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Demonstrators protest outside the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt., in April 2000, the month the nation’s first law recognizing same-sex civil unions was signed by the governor.
Toby Talbot/AP
Demonstrators protest outside the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt., in April 2000, the month the nation’s first law recognizing same-sex civil unions was signed by the governor.
Toby Talbot/AP
It wasn’t so long ago that a handful of Vermont legislators in a shabby Statehouse committee room struggled over what to call their proposal to give marriage-like rights to the state’s gay and lesbian residents.
Democrat Howard Dean, governor at the time, had already made clear he’d veto any legislation labeled “marriage.” Suggestions like “domestic partner relationship” were too clunky; “civil accord,” they decided, evoked a car model.
“We wanted something that sounded dignified,” says William Lippert, a Democrat who was vice chairman of the House Judiciary Committee writing the law. “We were trying to give it as much stature as possible, since we wouldn’t be able to call it marriage.”
Eventually, on a February day in 2000, they settled on “civil unions.”
It seemed radical at the time, and tore the state apart so wretchedly and publicly that historians were hard-pressed to come up with a parallel. Imagine the recent Wisconsin union wars, only injected with sex and religion.
But the Legislature in Montpelier approved An Act Relating to Civil Unions, and Dean quietly signed it later that spring, making it the first law in the nation to extend marriage-like rights of any kind to gay and lesbian couples.
From Pioneering To Afterthought
For Lippert and his fellow part-time legislators who devised civil unions in response to a Vermont Supreme Court order, the issue’s transformation since has been nothing short of astonishing.
So astonishing that Vermont’s pioneering law is viewed by many as an artifact.
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Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, (left) shakes hands with state Rep. William Lippert at the Statehouse after Dean signed the civil union law on April 26, 2000.
Toboy Talbot /AP
Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, (left) shakes hands with state Rep. William Lippert at the Statehouse after Dean signed the civil union law on April 26, 2000.
Toboy Talbot /AP
Nine states, including Vermont in 2009, as well as the District of Columbia, have since legalized full same-sex marriage.
And the U.S. Supreme Court next week will hear for the first time constitutional challenges to two laws that bar same-sex marriage, one passed by voters in California, and the other, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress in 1996.
Civil unions “went quickly from being the most cutting-edge thing to be attacked,” Lippert says, “to being the conservative alternative to marriage equality.”
Ten states followed Vermont’s early civil unions example and extend to gay couples an array of spousal rights similar to, but short of, marriage. Most recent polls show that though 31 states have banned same-sex marriage, a growing majority of Americans — including President Obama — support marriage law equality for gay citizens.
As the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices prepare to consider the cases, it’s worth recalling the early, but not long ago, role Vermont played and the price it paid in the historic metamorphosis of the issue.
A Shotgun ‘Marriage’
Late in December 1999, Vermont’s high court justices decided that two lesbian couples and one gay couple were correct in arguing that state law confining marriage to heterosexuals was discriminatory.
Fix it now, the court told the Legislature, either by extending full marriage rights and benefits to all or by creating a parallel status that would essentially do the same. The job to figure it out fell to the House Judiciary Committee, whose members included Lippert, then the only openly gay member of the Legislature, and Republican Rep. John Edwards, a retired longtime state trooper.
On a recent evening in the same small committee room where they worked with other members to write the bill, Lippert and Edwards recalled for NPR the tumultuous days that transformed them both.
Edwards, who represented a strongly French Canadian and Catholic district, knew how his constituents felt about same-sex marriage and what it would mean for his political career.
He recalls reading about the state Supreme Court’s decision on the front page of his local newspaper and thinking, “Oh my god, what have we done?”
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Lippert and former state Rep. John Edwards discuss the events of 13 years ago in the Statehouse committee room where the civil unions law was written.
Liz Halloran/NPR
Lippert and former state Rep. John Edwards discuss the events of 13 years ago in the Statehouse committee room where the civil unions law was written.
Liz Halloran/NPR
What followed was what Howard Dean later characterized as “the least civil public debate in the state in over a century” — so uncivil that, at times, the governor wore a bulletproof vest.
At hearings, anti-civil union activists denounced gays and lesbians as abominations, people who were sure to experience the wrath of God. They warned that approving civil unions would destabilize “traditional” marriage” and allow outsiders with a “homosexual agenda” to propel the state down an immoral path of no return.
One of the most vocal opponents, Republican Rep. Nancy Sheltra, brought in anti-gay, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, who ran his operation out of a storefront just down the street from the Statehouse. The national media descended on the nation’s smallest state capital.
“My feeling was that the entire country was focused on what we were doing,” says Lippert, who has served in the House since 1994. “It was the most intense conversation ever about the place of gay and lesbian people in our communities.”
Proponents of civil unions, and full same-sex marriage rights, argued that marriage was a civil, not a religious, right. They spoke of their families, some talked about their gay children, and of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
On two snowy nights, Vermonters packed the Statehouse for hearings, filling the House chamber, its window wells and balcony, clogging its hallways. In the event the emotional crowd turned on the legislators, state police had devised an escape route through a door in the back of the chamber, through the cafeteria and out.
Edwards and Lippert recall the police telling them that if they were ordered to leave, they needed to do so immediately — no questions asked.
It never got to that, but both men say there were moments at hearings in other parts of the state where they were frightened, including once when Lippert accepted an offer to have someone walk him to his car.
Passing A Law, Making History
Ultimately, it was Lippert and moderate Republican Rep. Thomas Little, House Judiciary chairman at the time, who emerged as catalysts for not only the law’s creation, but also its passage.
Working shoulder-to-shoulder with Edwards and other members in that cramped committee room, and with colleagues who were invariably friends or more-than-nodding acquaintances, Lippert’s persuasive, pastoral demeanor (he’s a trained psychotherapist and comes from a line of preachers) nudged the issue forward.
“I knew that Bill [Lippert] was gay, and we’d talked about our families, you know, Bill’s family, his partner,” Edwards says.
But Edwards was like most people in the largely rural Green Mountain State and didn’t have same-sex marriage on his radar.
It was a perspective at the time that was not unusual. “This was a world that was completely foreign to me,” Dean, the former governor, said in a 2011 interview with Vermont Public Television describing his own “casual homophobia” in looking back at the civil unions debate.
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Lippert speaks in defense of the civil unions bill on the House floor the March 15, 2000.
Toby Talbot/AP
Lippert speaks in defense of the civil unions bill on the House floor the March 15, 2000.
Toby Talbot/AP
“I was uncomfortable with gay people,” he told interviewer Christopher Graff, “and with gay marriage.”
Edwards knew that a yes vote for civil unions would almost certainly doom his re-election chances. But he says any doubts he harbored about the proposed law were banished when he read accounts of the civil rights debates of the 1960s. The language of that time startled him.
“Just change the N-word for nigger, for fags or faggots,” Edwards says. “It was nothing new. Just that the object of the bile had been changed.”
For Lippert, the opportunity to help change how gay and lesbian people were viewed was one for the ages.
“I felt deeply grateful,” he said of his unique role. “I was grateful that I had an opportunity to be the voice or to be the face of all the gay and lesbian people that I knew,” he said. “I got to be here. I got to be in the thick of this. And I got to hold out what was really true about the people that I knew and that I loved.”
Not once, he says now, did he wish he weren’t the only openly gay member of the Legislature attempting to carry out one of the most difficult jobs in the state’s history.
The Speech
If Vermonters point to a seminal moment in the rancorous debate over civil unions, it often is Lippert’s speech on the House floor the day he and his fellow legislators voted on the bill.
Ross Sneyd, who was Vermont’s Associated Press reporter covering civil unions, says that Lippert’s speech is his clearest memory of that tumultuous time.
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Article source: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/18/174651233/how-vermonts-civil-war-fueled-the-gay-marriage-movement?ft=1&f=1001