OutRight

Our First Anniversary in Vermont
The sky hasn’t fallen (although a few politicians have)–do you think the country’s ready to take the next step?
by Dale Carpenter

A famous American jurist once said the life of the law has been experience, not logic. One year after Vermont enacted its civil unions law–the closest thing this country has ever had to gay marriage–the most remarkable thing is how unremarkable that year has been. No meteors have descended on Montpelier; no plague of locusts has stripped bare the maple trees; husbands have not left their wives for nubile male youths; wives have not abandoned their children for sapphic music festivals. A few more experiences like this, and we may get nationwide gay marriage one day.

Discussions about Vermont’s civil unions usually begin with the Vermont Supreme Court’s bold declaration in December 1999 that opposite-sex-only marriage violates the state constitution. But that’s like beginning a history of the polio vaccine with the first inoculation. It’s an important event, but it would not have happened without all of the hard work that preceded it.

Long before the Vermont Supreme Court got involved, gay advocates had been arguing strenuously in legislatures, courts, and workplaces for recognition, any recognition, of same-sex couples.

This advocacy, which gave us the term "domestic partnership," had both symbolic and practical purposes. On the level of symbol, some formal recognition of gay couples is important as a marker of social acceptance. And whatever we may say at times, this movement is ultimately about acceptance, not mere tolerance. I tolerate the fact that my neighbor mows his lawn only once a month in the summer, but I do not accept it.

On the practical level, gay couples needed the benefits that recognition can bring, like health insurance, hospital visitation rights, and family and medical leave.

As the domestic partnership movement spread, businesses, cities, and states took note: Experience showed that recognizing gay couples cost very little and had the practical benefit of keeping gay employees and constituents happy. Scores of Fortune 500 companies, dozens of cities, and a handful of states now have some kind of domestic partnership policy covering same-sex couples.

This experience informed the Vermont Supreme Court’s stunning decision that the state must treat gay unions as equivalent to marriages. If gay couples had been given some of the benefits of marriage and no harm had resulted, why not take the next step of granting all of those benefits, even if we don’t call it "marriage"? It was the next incremental step.

What have we learned in the past year as a consequence of that step?

One thing we have learned is that supporting same-sex unions is still a politically risky proposition for a politician. After the state supreme court ordered lawmakers to come up with marriage or its equivalent for gay couples, Vermont’s legislature grudgingly created civil unions. But several state legislators who voted for the civil unions bill–especially supportive Republicans who were seen as heretical by party primary voters–lost their seats. An anti-civil-unions campaign succeeded in taking the state house of representatives for the GOP in the November 2000 election.

The more important and longer-lasting lesson of the past year was summed up nicely by Vermont Governor Howard Dean in an interview with the New York Times. The sky has not fallen, he said, "and the institution of marriage has not collapsed."

Throughout the state, the passions of last year’s debate over civil unions have subsided. Newspapers aren’t venting editorials about it every day. The ubiquitous "Take Back Vermont" signs are slowly coming down. Legislative efforts to repeal or water down civil unions have stalled. People are even talking about how the law has led to a small increase in tourism since most civil unions registrants have come from other states.

Civil unions are becoming routine. According to the Times, there have been 2,479 of them since July 1, 2000, the date the law took effect. (Only 502 of those have involved Vermont residents.) A website devoted to assisting gay couples preparing for weddings (gayweddings.com) reports a substantial increase in traffic.

With all these domestic partnerships and civil unions, we are seeing the normalization of gay life in America. That is, we are witnessing the process by which being gay in this country will no longer mean standing apart from the mainstream. That’s an unsavory prospect for both queer theorists and for religious conservatives who had hoped, for different reasons, to keep us out of the mainstream.

Let’s not be too exuberant quite yet, however. Domestic partnerships are not gay marriage. Not even civil unions are gay marriage since one state cannot, against the express statutory will of Congress (remember the Defense of Marriage Act?), confer the federal benefits on them that are available to opposite-sex spouses.

But what domestic partnerships and civil unions and their cognates do is this: They give Americans something to call gay relationships other than "perversion." They show people, slowly and surely, there is no harm in formal recognition of those relationships, and, in fact, there is some benefit in it for everyone.

After seeing one employer after another, and then one municipality after another, and then one state after another, survive the loss of a state-sponsored heterosexual monopoly on love, it just may be that one day the country will be ready for the real thing.