9/20/00 1:05 p.m.
Vermont and the Nation
The movement for gay rights may have overreached.

By NR's Editors

he movement for gay rights has advanced considerably over the last decade, winning changes in public opinion and in law. But in its recent push for gay marriage, it may have overreached. The testing ground is in Vermont.

Last December, the state supreme court ordered the legislature to establish gay marriage or a simulacrum thereof called "civil unions." The public favored neither. Twenty-five thousand Vermonters signed a petition against civil unions. When town meetings were held, not a single town supported civil unions. And opposition in the polls grew as people with reservations realized that they were not alone.

Nonetheless, the legislature approved civil unions and Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, signed the bill (avoiding a public signing ceremony in order, he said, to "start the healing"). It may cost Dean reelection: Ruth Dwyer, a Republican, is running a strong campaign against him on the issue. Five Republicans who supported civil unions were defeated in primaries. The legislature accepted the court's edict. The public, already angry about a previous court decision upending the state's system of school financing, has not.

If gay marriage is defeated in Vermont — after being voted down in California, Alaska, and Hawaii, where there were referendums on the subject — the cause ought to be doomed. But for that to happen, national leaders will have to give voice to the public's sentiment.

Many Democrats have been disingenuous on the topic of gay marriage. Al Gore, for instance, claims to be opposed to it. But he also opposed a California ballot initiative passed last March codifying marriage as a heterosexual institution because the initiative was "mean-spirited." So he is against gay marriage, and also against doing anything to prevent it. But how much better, really, is the Republicans' silence on the topic? George W. Bush says that he opposes gay marriage, but he has avoided comment about the developments in Vermont. Dick Cheney has said that "[d]ifferent states are likely to make different decisions based on the wishes and desires of the people of the state, and that's perfectly acceptable."

Cheney is misdescribing what is happening in Vermont. What we have here is not the people of one state clamoring to do something differently from their neighbors. Rather, activists are attempting to have gay marriage imposed on every state by the judiciary of one state, over the resistance of the people of that state. The legal game plan is obvious. Use the courts to get civil unions in Vermont. File lawsuits to get other states to recognize Vermont's unions. Then get those states to extend the same "right" to their citizens. Finally, have the courts make civil unions full-fledged marriages.

Or maybe not "finally." The courts having redefined marriage as a sex-blind institution, what's to stop further redefinitions? Why, for instance, should marriage remain confined to two people? Advocates of gay marriage scoff at the specter of polygamy. But polygamy has been practiced by far more societies than gay marriage has. The modern practice of divorce has already moved us toward a sort of serial polygamy. That change has not been good for children. Neither, in all likelihood, would be a redefinition of marriage that removed from it any lingering connection to the begetting of children.

There is no need for politicians to express hostility toward homosexuals, or to appeal to others' hostility. The state should not interfere in their private lives or deny them the rights everyone possesses. But those rights do not include a right to marry someone of the same sex. And with so much at stake, would-be leaders of the country have a responsibility to explain how they intend to keep the institution of marriage from unraveling.