For instance, he thumbs down an old bread truck and jumps into the back and there he is surrounded by a half-dozen Christians, quoting scripture and telling him about the Lighthouse Ranch.

"We went out there one day," Mabon says, "and some guy just shared with us that Christ was more than just a religion, that he was a person you could know and accept. That changed my life."

Mabon has a gravelly voice that sometimes squeaks like he's still breaking it in. He'll be going on about something or other and then - whoops - there it goes, like he's hit a pothole. When he laughs, he laughs quietly, without fanfare. His interviews are full of measured cadence, every syllable savored, no "gonna's" or curtailed words of the sort he'll use in a crowd.

After his last semester at Redwoods he moved to the Lighthouse Ranch to work in ministry. He met his wife, Bonnie, there - she'd come to the services, and her parents owned a few retirement homes in the area. They married in 1970 and eventually took over one of the homes, which turned out to be a bad career move for the young couple: 20 years, several retirement homes and a couple of defaults and foreclosures later, the Mabons are still $30,000 in debt to the IRS.

It was in Klamath Falls, Ore., where they'd been operating one of these homes, that politics entered the scene in the early '80s. Mabon was walking into a post office when someone yelled at him from inside:

"Do you believe in a strong defense?" Two guys at a card table, waiting for an answer.

"Yeah, within reason," Mabon finally says.

"Well, come here then." The table is piled with political brochures. "Why don't you get involved?"

"I don't know what that means," Mabon says.

They tell him he should be a precinct committee chairman. Before long he meets T.J. Bailey, who goes on to head the state's Republican Party. A guy he knows named Bob McDaniel figures he'll run for U.S. Senate in 1986, and Mabon says if you do I'll run your campaign, neither of them having done anything remotely similar before. But when Joe Lutz edges out McDaniel as Packwood's primary challenger, McDaniel pulls out, and Lutz asks Mabon to run 11 counties in Southern Oregon. Mabon is hooked, despite the eventual loss. He asks Lutz if he can take the southern counties and form some sort of political action committee, and Lutz says sure, but why not just do the whole state?

And the Oregon Citizens Alliance was born.

Bonnie, his wife, is treasurer, and all three of their children as well as Mabon's parents have worked for the organization at one time or another. Mabon says he's just employing people he knows he can trust. He pays himself a $3,000-a-month salary.

Mabon has not been afraid to play hardball politics over the years in the form of third-party campaigns, even to the detriment of Republicans. He managed the 1990 spoiler role of Al Mobley that is considered to have given Democrat Barbara Roberts her gubernatorial victory.

And the OCA and its offspring wield divisive language at a time when the national Christian Coalition and others like Jeff Kemp of Bellevue's Washington Family Council are urging a more moderate battle cry. The OCA has loosened its ties with Oregon's Christian Coalition, and on Aug. 30, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, even as he became the first major politician to address the OCA, suggested Mabon tone down the rhetoric.

Last July, an Oregon City man sued the OCA for using a picture of his three children and making public the fact he and his partner had tested positive for HIV in an anti-gay flier. The suit alleges intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Strident image aside, Mabon and those like him are riding a wave. For the small family-values-based organizations that scraped along in the late 1980s, fund-raising time is here. "I don't want to minimize the OCA," says Hardisty of Political Research Associates. "In a way I think of them as pioneers in their own right. They were out there on this (gay rights) issue a little ahead of everyone else. But what's happened now is that it's all gone beyond that. It's become a national movement."

THE PROSECUTION CALLS as its first witness Gail Yenne, of Washington's Department of Social and Health Services in Tacoma.

The scene is a small church near Vancouver, Wash., just north of Portland, on a warm Thursday night in late August. Nearly 70 folks, average Janes and Joes, line the rows for tonight's meeting of the Clark County chapter of the Citizens Alliance of Washington.

They are here to see Bob Larimer, CAW's wholesome 41-year-old chairman, a glass of milk with a suit on, who says all the right things:

"We are engaged in a new civil war," he says. "A cultural civil war versus a New Age barbarism."

Larimer introduces Yenne, a supervisor with DSHS's office of supportive enforcement. Yenne, who is not a CAW member, criticizes the department for mandating diversity training classes that she says promote homosexuality. She refuses to go.

You wouldn't know it to look at them, but these are people who are scared. A society based on Judeo-Christian traditions has taught a lot of people to harbor certain attitudes, like guns stocked on a wall, and faced with difficult questions, a lot of folks have opted to pick up muskets and aim. Don't tell them about hate crimes or discrimination or studies that show gay and lesbian teens are three times as likely to kill themselves or gay genes or the general futility of programs that strive to "cure" homosexuality. What they see are their children turned, bent, by an over-tolerant society, their way of life threatened and opportunities to do anything about it fading fast.

"We must act now," reads a statement issued in July by the Washington Public Affairs Council, a PAC led by Doug Burman, a one-time ally of Mabon. (The OCA helped Burman lead an initiative repealing gay minority status in Tacoma in 1989.) Burman is sparring with Larimer for the leadership reins in the fight to stop "special rights" for gays in Washington. Whoever's in charge, anti-gay-rights organizers in Washington will have until July 1994 to collect valid signatures from 181,667 registered voters to put an initiative on the November ballot.

Washington Citizens for Fairness' Hands Off Washington campaign workers spent the early part of the year forming 27 statewide coalitions to head off the anticipated rural political forays of Burman's and Larimer's groups. Mabon admits that Washington's gay community is more organized than Oregon's was, and WCF's Charlie Brydon says he doesn't expect the community rifts that occurred elsewhere to happen here. Coalition-building has included not only gay groups but those affected by what he says is the Citizens Alliance's larger agenda - environmental advocates, organized labor, people of color.

In July, about 125 people assembled at the University of Washington for a forum titled "Surviving the Anti-Gay Movement." During the question-and-answer session, a nervous man stands and says he was the author of a letter published in the Seattle Gay News expressing pride over the scope of Seattle's Gay Pride parade but concern about how the community's fringe elements, drag queens and so on, are affecting its public image.

"You want to fight now?" a woman in the row behind him says loudly.

But he is pained by this issue, and troubled over the very fact that he is pained. He wants to talk it out. These are the types of issues that Oregon's gay community dealt with only in the midst of the campaign.

The eventual struggle, says Rep. Anderson, might be to find something as catchy as "No Special Rights" to counter the phrase's common-man appeal. The notion that pedophiles will be baby-sitting everyone's children by the year 2000 might not seem convincing, but special rights seems a legitimately scary concept for a lot of folks. "We have to show it isn't special rights to be able to hold a job, or to live in a house as long as you can pay the rent," says Anderson, who sponsored a bill prohibiting discrimination against gays in housing and employment that died in the Senate earlier this year.

At the Clark County CAW meeting in Vancouver, they are premiering a new video called "Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda." A TV monitor sits atop the altar under a towering cross outlined in marquee blue. Selective images from the March on Washington are interspersed with experts refuting genetic origins for homosexuality and testimonies from "former gays" - "God has healed me," says a man named Sean.

The increasing political power of the gay and lesbian community, the threat of the "gay agenda," all build to a crescendo of ominous slow-motion video clips and gay-rights talking heads:

"We will not stop." "These guys are on the move." "It's our government now."

Murmurs rumble, heads nod, among the rows. This is yet another thing to be angry about in a country they see heading in the wrong direction, and more and more people aren't afraid to say so anymore.

Marc Ramirez is a staff writer for Pacific. Gary Settle is Pacific's photo editor.