Gay Marriage in Vermont
The interesting thing about the Vermont legislature’s strong vote in favor of gay marriage is that I think it illustrates that far from provoking a backlash against gay rights, pro-equality legal decisions on this front tend to drive the pace of change forward. One factor is that the more people see gay equality in practice, the less frightening it looks. But another factor is the dynamics of political leaders. This isn’t really a topic that politicians want to deal with, even politicians with progressive views and progressive constituents. They would just as soon focus on something else. But a court case smokes the politicians out, and forces the better ones among the bunch to take up the cause and do the right thing.
That, in turn, can help push public opinion forward. Once people see political leaders who they respect debating the issue, it looks like a “mainstream” topic. And when that happens, for a lot of folks basic values of fairness wind up trumping the fact that they’ve lived their whole lives with the rules being a certain way and it seems “unnatural” to change them.
32 Responses to “Gay Marriage in Vermont”
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April 7th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
As a Vermonter myself, I say it’s about time. Good job, legislators!
April 7th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
The interesting thing about the Vermont legislature’s strong vote in favor of gay marriage is that I think it illustrates that far from provoking a backlash against gay rights, pro-equality legal decisions on this front tend to drive the pace of change forward.
This may be true where public opinion and demographics have already moved (or are moving) in that direction. The politicians just need encouragement to catch up. But it’s not an iron law. If the courts get too far ahead of public opinion, you’ll get a backlash.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Hey Matt,
Take a look at this compromise proposal on the gay marriage issue, that Steve Waldman floated last month. What do you think?
While it wouldn’t be ideal for either side, I think it’s a promising compromise that hopefully both sides could manage to accept.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2009/03/a-modest-proposal-religious-co.html
April 7th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
This seems correct. Marijuana decriminalization should be in a similar situation in about five years.
I don’t get is why elected officials lag so much behind the courts and public opinion. It’s like they are always fighting the last election, and seem to willfully ignore that public opinion has moved on. I guess it’s that the 60% of the general public that approves these supposedly freakishly progressive positions are less loud than are the well-funded and well organized groups focused on guns, gays, drugs, abortion, defense contracts, etc.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
And when that happens, for a lot of folks basic values of fairness wind up trumping the fact that they’ve lived their whole lives with the rules being a certain way and it seems “unnatural” to change them.
Exactly. What’s more, once people actually start grappling with the merits — instead of being able to just say, oh that’s ridiculous — they realize that there is no merit to the pro-discrimination position. Virtually every court that has considered the issue on the merits — with the notable exception of the embarrasingly stupid opinion of our Court of Appeals here in NY — has reached the conclusion that none of the justifications proffered for the unequal marriage statutes makes any sense. It’s getting people to that point where they actually examine the merits in a fair-minded way that is the hard part. (And why the Prop 8 proponents had to rely so heavily on lies and distortion.)
April 7th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
As irrational as it might be, many people tend to be supportive of the status quo, no matter what it is. A few years ago, the status quo was that marriage was only heterosexual. Today gay marriage is real and commonplace. That will likely swing public opinion toward it.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I’d agree. But I’d add that while I have little respect for politicians, I do respect judges. Even those who have put me in jail. And while I’ll complain about who gets appointed to the bench, I usually end up agreeing with their opinions anyway. Even partisan judges end up upholding the law. But today is really different. It’s a day when I can be proud of politicians. It seems even they can do the right thing every now and then. Good for them. And I’m neither gay nor married, nor do I live in Vermont. So this has no effect on me. But it’s still the right thing. Vermonters obviously should be proud today. But so should the rest of us. This shows that our political system really does work. It may be slow, but works eventually.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Hector,
Some of those ideas look alright. Premarital education is good, as long as it’s for stuff like a discount and not just mandatory. Community marriage policies seem a bit heavy-handed, and their data seems weird. Mediation is a worthwhile thing to have available to help with problems. Longer waiting periods before divorce? I’m skeptical that would actually help a great deal.
But legal covenant marriages…I’m *really* skeptical about that one. Surely the vast majority of people going into a marriage thinks it’s going to be for life. If you offer a “weak” or “strong” type of marriage license, there will be intense social pressure to pick the strong one. So basically you legally lock people into mandatory counseling both before the marriage and at any point in which they’re having problems, and most people would do this to avoid their families and friends thinking they’re not serious about their marriages.
Now, I’m all in favor of the type of covenant marriage Huckabee and some other very religious people have. It’s not a different type of license, and it’s not binding, it’s just a voluntary commitment through they make through their church. If religious gay people want to demonstrate how serious they are about their marriages with something like that, great. But I think the author’s suggestion of making a different type of license really crosses a line, because it’s effectively creating two different classes of government-recognized relationships.
Also, in any case, there’s no need for gay marriage advocates to “compromise” at all. It’s becoming more popular every year and I have no doubt that within a generation just about every blue state will have it, if not the whole country through a federal decision. But the author does make a great point that many opposed to gay marriage care little about efforts to regain the sanctity of the institution.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
There was an initial backlash against the civil union compromise after the State Supreme Court decision that caused a demographic shift in the state legislature and helped Douglas become governor. However, I think the Bush administration was such a colossal failure that things shifted to the point where we could collectivize the farms and make flag burning the official state pastime. I suspect that even the bigots that had Take Back Vermont signs on their lawns are too concerned with more earthly matters for them to muster much of a repeat performance.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
That’s interesting Hector. I really like the idea of pre-marriage counseling. That’s one thing I think the Catholic church does right. But I have to say that I only have one friend who has ever been divorced, and he had a Catholic marriage. It sure seems like it should work, but maybe it doesn’t. But even if it doesn’t really work, I’m still in favor of it. I think people should seriously consider the commitment they are about to make. And counseling does that.
That said, I’m not really sure why liberals would want to compromise on this issue. We really don’t need to. We’ll eventually win in most states anyway. And in states like Oklahoma, there is no way that conservatives will ever buy into this compromise. But with their exceptionally high divorce rate, maybe they need the Covenant marriage to keep them together. And the liberal states already have low divorce rates, so we don’t need the Covenant marriage. I think the reason is that we don’t need to marry someone before having sex with them. So we don’t get ourselves into unwise marriages.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I’ll add this. Almost all of my friends have great relationships, and most of them got married and will stay that way. But the best relationship of all of them is a couple out in California. I’ve never met any couple that loved each other more. And they have a nice house in Capitola and three beautiful and intelligent daughters. They home school their kids, and they do everything together as a family. They are the conservative’s wet dream. Except for two things. They never got married, and they are radical liberal hippies. When conservatives can figure out how to live up to their ideals, they can tell us liberals how to live our lives. But until then, shut the fuck up. The reason conservative want the government to control their relationships is because they don’t know how to do it on their own.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Hector,
Why the hell should gay people work to strengthen marriage? What have they done to ‘weaken’ it? They’re not the ones who’ve made a mockery of the institution (see: Spears, Britney and a dozen other ‘married in Vegas on a whim’ couples, just as one example).
And anything that slows down separations is not on, as far as I’m concerned. Too easy for an abuser to use it as a weapon.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Re: But the author does make a great point that many opposed to gay marriage care little about efforts to regain the sanctity of the institution.
Adam,
He also appears to be correct that some liberals, like yourself, want gays to be able to access what the institution has become, not what it once was. And that seems to me to be very sad. I don’t think marriage in present-day America, gay or straight, is what it was intended to be, and what it would be in a healthy society. Marriage was meant to be, ideally, indissoluble and lifelong. And ‘indissoluble’ means that it couldn’t be dissolved without incurring sin.
Of course covenant marriages (or, for example, abolishing no-fault divorce) would be reducing freedom and making it more difficult to get divorced, and of course people would take advantage of them when they got married because of social pressure and because they didn’t envision ever wanting to get divorced. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Marriage is not supposed to be about a contract that we enter into, in which we both expect to get something, and from which we feel free to remove ourselves at any time. Ideally, I see it more as the kind of promise that we make when we are baptized, or when a soldier entered the lifetime service of a feudal lord: it’s a voluntary surrender of freedom and self-ownership, and pledge of loyalty and submission. Marriages can be broken, but they can never be broken without incurring sin, and I think that both church and state should be sparing, at best, about performing second marriages. It’s not a contract that has simply whatever ‘meaning’ we arbitrarily choose to give it- rather it’s something that has an eternal and objective meaning quite independent of our preferences, and that we are called to obey and submit ourselves to. This is what I think of marriage- not the modern, individualist, contract-based idea. And it saddens me that too many of the supporters of gay marriage see it differently.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
This is a little off-subject, but it’s really a pet peeve of mine, so I must rant about it. The most important marriage reform we need to do is to eliminate common law marriage. Marriage should be about consent, not the government making choices for you. Because of Colorado’s common law marriage statute, I have technically been married. Fortunately, that marriage was dissolved when my female roommate married her boyfriend. I didn’t have to divorce her. At least the statute recognizes a formal marriage over a common law one. But it still allows for a common law divorce if neither of the persons marries someone else. I can’t rent a room in my house to a female because after two months, we’d be married and she could sue me for my house. Now it’s true that most judges will ignore the statute and refuse to hear the case. But the risk is still there. It’s real enough that one lawyer friend of mine kicks her boyfriend out for two days out of every month to avoid marriage.
But there is one good thing about it. A friend of mine bought a house with his girlfriend, and she wanted him to marry her. He didn’t want to, and he held out for years. Eventually, she figured out the law and informed him that they were already married. So he gave in and had a formal wedding. And by formal, I mean him, her, a judge, and the county clerk as a witness. Now they live happily ever after with their three sons. They would have anyway, but now it’s official.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Okay, here’s a scary thought: Gay Common Law Marriage. If you live with someone of any sex, you are automatically married to them.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
“want gays to be able to access what the institution has become, not what it once was.”
It once was an institution where wealthy men purchased multiple wives and did with them what they wished. Read the Hebrew Bible, it’s spelled out quite clearly there. And it is the Word of God! Is that the ideal to which you refer?
April 7th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
And what’s with David’s ‘friend’ Jonathan? Their relationship seems, umm, a little closer than normal for two men.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
It’s worth unpacking why the Vermont legislature overturned the veto — by a single vote. Some legislators remained opposed to the bill, but were affronted by Gov. Douglas announcing his intention to veto in advance of the original vote.
Our poor Renaissance Faire fantasist hasn’t yet grasped that his “ideal” of marriage has never actually fucking existed. “What it once was” never ever was.
As for Waldman’s proposal: how about ordained Christian ministers stop officiating at Las Vegas drive-thru weddings, and then we’ll talk?
April 7th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
“Why the hell should gay people work to strengthen marriage?”
Well, they should work to strengthen their own marriages. As should heterosexuals. The problem here is that people are too worried about other people’s marriages to give damn about their own. If you have a problem with marriage, then work it out with your spouse.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
““What it once was” never ever was.”
Oh, that’s not true. Throughout history there have been so many concepts of marriage that any concept you choose once existed somewhere. Hell, Muhammed alone accounts for a few of them. Add in Oedipus and Alexander, and you’ve pretty much covered the bases. My proposal is simple: worry about your own damn marriage. I’m sure your spouse would appreciate that.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
“Some legislators remained opposed to the bill, but were affronted by Gov. Douglas announcing his intention to veto in advance of the original vote.”
Good for them. One thing that’s true about Vermonters is that they hate it when someone tries to tell them what to do. They are individualists to their core. Bless them for that. They are true Americans even if they want to secede.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Equal rights are great, but why do homosexuals feel the need to assimilate into heterosexual culture? As happy as I am that my people (queer) are starting to acquire the same rights, I fear that we are not supporting our queer history and community and are choosing the easy assimilation route. I wish that we eliminated marriage for all couples through the state and just allowed everyone in civil unions or domestic partner benefits and left marriage title and the heteronormative ideas associated with it to the churches. Just me
April 7th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I think predictions of a backlash were reasonable at the time, but that for the most part the backlash has already happened. There have been a number of states in recent years which have put anti-gay constitutional amendments on the ballot, and most of them passed. In many of these states, there was no local court decision that prompted this – they were reacting to the national attention that Massachusetts got. The end result is that a shockingly large portion of this country has constitutionally enshrined bigotry.
(See this map, where every state in red or orange has a constitutional provision against gay marriage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samesex_marriage_in_USA.svg)
But this damage is done. From where we stand now, I think Matt’s right. For the dozen or so states where this issue is still in play without amending the constitution, I doubt there’s a serious risk of backlash in response to marriage equality, whether brought on by the courts or the legislature. It doesn’t look to me like the religious right waits for it to happen in-state before they mobilize. In the remaining states, I expect they’ve already tried. If those efforts failed a year or two ago, I don’t think there’s much risk of them succeeding now, and with every passing year more supporters of gay marriage are born, and more opponents die.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Well thanks, DTM. As for my friend being conned, it really doesn’t matter. They were raising a family together anyway, so the blessing of the State of Colorado really doesn’t mean much. Well, except for the fact that the wife’s father is super rich and now gives him $10K a year because of that simple legal detail. I never understood why my friend avoided marriage in the first place. He gave up $60K for his refusal to marry her for six years. I respect that he took a stand of principle against the free money. But the reality is that he’d always be with her anyway. At that point, just take the free money. I’d say he’s either stupid or insane, but I know damn well that he’s neither.
But as for consent, that’s a matter for the jury, isn’t it? And you never know what a jury might do. I can not consent, but it’s logically impossible to prove a negative. If someone else says I consented and I say I didn’t, then we’re in a he said/she said situation, and a jury can go either way on that. So the risk is still there. It’s just a roll of the dice with the jury. I cannot possibly prove that I never consented. Nor can I provide physical evidence that I never had sex with her. The possibility of condom usage preludes that. As long as we live together, she can always push the argument that I consented to a marital relationship. And I have no way to prove otherwise.
As for my friend’s situation on consent, well he’d be screwed anyway. He bought a house with her (two, actually) and fathered a child with her. It would be impossible for him to prove that he wasn’t consenting to marriage at that point. He can say what he wants, but that child (with his DNA) is really solid evidence against him. In the end, he made the choice he should have made years earlier.
In the end, we should just eliminate this statute. It just creates a gray area in the law. Traditional marriage creates an obvious legal framework for anything else that might happen. Common Law marriage does nothing but raise questions.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:13 am
“Equal rights are great, but why do homosexuals feel the need to assimilate into heterosexual culture?”
Well I don’t think that you have to assimilate. What I do believe is that there is no need for you to isolated. There is no need for a Straight culture and a Gay culture. We can have one culture that accepts everyone as equals. If you feel more comfortable with gay people, that’s fine. I feel more comfortable with breeders. But it’s better for all of us if we feel comfortable being with each other. It’s taken some effort for me, but I’m at the point where I enjoy hanging out with the Katoeys (lady boys) in Bangkok. Ultimately, your comfort comes down to how comfortable you are with yourself. Once you’re fine with yourself, you can accept anyone else. Discrimination is based on fear, and that fear is based on one’s own insecurities. It’s hard, but you can learn to accept us breeders as equals.
That is not to deny that you have faced real discrimination. I would be surprised if some redneck hasn’t kicked the shit out of you for who you are. But you should realize that it’s really their failings that made it happen, not yours. Don’t ever blame yourself for that. Be who you are, and be strong, we breeders will come around eventually. And we really are doing it.
And I really can feel for you. I’m a somewhat effeminate guy who is often mistaken for being gay. And I have had the shit kicked out of me because some rednecks thought I was gay. The fact that I’m straight didn’t make the bruises feel any better. And even the irony didn’t help. Although the laughter did, even if it’s painful to laugh with broken ribs.
But have some optimism, eventually we won’t care about these things. Eventually, we won’t have different cultures. We’ll just have one that accepts everyone.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:05 am
It’s amazing that gays have been able to convince so many people that they are oppressed. Gays are a mostly well-off, mostly white community, who make a higher average income than non-gays and attain higher average levels of education. We should all be such victims! So some people find homosexaulity distasteful. This does not constitute “oppression”. Some people find my religion distasteful (and are pretty open about it). Big deal. Being gay is really a way for well-off whites to pose as members of the ranks of the “oppressed” in our country. Gays do great here, better than most people. But because our country has offered all people only one kind of marriage, they have been able to convince themselves, and others, that they are somehow victimized. It’s amazing. And the disingenuousness of the gay movement is also amazing. Everyone can see that this is only a start: If gay “marriage” is okay, then the arguments against group marriage all disappear. It’s only your religious prejudice, after all, that says I can’t love six or eight chicks and dudes at the same time in the same way two of us love each other. It’s also only your religious bigotry that prohibits marriage of blood relatives. All that is coming, for sure, and I hope gay “marriage” activists feel good when it gets here. Probably, they will, in fact . . .
April 8th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Gays are a mostly well-off, mostly white community, who make a higher average income than non-gays and attain higher average levels of education.
Sorry, David, but this particular myth has no actual data to back it up. Those who have actually tried to study the issue — rather than just spewing bigotry in blog comments — have never found any evidence that gays and lesbians have any greater earning power than heterosexuals. And the idea that we’re “mostly white” is just offensive trash.
Oh, and please go fuck yourself.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Leave it to Vermont and Iowa to be the most progressive states in the nation, shame on us here in California for passing Prop 9. Whether you call it Gay Marriage or Civil Union, the basic premise is that every person should have equal rights. It’s good to see that some states are progressing, I made a list on my site of the states I think will legalize Gay Marriage first: http://www.toptentopten.com/topten/first+states+that+will+legalize+gay+marriage
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