Vermont Panel Opts for DP
SUMMARY: Given a choice between legal same-gender marriage and a “separate but equal” domestic partnership, a Vermont House committee has picked the latter - which probably won’t please either side.
The Vermont House Judiciary Committee, charged with drafting legislation in response to the Vermont Supreme Court’s December 20 ruling that under the state constitution same-gender couples must have access to all the benefits of legal marriage, voted 7 - 3 on February 9 to design a parallel registered partnership for gays and lesbians rather than extend existing marriage law to include them, the Associated Press reported. Committee chair Representative Thomas Little (R-Sherburne) promised that new relationship would be “different than, broader than” domestic partnerships elsewhere in the U.S., because “It is clear to me that the will of the Committee is to initiate and work on a civil rights bill.” Openly gay Committee vice-chair William Lippert (D-Hinesburg) said, “I tr! ! ! ust whatever next step we take collectively, we take in a continual step to dismantle institutional discrimination.”
The Committee vote does not entirely kill the possibility of legal same-gender marriage in Vermont, since a bill to that effect has been introduced in the legislature (HB 694 “An Act Relating to the Ability to Marry,” sponsored by Representative Dean Corren), but it does make it appear more unlikely. Nor does same-gender marriage seem likely in the near future in any other state; a bill has been introduced in Rhode Island but is given little chance of passage, while no lawsuit similar to Vermont’s “Baker” case is at all close to a state Supreme Court hearing. It remains to be seen whether the Vermont panel’s move will make any difference to the renewed momentum in several other states to prohibit legal recognition of same-gender marriages another state may someday perform. That movement swept the country in the wake of the 1993 Hawai’i Supreme Court ruling in “Baehr” but had almost died out until the Vermont decision.
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee began consideration of a preamble for the bill both houses of the legislature have agreed it will draft, after hearing several weeks of testimony to lay a groundwork for its task. It will likely prove much more challenging for the panel to develop a new legal relationship that meets the state high court’s standards for equal treatment than it would have been simply to extend the existing marriage law to include gay and lesbian couples.
In the Committee’s own hearings, in some eight hours of public testimony, and in polls and comments to media, it’s been clear that neither the supporters nor the opponents of same-gender marriage have been satisfied by the concept of registered partnerships, but it’s also been apparent to many lawmakers from the first that it would be the only acceptable compromise between those sharply divided factions. On February 6, state Senator Ben Ptashnik (D-Windsor) and state Representative Ann Seibert (D-Norwich), both supporters of equal civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians, told an educational forum in Norwich organized by the Freedom to Marry Coalition that they believed the votes weren’t there to enact it, with Seibert estimating no more than 2/3 of the necessary votes in the House.
Just how acceptable legal partnerships will prove to be to those contesting marriage remains to be seen. The state’s leading opponent to civil marriage for same-gender couples has been Vermont’s top Roman Catholic, Bishop of Burlington Kenneth Angell, who is just as opposed to legal partnerships. The Church rejects homosexual acts as sinful, and Angell is convinced that legal recognition of same-gender couples will inevitably lead to full marriage rights for them.
The “Baker” plaintiffs, three lesbian and gay couples, will almost certainly contest the high court’s review of a registered partnership measure since “separate but equal” has so often proved anything but equal. Two of the attorneys who represented them, Susan Murray and Beth Robinson, both lesbians themselves, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on February 4, following earlier testimony by Angell and by a group of religious leaders from various denominations who support gay and lesbian marriages. It was a highly emotional appearance for Murray, who was deeply troubled by the way opponents had spoken of gays and lesbians, particularly at the public hearings. She said, “It’s really painful to hear people say, 'You’re immoral, you’re an abomination. … Why do these people feel so free to say these things? Gays and lesbians are the only group that are still politically correct to kick.”
Murray noted that when Vermont enacted civil rights protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1992, lawmakers heard many of the same dire predictions now being uttered against equal marriage rights, and said, “All these predictions about how it will degrade other people, the same statements were made then. None of it came true.” She made the oft-repeated comparison to former bans on interracial marriage, citing historical quotations from a U.S. Senator who said his opposition to those marriages was “simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong” and a Congressmember who said interracial marriage “necessarily involves degradation” of the institution of marriage; Murray said, “The same arguments are being heard 50 years later” against same-gender marriages.
Committee chair Little asked Murray and Robinson about the issue some of the public had raised about homosexuality being a “choice,” noting he did so not to endorse those arguments but to help the Committee to address them. Murray’s response was, “What difference does it make?” Robinson pointed out that religion is a choice, and that the argument for interracial marriage was not that skin color couldn’t be changed but that “skin color doesn’t make any difference” before the law. Little commented, “Sometimes the non-rational arguments are the hardest to dispose of.”
Little asked the attorneys to respond to the limited public support for marriage rights and the profound division among Vermonters on the issue, and both urged the Committee to move for marriage regardless.
