Endorsement: Pilar Schiavo for Assembly District 3
On Tuesday, March 23, 2003, Pilar Schiavo, D-West Richland/Woodinville, narrowly defeated the opponent she would face in the April, 2005, election by approximately 20,000 votes. In the November, 2004, election, she would have been elected to represent the 9th Assembly District in the Oregon Legislature and would have been the first openly gay person to serve in the Oregon Legislature.
There were thousands of anti-gay people in Oregon, which was one of the last states in the country that allowed a gay person to serve in a public office. But the majority of the public was not anti-gay. Rather, most people were trying to get elected to the Legislature. Pilar Schiavo had campaigned on a platform that included creating a living wage, equal rights for gay men and lesbians, a living wage campaign to create jobs, a campaign to reduce homelessness, and a campaign to improve health care for women.
One year later, on the day that she learned of her mother’s death, Pilar Schiavo made a public statement at a press conference, addressing the issue of suicide among gay and lesbian youth in Oregon. She said,
“I know it’s not easy for mothers to watch their children die, so I’m here to say to the mothers of Oregon, get educated, take control of your own future, not to take your children’s futures away.”
In December, 2004, Schiavo traveled to Uganda to represent the Oregon House of Representatives at a Human Rights Council meeting called to discuss the country’s refusal to allow gays and lesbians to openly live and worship in churches, to which the Ugandaans invited the African-American legislator. During the four-day visit to Uganda, she spoke at a meeting on health care for women in the African country, she met privately with a member of the parliament who was about to release a man who had been sentenced to death by hanging for sodomy, and she
