Gay bashing, Vermont style

Despite Governor Howard Dean's surprise victory, Vermont voters did uncivil things to the legislators who approved civil unions

by Dorie Clark

On Tuesday, Vermont residents let their gay and lesbian neighbors - and the nation - know what they think about homosexuality. And the answer is that they're pretty divided.

The Vermont Republican Party had tethered itself to sentiment against civil unions, a type of legal contract approved in July by the state legislature that allows same-sex couples to enjoy nearly all the rights and responsibilities of marriage. And the party appeared poised to retake control of the Vermont House of Representatives. As of 4 a.m. Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Republicans had secured 62 seats to the Democrats' 40 and the Progressives' four (though 44 races were still being counted). In the state senate, the Democrats appeared to retain a slight majority, though they lost a seat. The last time the GOP controlled both houses was 1984. But the race most closely watched as a referendum on civil unions was for the governor's seat. With 98 percent of precincts reporting, incumbent governor Howard Dean seemed to have scraped together enough of a majority to prevent a secret-ballot runoff in the state legislature against opponents Ruth Dwyer, who vehemently opposed civil unions, and Anthony Pollina, who said they didn't go far enough.

Looking ahead In a little-noticed irony, the effort to repeal same-sex civil unions - an effort supported by many of the Republicans elected on Tuesday - may end up giving Vermont gays and lesbians full-fledged marriage rights. Last December, in response to a suit by two lesbian couples and one gay male couple, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the state had impermissibly discriminated by denying them marriage licenses. In a strongly worded salute to "our common humanity," the court asked the state legislature to remedy the situation, but basically limited politicians' choice of remedies to either legalizing marriage for same-sex couples or creating a new separate-but-equal system. The legislature approved the second option on April 25, and Governor Howard Dean signed the measure into law the next day. Proponents of a repeal took a hit when Dean received a majority of the popular vote, preventing a January runoff in the legislature against anti-civil-union Republican Ruth Dwyer and left-wing challenger Anthony Pollina, who supports gay marriage and drew 10 percent of the vote. Even if a bill striking down civil unions were to pass the legislature without Dean's support, gay activists would appeal it, and the court would be probably side with them. And even without a lawsuit, the court - which has retained jurisdiction over the case - could simply rule on its own that the state must begin granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Take It to the People and other conservative activists are trying to circumvent this possibility by moving to amend the state constitution in 2003 (the soonest such an amendment is possible under Vermont law) to limit marriage to couples consisting of one man and one woman. Amendment, however, is a cumbersome process, requiring passage in the Senate by a two-thirds majority; then ratification in the House by majority vote; then reiteration of support two years later in both legislative chambers by majority vote; and subsequent approval by voters. In the meantime, same-sex marriage remains a real possibility. -- Dorie Clark

Exit polls showed a surprisingly positive reaction to civil unions, with 52 percent of voters in support. Dwyer, in her concession speech, linked her defeat to that issue. "The people of Vermont clearly don't believe what we believe," she said, "and we've got to accept that." Meanwhile, Ed Flanagan, the openly gay Democratic challenger to the popular US Senator Jim Jeffords, took an unexpected walloping - he was expected to lose, but the margin of defeat (26 percent to Jeffords's 66 percent) was a shocker. He did little better than the thoroughly marginalized Karin Kerin, a transsexual Republican challenger to US Representative Bernie Sanders; she got 19 percent to Sanders's 70 percent.

But the real story isn't Tuesday's election results. It's the highly polarized campaign season itself. "If you're a conservative Catholic farmer, you look out and say, 'My God, what's happened to my state?' " says University of Vermont political-science professor Garrison Nelson. As Tuesday's returns show, Vermont is still a state divided. This ferment helped boost voter participation. Though final turnout figures were not available at press time, anecdotal evidence suggests it was very high. In fact, the Vermont secretary of state's office reports that 17,000 new voters registered between March and September of this year, and the office estimates that an additional 10,000 to 12,000 voters have registered since September. That's an increase in voter registration of nearly 6.5 percent.

This goes to show that when elections are referendums on big, emotional issues - like homosexuality - people will vote. "It takes work to figure out which candidate you agree with on Social Security, or which one you should agree with, because these are complex issues involving projections of future tax receipts or whether there will be a surplus," says Tami Buhr of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. But voting on gay rights is more about gut reactions than research. As Buhr notes, most people already hold strong opinions about gay marriage - and aren't shy about expressing them.

Vermont has a history of bucking national trends. It was the first state in the Union to ban slavery. And it was a leader in gay-rights legislation even before the civil-unions law was enacted. In 1994, Vermont became the first state to offer health-care benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian state employees. It passed a slew of pro-gay laws in the early-to-mid 1990s, including a hate-crimes bill, a ban on sexual-orientation discrimination, and a law allowing second-parent adoptions, which enable both members of a lesbian or gay couple to become legal parents of their children. None of these measures seemed to cause much controversy in a state proud of its "live and let live" ways. But with the Vermont Supreme Court's ruling in Baker v. Vermont last December, which required that same-sex couples be given all the benefits of marriage under state law, many residents felt that things had simply gone too far (see "Looking Ahead," page 26). The first public hearing on the issue at the State House drew more than 2000 people in the midst of a January blizzard. Town meetings on the court ruling continued until April, when legislators voted to create civil unions.

Since then, the anger of those opposed to the measure has been palpable - and growing. take back vermont signs dot the landscape. Nearly as many anti-gay hate crimes were reported in the first six months of this year as in all of 1999, although it's impossible to link the increase directly to the state's political climate. Before the civil-unions debate started, "I had never experienced so much as a crossed eye in my direction, and certainly no bashing or hate mail," says Barb Dozetos, the editor of Out in the Mountains, Vermont's statewide gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender newspaper. Things have changed, however. "The permission the other side suddenly seems to feel to voice ugliness is still startling us," she says.

Despite the furor, more than 800 couples have celebrated civil-union ceremonies since July 1, when the law took effect. Over three-quarters have come from out of state, many of them oblivious to Vermont's internal rift over the issue. Their presence is galling to Mary Schroyer, a board member and former president of the anti-civil-union advocacy group Take It to the People. They're a reminder that, in her view, the state is being used as a testing ground for a national gay-rights agenda. She speculates that gay couples will come to Vermont for the ceremony and then use their unions as leverage to sue their own states for benefits. "The rest of the nation is responding to what we've done," Schroyer says, "but it's not what the people have done. It's the court."

Traditionally, Vermont's elections are low-budget affairs. Out-of-state money, however, poured into this year's races, supplying 69 percent of the donations to Vermonters for Civil Unions. (By contrast, nearly two-thirds of the funding for Take It to the People originated in Vermont.) National media scrutiny has been intense, with correspondents from such outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle canvassing the state. The glare of the spotlight has only reinforced the feeling of some natives that their state is slipping away from them. "The government has moved farther and farther from the will of the people," says Schroyer.

Ironically, their would-be knight in shining armor comes from Long Island. Ruth Dwyer, a 42-year-old beef farmer, hit pay dirt with populist rage against civil unions to win the Republican nomination for governor. According to State Representative Bill Lippert, Vermont's only openly gay legislator, she is "someone who collects the angry people of Vermont." And they have a lot of grievances: to begin with, 40 percent of state residents come from out of state (they're known as "flatlanders" to disapproving natives). Traditional industries such as logging are being eroded by recent environmental regulations. The controversial Act 60, passed by the legislature in 1997 at the behest of the Vermont Supreme Court, angered some residents by Robin Hooding money away from richer school districts and giving it to poorer ones. Even shopping malls have caused friction - they're popular with natives seeking cheap goods and jobs, but reviled by outsiders trying to escape suburban sprawl. The flatlanders seemed to be trying to create a liberal utopia, a social experiment, on the backs of natives who have long cherished the libertarian tenets of property rights and local autonomy. Civil unions seem in some ways to be the final insult.

Ruth Dwyer's campaign slogan "Listen to the People" made a not-too-subtle reference to the fact that, according to poll results (Tuesday's exit surveys to the contrary), most Vermonters do not support civil unions - and yet their legislators and the incumbent governor, Howard Dean, put the measure in place (although for some lawmakers, it was less a matter of principle than a reluctant acceptance of the court's mandate). By all accounts, Dean - who ran for an unprecedented fifth consecutive two-year term - had the fight of his life. In addition to the challenge from Dwyer, he faced a progressive third-party candidate in Anthony Pollina, a former staffer for Vermont's only US representative, the socialist Bernie Sanders. Pollina challenged Dean on the left, arguing that civil unions were insufficient and that he would support full-fledged gay marriage. "The dynamic [was] very similar nationally to Ralph Nader and Al Gore," notes Lippert.

In addition to the heated Dwyer-Dean campaign, two other races stood out as a way to weigh in on civil unions. State Auditor Ed Flanagan - the first openly gay statewide elected official in the nation - broke even more new ground with his campaign to be the first openly gay US senator. However, he lost by 40 points to Republican incumbent Jim Jeffords (who shares Flanagan's support for civil unions). Although Flanagan's campaign worked hard to focus on issues such as health care and campaign-finance reform, his spokesman Liam Goldrick concedes that civil unions affected the race. "People . . . get tired of hearing about civil unions," he says, "and then this openly gay candidate comes along, and they say, 'Enough already.' " Flanagan, like many of this year's Vermont politicians, did manage to capture the imagination of out-of-state givers.

Nearly $100,000 came from the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund alone. The US congressional race, perhaps most of all, pointed out to conservatives the extent to which the Green Mountain State had changed. There was never any question that Bernie Sanders - known on signs, on bumper stickers, and in the common parlance simply as "Bernie" - was going to be re-elected. What probably riled Sanders's opponents even more than his Ted Kennedy-like walk to re-election, however, was his Republican challenger. Karen Kerin is an anti-gun-control fiscal conservative who stands firm against civil unions. However, she is also an out transsexual and a founder of It's Time, America, a national transgender-advocacy group. For a Republican Party that wanted to campaign on traditional values, Kerin was a complication, and a sign that no place - not even the GOP - was safe from the incursion of modern ways. Some observers feel the civil-unions issue was deliberately manipulated by right-wing forces, rousing anti-gay sentiment to increase conservative voter turnout. Says Beth Robinson, one of the lawyers responsible for the court victory that led to civil unions, "A lot more people are upset about civil unions now than five months ago, when the law passed, or 11 months ago, when the court decision came down. It's not because they thought about it and decided that civil unions are bad or that children shouldn't be raised by same-sex couples. It's because people have come in and stirred the pot."

Whether that's true or not, it's undeniable that large numbers of Vermonters turned out to fight a battle this Tuesday - a battle of flatlanders versus natives, of town meetings versus binding judicial mandates. Both sides were amazed at the rancor. "I can tell you as a gay man that it's a tough time to be gay in Vermont," said State Representative Lippert in the days before the election. "There's a corrosive effect to all the anti-gay sentiment that's been expressed, unlike anything I've heard in my 28 years in Vermont." Even Schroyer of Take It to the People was left reeling at the tenor of debate. "For decades I've sat in town meetings, and we've talked about dump trucks and schools," she says. "I don't know why we can't talk about marriage civilly, but now we have vandalism and name-calling, and things that are very un-Vermont."

The acrimony shows the extent to which these deeply personal issues reflect the way Vermonters see themselves. But the intrusion of "un-Vermont" discord also marks the state's "coming out" into national politics. With this election, the second-smallest state in the country became a battleground pitting defenders of traditional morality against those fighting on what some see as the final frontier in the civil-rights movement. The University of Vermont's Garrison Nelson speculates that both sides have national aspirations for their respective agendas - either the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide, or the amendment of the US Constitution to prohibit it.

Attorney Beth Robinson is optimistic that Vermont will return to normal and that civil unions will become accepted as more states adopt them, but Nelson isn't so sure. "This is a social issue that cuts to the core of people's fundamental beliefs," he says. "Those are things that don't go away." Schroyer, for one, vows to continue the fight. Buoyed by Take It to the People's legislative victories and its success at increasing voter participation, she feels that the strength of the group's mission lies in its emotional impact. "It's so basic, so close to the heart," she says.

Some proponents of same-sex marriage remain appalled that what they see as basic civil rights were a campaign issue to begin with. "We all know that if women's or African-Americans' right to vote had been put to a vote, they still wouldn't have it," says Lippert. "Civil rights are a vote of conscience that need to be done outside a referendum of the people." But the anti-civil-unionists have shown - even if it's a truth we don't want to hear - that the best way to spur voter turnout and make the political process exciting is, in fact, to let people weigh in on others' civil rights, or to try frantically to protect their own. It's the political equivalent of Survivor. Indeed, a popular pro-civil-unions bumper sticker urged residents to vote ruth off the island.

On Tuesday, the "tribal council" of Vermont voters told the world what they thought about gay rights. Judging from the inroads of anti-civil-unionists in what is generally considered a liberal mecca, gay activists and their allies are likely to face many more such battles in other states over the next few years. And that's a lot of tiki-torch fires to put out.

Dorie Clark can be reached at dclark[a]phx.com.