Issue Position: Civil Rights and Freedoms

Issue Position

I have spent my career fighting to empower vulnerable people in our society. As a military lawyer, I prosecuted sexual assault and harassment cases. I remember meeting a sexual assault survivor in the immediate aftermath at our hospital in the Middle East. We put together a team that investigated, prosecuted, and convicted her attacker, a superior officer. It took a lot of caring people, but her satisfaction in seeing justice done made it one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. More recently, I helped get the Air Force Special Victims Counsel program started and wrote a flight plan for its future, making sure that all victims of sexual assault have access to their own lawyer.

I support reproductive rights. Oregon has one of the most progressive laws on the country on this subject, but barriers remain. I worked to reduce these barriers for women in the military, writing a law review article pointing out the practical obstacles the military imposes on women seeking to exercise their rights. A right with no access is not a right. We need to continue to reduce obstacles so that all women have the unconstrained right to choose.

LGBTQ+ people should have the same rights the rest of us do - to be judged by the content of their character, not who they love. Too often, they face discrimination in employment and services. I have fought for their rights in my career in the military and will continue to do so in the legislature.

We must aggressively prosecute cases of bias both inside and outside of government agencies. As a Police Commissioner, I supported Eugene's program to collect data on officers' perceptions of the race of the people they stop, along with the disposition of the encounter. This allows us to provide feedback to those officers and combat implicit bias against minorities in our community.

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