The legal status of 3,022 marriages was decided by the absence of a single word. In March 2004, Multnomah County, Oregon, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. For a year, these couples were married under the law of the county. Then, on April 14, 2005, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled. The licenses were null and void. The court did not rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage itself. It ruled on authority. The county had acted without it. The state's marriage statutes, the court found, did not explicitly prohibit same-sex marriage, but they also did not authorize it. By not naming the possibility, the law had rendered it impossible for a county to create it.
The decision was a peculiar kind of erasure. It was not a moral condemnation. It was an administrative correction with profound human consequence. The couples were returned to a prior legal state, as if the ceremonies, the certificates, the year of public recognition, had been a collective misunderstanding. The state legislature later created civil unions, a separate category. It would take another nine years for a federal court to strike down Oregon's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The 2005 ruling was a hinge moment. It demonstrated that progress could be measured not only in advances, but in formal, precise reversals. It defined marriage not by the commitment of the people in it, but by the specific vocabulary of the statute that permitted it.