Skip to content
Round Logo — Smalller size
Wills, Trusts, & Estates Prof Blog
Formerly Hosted by the Law Professor Blogs Network

In the Northwest, Polyamory Finds Something New: Legal Protection

Clouds drift over the tree tops and the Carbonado river near the Fairfax Bridge in Washington.
Dave Hoefler, Unsplash
By Allison Monacelli

[Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.]

Under President Trump’s leadership, the country as a whole is swinging to the right on social policy. But the Pacific Northwest, as usual, is swinging its own way.

A wave of recent local ordinances in large liberal bastions like Portland, Ore., but also smaller communities like Astoria, Ore., which has a population of 10,181, would confer the beginning of legal protections to polyamorous relationships. The goal, pushed by a group based in California, is to establish legally protected family structures for groups of adults who are romantically or otherwise tied together under one roof.

“Right now, we’re just talking about a basic level of protection, having certain mechanisms in place so that if I’m discriminated against in employment or housing because of the way I choose to structure my home life, I have redress,” said Jessa Davis, a transgender activist and organizer in Seattle who lives in a nonromantic family structure with three other transgender women and two toddlers. “It’s about the law catching up to where we are culturally.”

National Democrats might be trying to move the political conversation away from divisive social policies that helped cost them the White House in 2024, but proponents of the polyamory changes say Mr. Trump and his supporters have forced them to act. Adding protections for “nontraditional” households is a response to efforts to roll back rights for groups that already enjoy legal protections.

The initiative in Olympia, Wash., to ban discrimination based on “diverse family structure,” for example, grew out of a drive to bolster the city’s sanctuary laws, which already included immigrants, to cover the L.G.B.T.Q. community when Mr. Trump returned to office last year.

Advocates of expanded nondiscrimination laws say they’re also hoping to recognize the increasing number of Pacific Northwesterners who are choosing less traditional family structures. Those numbers are difficult to track, but supporters of expanded nondiscrimination policies point to a 2016 study from the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy in which researchers estimated that one in five unmarried Americans had been in a consensually nonmonogamous relationship at some point.

For more information see Anna Griffin “In the Northwest, Polyamory Finds Something New: Legal Protection,” The New York Times, February 28, 2026.