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TRAILBLAZERS
Vermonters get over the civil-union battle; can Bay Staters do the same?
BY SUSAN RYAN-VOLLMAR
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Vermont’s civil-union controversy, which nearly paralyzed the Green Mountain State four years ago, isn’t much of a political issue anymore. See for yourself by checking out the current issue of the Chronicle (www.bartonchronicle.com), a weekly newspaper covering Orleans County, the heart of Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom. (I picked up the paper over Columbus Day weekend, which I spent in Jay, Vermont.) A front-page article on local legislative races makes clear that voters and candidates have put it behind them. In the 2000 elections, held right after the state legislature approved the civil-union law, Orleans County voters kicked out four incumbents (one Democrat and three Republicans) who had supported the law. In their place, voters sent four Republican social conservatives to Montpelier, who joined two others from Orleans County who had opposed civil unions. The legislators became known as the Six Pack, and the story of how they came to office evolved into shorthand for how the civil-union debate affected politics in Vermont. (David Moats includes the Six Pack story in Civil Wars, his excellent book about Vermont’s civil-union debate.) In this fall’s Republican primary, Mike Marcotte, who owns a Jimmy Kwik mini-mart in Newport, Vermont, defeated Six Packer John Hall of Newport. But the hot-button issue this time around wasn’t legal recognition of same-sex relationships, but whether a local Catholic church should be allowed to lease antenna space in its bell towers to Verizon Wireless. (Marcotte chairs the parish council of the church in question.) Although Hall has refused to give up and will run against Marcotte as an independent this November, Marcotte insists that the civil-union question isn’t dominating the race: "That issue has come and gone. I think the issue’s over with. It divided people, but people have learned to live with it." Indeed, Duncan Kilmartin, one of the Six Packers whose re-election seems safe and who remains angry about the Vermont Supreme Court ruling that prompted the legislature to create the civil-union law, insists that he is not a "one-issue person." Although he told the Chronicle that Justices Denise Johnson and John Dooley, the architects of the Vermont court’s ruling, "have no respect for the separation of powers," he had much more to say about wind power (which he opposes) and the need for economic stimulation in the Northeast Kingdom. And he had very kind words for Marcotte. "I feel particularly fortunate to be running with Mike Marcotte, because of his experience in municipal government," Kilmartin said. "I really think the citizens of the district will benefit if Mike and I are allowed to share the burden." It’s a little hard to imagine right now, but maybe the same can happen in Massachusetts.
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