Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage

By David Moats
Published by Harcourt
February 2004; $25.00US; 0-15-101017-X

When three same-sex couples requested marriage licenses in their small Vermont towns, they simply wanted to declare their love and commitment. But the  debate they ignited over their right to marry led all the way to the state  Supreme Court. Eventually the Vermont legislature became the first in the  country to make civil unions legal for gay and lesbian couples. But it was not  an easy victory -- the bill sparked the fiercest political, social, and cultural  struggle in the state's memory, setting neighbor against neighbor, brother  against brother.

David Moats was in the thick of this drama, writing a series of balanced, humane editorials for the Rutland Herald that eventually earned him a  Pulitzer Prize. Now, in an account of unstoppable narrative power, he tells the  intimate stories behind the public battle. We meet the couples who filed the  suit; the lawyers who spent years championing the case; and the one openly gay  legislator in Vermont, who ensured victory with an impassioned, deeply personal  speech delivered to the House at a crucial moment. Civil Wars is a  remarkable drama of democracy at work on a human scale -- and a revealing story  of individual lives swept up in the whirlwind of social change.

Author

David Moats grew up in San Mateo, California; graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara; and served in the Peace Corps in the 1970s. He  is the editorial page editor of the Rutland Herald, where he won that  paper's first Pulitzer Prize for his series of editorials in support of same-sex  unions. His articles have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also a playwright who has authored a dozen plays. He  lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

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Reviews

"In Civil Wars David Moats tells an inspiring story of political courage that has the excitement of a thriller. The struggle for equality that he  describes is a story of sacrifice and triumph that changed Vermont and may well  change the nation. It will certainly change the reader."

--U.S. Senator Patrick J. Leahy

"David Moats has taken a Vermont experience and made it into a national story  that is worth telling."

--former Vermont governor Madeleine May Kunin

Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the book Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage

by David Moats

Published by Harcourt; February 2004; $25.00US; 0-15-101017-X

Copyright © 2004 David Moats

Chapter One

Our Common Humanity

Beth Robinson did not expect the call to come that Monday, but at 10:55 A.M.  on December 20, 1999, the court clerk was on the line. It could mean only one  thing. The Vermont Supreme Court had reached a decision.

The struggle for gay marriage had been waged fitfully for nearly thirty years  in courtrooms across the country, gaining a short-lived victory eleven years  before in Hawaii. But Hawaii eventually reversed course, and no jurisdiction in  the country had established that gays and lesbians had a right to marry equal to  that of heterosexual couples.

Now the Vermont Supreme Court was in a position to lead the way. Robinson had  argued the case thirteen months before, urging the court to establish for the  first time anywhere in the United States that gay and lesbian couples had the  right to marry. For the past year, she and supporters all across the country had  been waiting for the outcome.

The court customarily released its decisions on Fridays, and for the last six  months Robinson had worn specific outfits to work each Friday to be ready for  the press conference that would follow an announcement of the ruling. In the  spring and fall she had worn an electric blue suit. For the summer she had a  black and white outfit. But Friday had passed three days before without a  ruling, only a hint: The court had sent out a message that because of the  holidays it might release rulings the following week on a day other than Friday.

Robinson was a 34-year-old lawyer with one of Vermont's most prestigious firms. She was trim and athletic, with an intense gaze, an incisive intellect, and a devotion to the rigors of the law. She had been working on the  freedom-to-marry issue for four years, and she knew that people all across the  country who had struggled against the indignities of a second-class status had  pinned their hopes on her. She had heard the stories of insults endured and  rights denied, and she had drawn inspiration from the commitment of people who  were willing to fight for legal recognition of their intimate relationships.  Since the dawning of the gay rights movement thirty years before, gays and  lesbians had been engaged on numerous fronts to establish protections against  harassment and hatred, to secure equal rights, and to live with dignity. Now the  issue of gay marriage was at the vanguard of the struggle. The decision Robinson waited for on the telephone in Middlebury could well be a landmark in that struggle.

Each of the participants in this political drama had followed a different path to this moment. Some of them were born and raised in Vermont. Others came  from as far away as California. Some were gay. Some were straight. Many of them  had emerged from the 1960s and 1970s with an idea of Vermont as a community  where the individual still mattered.

Vermont was, perhaps, an unlikely setting for such a drama. This was not Castro Street or Christopher Street, the neighborhoods in San Francisco and New  York where gay America had staged its sometimes flamboyant, sometimes violent,  coming out. This was South Pleasant Street, a shady avenue in Middlebury, a  picturesque town of 8,000 where Robinson was a partner at Langrock Sperry &  Wool. It was a practice that handled all the affairs, grand and small, of a  small town in a rural state. Peter Langrock, the founder of the firm, had  written a book of tales from his practice that included a story about the  disputed ownership of a stuffed fish.

The Langrock office was housed in a stately white nineteenth-century house situated between another law practice in another white house and the gray stone  Baptist church. A florist's shop, where high school kids bought corsages for  their proms, was across the street. Three buildings down, overlooking the green,  was the elegant mansion built in 1802 by Gamaliel Painter, the pioneer who was  one of Middlebury's founders. During the early decades of the nineteenth century  Painter, a signer of Vermont's first constitution, was able to look down from  the third-floor monitor -- a kind of widow's walk -- onto the green, the shops, and  mills of the village he had helped to establish on the falls of Otter Creek.

Larry Abbott was the court clerk who had called Robinson that day. He was  authorized only to tell Robinson the outcome of the case, in which the Supreme  Court was ruling on a lower court finding that the law limiting marriage to  heterosexual unions was constitutional.

This is what he read: "The judgment of the superior court upholding the constitutionality of the Vermont marriage statutes under Chapter 1, Article 7 of  the Vermont Constitution is reversed."

Robinson felt a surge of elation. She had won. The lower court had been reversed, and excluding gay and lesbian couples from marriage was now  unconstitutional.

But Robinson listened with dismay as Abbott continued to read. "The effect of  the Court's decision is suspended, and jurisdiction is retained in this Court,  to permit the Legislature to consider and enact legislation consistent with the  constitutional mandate described within."

Robinson was astounded.

"Larry, what does that mean?"

It was not Abbott's job to tell her what it meant. He told her the ruling would be on the court's Web site at 11 A.M.

To Robinson this was devastating news. It seemed to her like the cruelest defeat. Even so, her mind was already racing ahead. She hung up the phone and  broke in on Susan Murray, who was meeting with clients in the adjacent second-floor office. Murray, 41, and Robinson had founded the Vermont Freedom to  Marry Task Force four years before, and since then she and Robinson had mapped  out a careful legal strategy and had worked assiduously to cultivate grassroots  support for their cause.

They had won, Robinson told Murray, but the court had handed the issue to the  Legislature. The two lawyers didn't have time to dwell on their joy or their  disappointment. Pandemonium broke out at Langrock Sperry & Wool. Months ago  Robinson and Murray had made arrangements with the Ramada Inn in South  Burlington to use a conference room for a press conference. The whole world  would know about this ruling as soon as it appeared on the court's Web site. In  the next three hours they had to get up to South Burlington, thirty-five miles  away, but they didn't have a clue what they were going to tell the press.

Murray, tall and affable, with flecks of gray in her dark hair, had been at  Langrock Sperry & Wool since 1984. She quickly joined Robinson in trying to  figure out what to do next. The two staff assistants who were prepared to help  them with the press conference were both out with the flu, so the lawyers  enlisted other staff members to download a copy of the ruling, get in touch with  the Ramada Inn, notify the press, and track down the six plaintiffs.

Murray and Robinson represented one gay and two lesbian couples who had gone  to their town and city clerks seeking marriage licenses. The clerks had politely  denied all three couples, citing Vermont law and an opinion from the Vermont  attorney general's office. The six had sued, and their case had ended up before  the Vermont Supreme Court. These six were the public faces of the case, and they  needed to be at the press conference.

Robinson and Murray decided the lawyers and clients would have to meet at the  firm's Burlington office before the press conference so they could decide what  to say about this mystifying decision. In the meantime, Robinson and Murray  would have to read the court's ruling. The court had affirmed their clients'  right to marry but had suspended its decision. It seemed they had won a victory.  But what kind of victory? The news of the decision would soon be on the airwaves  nationwide, but the lawyers who had won the case were caught between the joy of  victory and the despair of victory deferred.

Copyright © 2004 David Moats

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