As the clock strikes midnight tonight, Portland, Oregon residents will welcome both a new year and a new mayor.

Mayor-elect Sam Adams will officially be sworn in tonight, making him the first openly gay mayor of a top 30 U.S. city. Adams won the mayoral primary in May with more than 50 percent of the vote, allowing him to avoid a runoff against his nearest opponent.

The invitation-only ceremony will take place tonight at City Hall, while his public swearing-in ceremony will be held on Monday at a local high school.

The paper writes:

Adams, 45, has risen on the force of his liberal and creative ideas, frenetic energy and legendary work ethic.

Although he didn’t campaign on diversity issues, most Portlanders probably know he’s gay. He’s prominent in the gay community’s well-organized national campaign for equality. He raises money for the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and said he won’t stop fighting until gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are recognized as equal under the law.

Still, Adams rarely makes an issue of his sexuality, and his opponents in the May primary didn’t raise it.

And that’s just the way Adams wants it.

“I don’t want to be a gay mayor,” he said. “I do want to be a great mayor. There is no gay pothole and no straight pothole. They’re just potholes.”

Adams is truly a mainstream politician, said City Commissioner Nick Fish, a former labor and civil rights lawyer who lost to Adams for a City Council seat four years ago.

“He is focused on bread-and-butter issues: job creation, economic development, getting businesses to come here,” Fish said. “That is not the typical mantra of a Democrat in this community.”

Yet Fish said Adams’ sexuality does have a political impact. As with President-elect Barack Obama, Fish thinks Adams has broken a barrier in part just by being who he is. And that’s important, he said.

“If they knew nothing else about Sam as a candidate, they knew he was gay and that is a powerful thing to young voters and to liberals in general,” Fish said. “The movement for gay rights is the civil rights movement of our time. The movement for gay marriage is the equal rights struggle of our day.”

Openly lesbian Rep. Tammy Baldwin is one of the honorary co-chairs of the 2008 presidential inauguration, according to a list released by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

The announcement comes after the recent controversy caused by President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to lead his invocation. Warren’s involvement has called an outcry among the LGBT community because of Warren’s anti-gay history. Victory Fund CEO Chuck Wolfe called the selection “unsettling” and said that “the decision to invite such a controversial figure to such an historic event leads me to question whether any LGBT individuals were consulted, and highlights the importance of building an administration that includes qualified LGBT Americans who are ready to serve their country.”

The other co-chairs include:

President Jimmy Carter
President George H. W. Bush
President William J. Clinton
Mayor Adrian Fenty
Senator Dick Durbin
Senator Dick Lugar
Senator Claire McCaskill
Representative Tammy Baldwin
Representative Artur Davis
Representative Ray Lahood
Representative Linda Sánchez
General Colin Powell
Hunter and Kathleen Biden
Craig Robinson
Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng

California Attorney General Jerry Brown reversed his previous support for the legality of Proposition 8, by urging the Supreme Court to void the anti-gay measure.

Previously, Brown had defended the measure against legal challenges. Now, Brown has filed a 111-page legal brief offering support for overturning Prop 8.

The Advocate reports:

“It became evident that the Article 1 provision guaranteeing basic liberty, which includes the right to marry, took precedence over the initiative,” he said in an interview Friday night. “Based on my duty to defend the law and the entire Constitution, I concluded the court should protect the right to marry even in the face of the 52 percent vote.”

Brown served as the governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and is rumored to be seeking the office again in 2010. Though Brown said he personally had voted against the marriage ban, as recently as last month, he said he would fight to uphold it as the state’s top lawyer.

Opponents of gay marriage, who also filed arguments with the court Friday, were said to be shocked by Brown’s decision.

The Protect Marriage coalition urged in their brief that the justices uphold the proposition, which voters approved 52% to 48% on Nov. 4 — the most expensive battle for gay rights in history.

Andy Pugno, the lawyer for Protect Marriage, told the Associated Press that Brown’s argument is “an astonishing theory.” He said he was “disappointed to see the attorney general fail to defend the will of the voters as the law instructs him to.”

In an article for The Huffington Post, Rep. Barney Frank expressed disappointment in President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to have pastor Rick Warren play a role in his inauguration. Numerous LGBT leaders, including Victory Fund CEO Chuck Wolfe, have spoken out against the decision due to Warren’s past anti-gay activism.

Frank wrote:

Religious leaders obviously have every right to speak out in opposition to anti-discrimination measures, even in the degrading terms that Rev. Warren has used with regard to same-sex marriage. But that does not confer upon them the right to a place of honor in the inauguration ceremony of a president whose stated commitment to LGBT rights won him the strong support of the great majority of those who support that cause.

It is irrelevant that Rev. Warren invited Senator Obama to address his congregation, since he extended an equal invitation to Senator McCain. Furthermore, the President-Elect has not simply invited Rev. Warren to give a speech as part of a series in which various views are presented. The selection of a member of the clergy to occupy this uniquely elevated position has always been considered a mark of respect and approval by those who are being inaugurated.

With the rumored nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis to the post of Labor Secretary, it’s apparent Barack Obama’s cabinet will not include a member of the LGBT community.  Chuck Wolfe, president and CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Leadership Institute, expressed the community’s disappointment.

“It’s now clear that President Obama’s top appointees will gather in a Cabinet Room that does not reflect the living rooms, board rooms or rooms of worship across this country.  Openly LGBT people are accepted and involved in nearly all aspects of American life, but they still will not have a place at the table at the highest reaches of their government,”  Wolfe said.

The LGBT community’s Presidential Appointments Project does not have an express goal of attaining a cabinet-level appointment, but the floating of several names of openly gay and lesbian contenders to head the Labor and Interior Departments stirred hope that Obama would make an historic nomination.  Still, Obama will make thousands more appointments in the coming months, and the Project has so far collected some 1,400 applications from openly LGBT at all levels of experience.

“Floating names is not enough.  We expect President-elect Obama to live up to his word to appoint a diverse administration,” Wolfe said.  “Our community is ready to help lead this country.”