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Changing Minds By Adam Lisberg Sometimes a turning point becomes clear only in retrospect. Now that civil unions are the law of Vermont, and the first gay and lesbian couples will be legally linked July 1, it’s easier to see just when the real turning point occurred - when the idea of treating homosexual and heterosexual couples equally under the law began to seem like the reasonable, even honorable, thing to do in Vermont. It wasn’t in December, when the state Supreme Court issued a thick and complex ruling stating that gays and lesbians deserved the rights of marriage, if not the rites of marriage. While gay-rights advocates and editorial writers quickly seized on the stirring language of the decision, a long legal document alone doesn’t convince most people to support a sweeping change in social relationships. It didn’t come in March or April, either, when the Vermont House of Representatives and Senate voted to approve the civil unions bill. The state’s 180 lawmakers debated God, sin, love and rights for hours on those tense and angry days; though the bill passed by close margins, the process was divisive and disturbing. Instead, the turning point came on a cold Wednesday morning in February, when the members of the House Judiciary Committee finally told the world where they stood. These 11 legislators were a cross-section of Vermont, from their towns (rural farming areas, urbane downtowns, suburban developments) to their jobs (retired cops, lawyers, non-profit workers) to their lifestyles (some had been married for decades, some chose on principle not to marry, and one was a gay man with a long-term partner). They were friendly and they worked well together, but when they filed into an ornate meeting room jammed with more than 100 spectators, there was no reason to expect they would all agree about something as controversial as gay relationships.
They had spent January listening, trying to hear from all sides before making up their minds, but by Feb. 9 they had run out of people to listen to. It was their turn to speak. Tom Little, the chairman, went first. Little is a 46-year-old lawyer, a quiet and measured man. He is widely respected in the Statehouse as a leader who listens to his committee but keeps it on track. And when Little - a veteran legislator and moderate Republican - said same-sex couples deserve legal recognition of their partnerships as a matter of basic civil rights, it became clear that change was inevitable in Vermont. “Our children are being raised in a variety of family models that could not perhaps have been imagined in 1779,” Little said. “Our families ought to have a common set of legal rights and benefits.” One after another, the rest of the committee members said the same thing. They differed over whether to allow same-sex marriage or to create an expansive new type of domestic partnership, but they agreed that same-sex couples deserve the same rights and benefits as married straight couples. “It’s time that we put the prejudice behind us,” said John Edwards, also a Republican and a former state trooper from the conservative northern dairy town of Swanton. “Somehow, when you listen to the compelling stories of gay and lesbian people, it demystifies who they are, what they stand for, and how valuable they are for our communities.” And with that display of unanimity, the committee got to work. By afternoon, they were reviewing a first draft of what would become the civil union law. BEHIND THE SCENES This sudden expansion of rights didn’t happen spontaneously. It was the culmination of years of work by gay and lesbian activists who had spent as much time building public support for gay marriage as they had working on their legal case. The Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force had built a base of tolerance for its cause by sending speakers around to small community gatherings and showing promotional videotapes for years. Before lawyers Beth Robinson and Susan Murray filed their lawsuit arguing that gays deserved the right to marry in 1997, they met with Vermont’s attorney general to lay out their case and establish that the dispute would be argued on legal grounds, not emotional ones. The opponents had a harder time of it, and not just because they got started late. From the time the lawsuit hit the courts, it was clear that the Vermont Constitution gave the plaintiffs the edge; the state would have to offer justifications for excluding gays and lesbians from the marriage laws, and most of them seemed patently flimsy. When the Judiciary Committee went looking for the other side of the argument, all it found was religious and moral reasoning wrapped in legal trappings. “The arguments we heard against were mostly Biblical,” said Cathy Voyer, a committee member from working-class Morristown who works at a portable-toilet company. “I didn’t hear one legal argument against it that would stand up in a court of law.” The opponents were also hobbled in other ways: They hadn’t laid the community groundwork that the Freedom to Marry Task Force had, so they relied heavily on the Catholic and Mormon churches for money and volunteers. (Those churches were the main donors to the lead opposition group, Take It to the People, which pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.) They also had to contend with unwanted extremists from out of state: Randall Terry, the flashy founder of Operation Rescue, opened an office near the Statehouse and made Vermont’s Legislature the target for Christian conservatives across the country. Take It to the People and other Vermont opponents told Terry to butt out, to no avail. Terry’s outrageous public statements - “A man putting his penis in another man’s rectum is not the basis for civil rights,” he said at his first news conference - had two results. Moderate lawmakers opposed to civil unions found themselves unavoidably tarred by his extreme rhetoric. And lawmakers who were on the fence were repelled by the fear and hate Terry helped stir up. Rep. Marion Milne, a grandmother from central Vermont, said the offensive and hateful phone calls she received from people urging her to vote against the bill had exactly the opposite effect. “They showed me why this legislation is so important,” Milne said during the final House debate. “It is time to pass this bill. The constitution requires it. History requires it. Conscience requires it.” RIGHTS AND TRADITIONS Of course, plenty of lawmakers looked at their consciences, looked at history, and decided there was no way in hell they could support a bill that treated gays and lesbians the same as a married couple. “My definition of marriage, in my mind, is a union between a man and a woman,” said Thomas DePoy, a Republican representative from the once-thriving industrial city of Rutland. “This is a bad bill. I believe that it does infringe on traditional marriage.” Vermont’s tradition is harder to read, however, once the Ben & Jerry’s image of placid Holsteins and green mountains is peeled away. It is a poor, rural state dotted with tiny, insular towns that are just a few hours’ drive from major cities like Boston and Montreal. It is a state that never elected a Democratic governor until the 1960s, but elected a socialist to Congress in the 1990s. It is the whitest state in the nation, but was the first to outlaw slavery. Vermont was transformed by the hippies and commune-dwellers and starry-eyed college kids who flocked to the state in the 1960s and 1970s, yet the state maintained its ingrained respect for independence and personal liberty. Vermonters generally oppose government controls on both guns and abortions. Vermonters are often willing to go against conventional wisdom and accept outsiders, and sometimes they take great pride in their contrariness - but only when there is broad agreement about it, said University of Vermont political science professor Frank Bryan. He believes the state’s political leaders made a mistake by not building a wide public consensus in favor of civil unions before passing the law. “We’re changing 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition in three months,” Bryan said. “We really didn’t have a democratic conversation about this. Now maybe it’ll happen after the fact.” Civil unions aren’t the same thing as marriages, but they are very, very close. They don’t apply to federal benefits (like Social Security or veterans’ benefits) and their validity outside Vermont is untested, but within the state they will function exactly the same as marriages. Gay-marriage advocates say they can live with the distinction for the time being, though they believe having parallel systems for gay and straight couples smacks of separate-but-equal. They acknowledge that full-fledged same-sex marriage is too much, too soon in Vermont, but it remains their ultimate goal. “Giving up marriage was just the hardest thing. We agonized over it. It was gut-wrenching,” said Sandi Cote, who plans to join her partner of 33 years in a civil union in September. “We need three, five years. Some say a generation. I hope not.” CHANGING MINDS Vermont bed-and-breakfast owners are planning for a flood of civil union ceremonies soon after the law takes effect July 1, as out-of-state couples come to Vermont to get a piece of paper that may not carry any legal weight outside the state’s borders. State officials won’t venture a guess at how other states will treat civil unions, or how the federal Defense of Marriage Act will apply to them. Nonetheless, for these couples, the symbolic value of a state recognizing their relationship will be incalculable. Meanwhile, some lawmakers who voted for civil unions fear they will lose their seats in the fall elections, and opponents are forming PACs and raising money to send them packing. “We’ve got a lot of good folks on both sides of the aisle,” said Rep. Danny Deuel, a collegial Democrat from West Rutland. “This may be the swan song for some of ‘em.”
Deuel said he opposed civil unions because the overwhelming majority of his constituents wanted him to. In fact, public opinion about civil unions is mixed. An April poll found 52 percent of Vermonters surveyed were opposed to the law, while 43 percent supported it. More than half those surveyed said that if a candidate for governor or the Legislature supported civil unions, it wouldn’t affect their vote; only about 15 percent said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the civil union law. Still, the public interest in the civil union bill overwhelmed the Legislature. More than 1,000 people jammed the Statehouse on snowy weeknights for two public hearings on the issue; lawmakers received tens of thousands of letters, e-mails and calls as their home phone numbers were spread across the country. Achingly personal stories poured in from Vermonters on all sides: Some said a domestic partnership law would offer basic protections for them and their children, some said it would do wrong in the eyes of God, some said the state needed to protect the rights of a minority, and some said the Legislature shouldn’t take its orders from the Supreme Court. The phone calls, letters and personal tales changed a few minds in the Legislature. So did eloquent speeches by Rep. Bill Lippert, Vermont’s only openly gay lawmaker, who had waited years to be in the House at this pivotal moment. Some lawmakers agonized for weeks, then made up their minds just before they voted; on some days, the civil union bill’s survival was far from assured. Ultimately, though, Vermont created civil unions because of a transformation that took place in the hearts and minds of dozens of legislators - the same transformation that first became clear in the Judiciary Committee’s meeting on that cold February morning. Lawmakers who were uncomfortable with the idea of two men kissing, much less marrying, reluctantly came to believe that creating a domestic partnership system was a matter of simple fairness. After hearing stories of discrimination and hate; after realizing that the arguments against same-sex unions were legally weak; and after spending sleepless, stomach-turning nights thinking about what to do; they found themselves with no other option. “It would have been easy to say no. But you have to stand up and do what you think is right. And the right thing became apparent as the day went on,” said Jack Anderson, a representative from picturesque Woodstock who decided to vote for the bill just before the final roll call. “I had a chance to see that justice was done.” Adam Lisberg, a reporter for the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, covered the creation of civil unions in the Vermont Legislature this year. He is getting married in September, and feels nothing but sympathy for gay and lesbian Vermonters who now have to worry about the band and the photographer and the flowers and the cake and the guest list and the parents and the rabbi “ Sites Mentioned Elsewhere on the Web From the Marriage Issue
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