Vermont
How did gay marriage become legal? How civil unions paved the way 25 years ago.
Gay marriage, once an unpopular concept nationwide, is widely accepted in Vermont today.
“People take for granted that same-sex couples can get married nowadays,” said Bill Lippert, 75, one of Vermont’s first openly gay lawmakers. “You can reference your husband or wife casually now in conversation. But if you weren’t around 25 years ago, there isn’t always an appreciation for how hard we had to fight.”
April 26 marks the 25th anniversary of civil unions – marriage for same-sex couples in all but name – becoming state law. Although civil unions were deeply controversial even among Vermonters at the time, they served as the first pivotal step toward full marriage equality, Lippert said.
In 2000, Vermont became the first place in the world to grant marriage-equivalent legal rights to same-sex couples. Domestic partnerships existed in some places, but those unions “usually only granted a few legal rights,” Lippert said.
“The eyes of the whole country and world were focused on what Vermont was doing in 2000,” said Lippert, who helped craft the civil unions bill while serving on the house judiciary committee.
Three years later Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, followed by Connecticut and Iowa in 2008. Vermont followed suit in 2009. Several more states legalized same-sex marriage before U.S Supreme Court finally made it nationwide law in 2015 through the Obergefell v. Hodges case.
“One can see the direct connection between what Vermont did in 2000 with civil unions to what followed in Massachusetts and eventually with Obergefell in 2015,” Lippert said.
Life before civil unions
Prior to the creation of civil unions, gay and lesbian couples lacked “a thousand more rights” than married straight couples, Lippert said, no matter how long they had been together.
For instance, if one partner in a same-sex relationship was in hospital, the other partner did not automatically have the power of attorney.
“That was one of the most painful ones,” Lippert said.
Lippert recalled one particularly egregious case that happened to a lesbian couple with a child. When the partner who had given birth to the child died in a car crash, her parents fought for custody even though the two women had been raising the kid together.
“The list goes on and on,” Lippert said.
Although Vermont eventually established “second parent adoption” in 1993, there still wasn’t a “legal connection between partners,” Lippert noted.
“That side of the triangle was missing,” he said.
The road to civil unions: ‘The Baker Case’
In the late 90s, three lawyers and three same-sex couples decided it was time to test Vermont’s marriage laws.
In 1998, three Vermont same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses in Chittenden County. When their marriages were denied, they filed a lawsuit that became known as Baker v. Vermont, or informally ‘the Baker Case,’ after the last name of one of the plaintiffs. A Vermont Superior Court judge ruled to dismiss the case, so the plaintiffs made an appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.
What the Vermont Supreme Court did next shocked everyone. Instead of either legalizing gay marriage or striking down the case, the justices ruled in 1999 that same-sex couples should be afforded all the same legal rights as heterosexual couples but left it up to the Vermont legislature whether to grant gay couples the ability to marry or form an equivalent union.
“Personally, I was shocked because I had been assured by the attorneys fighting for gay marriage that we would never have to vote on it in the legislature,” Lippert said. “Many of my colleagues were, frankly, beyond anxious – terrified – because they never wanted to deal with the issue because it was so controversial.”
At the time, some states were changing their constitutions to outlaw gay marriage. The Defense of Marriage Act also went into effect two years prior. In Vermont specifically, only 20% of residents supported gay marriage.
Gay marriage “was not a popular proposal,” Lippert recalled. “It was hotly condemned and fought against by major religious groups as an affront to their religious sacraments.” One of their main fears was that churches would be forced to marry gay couples.
‘Separate but equal’
The Vermont legislature was already in mid-session when the court dropped the issue of gay marriage in their laps. The house judicial committee, where Lippert served as vice chair, was tasked with writing the bill that would grant gay couples the right to marry or to form an equivalent union.
After listening to weeks of testimony from supporters and opponents of gay marriage, the committee voted to create a “parallel legal structure,” which they named civil unions, Lippert said.
“It was very disappointing for the attorneys and advocates, but it was clear that we did not have the votes to create full marriage for same-sex couples,” said Lippert, who was among the three committee members to vote for gay marriage.
Some gay marriage advocates at the time found the idea of civil unions insulting and akin to the concept of “Separate but equal.”
Some activists said civil unions were like “having to sit on the back of the bus” and refused to support the bill, Lippert said. “Others said, ‘At least we’re on the bus.’”
The lawsuit plaintiffs and their attorneys decided “it was better to pass something achievable than pass something that would fail and then get nothing,” Lippert said.
Victory uncertain
On the day house reps were scheduled to vote, Lippert and his committee members weren’t sure if they had enough support to pass civil unions in house. Some representatives wouldn’t share their plans, while others kept saying they “needed more information” before they could decide which way to vote.
For some representatives, a “yes” vote guaranteed they would lose their seats in either the primary or general elections later that year.
“Until the roll call, none of us knew we were going to win,” said Lippert. “It would have taken a few votes to switch and we would have lost.”
After 12 hours of debate and testimony that day, the Vermont house voted 76-69 to pass the civil unions bill.
Lippert primarily attributed the win to “courageous” gay Vermonters, loved ones and other advocates who shared personal stories throughout the bill process. Some gay people even came out publicly for the first time to throw their support behind the bill.
Lippert also thinks the “hateful phone calls and letters” legislators received made them realize why civil unions were necessary.
“They saw why we needed this,” Lippert said. “That if this is the level of prejudice and hatefulness that comes at me, what must it be like for gay people? The hate backfired.”
Once civil unions passed the house, it was much smoother sailing for gay advocates. The senate, which had a higher percentage of Democrats than the house, passed civil unions 19-11.
Gov. Howard Dean, who already voiced his approval of civil unions, signed the bill into law soon after – albeit behind closed doors and without fanfare.
“He said publicly that marriage for same-sex couples made him uncomfortable” but that he could back civil unions, Lippert remembered. Even still, Dean’s support was “crucial.”
“If he hadn’t been willing to say he would sign the bill, I don’t think we would have passed it,” Lippert said. “People wouldn’t have risked voting for it.”
The aftermath
Later that year, 17 legislators who voted for civil unions in April 2000 lost their seats to opponents who promised to help repeal the institution. Dean, who had to wear a bulletproof vest during his gubernatorial campaign, also faced an ardent anti-civil unions challenger.
“It’s hard to explain the level of controversy and some of the hatefulness directed at the governor and lawmakers,” Lippert said.
The following session, the now more conservative house managed to repeal civil unions by one vote, but the effort died in the senate.
Between 2000 and 2009, thousands of gay couples from other states and nations traveled to Vermont to enter civil unions. They wanted legal recognition of their relationship somewhere even if their home state or country wouldn’t respect it, Lippert said.
“At the time, I would have been happy to have settled the case in court,” Lippert said. “But looking back, I think it would have garnered greater backlash if the court had granted gay marriage or an equivalent institution directly.”
That’s what happened in Hawaii. In 1996, the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to deny marriage to same-sex couples. An enormous public backlash ensued, and by 1998, Hawaiians had changed their state constitution to outlaw gay marriage.
Amending Vermont’s constitution wouldn’t have been as easy – it takes multiple years versus only one in Hawaii – but there definitely were some lawmakers who wanted to, Lippert said. Such an amendment never got off the ground, however.
“My view is civil unions was a historic step for civil marriage for same-sex couples,” Lippert said. “Saying that full marriage equality was important does not take away from civil unions moving us to marriage equality in a profound way.”
Lippert and his spouse eventually entered a civil union themselves. They then got married once Vermont legalized what Lippert now calls “full marriage equality.”
Two empty seats
The leaders of both the Vermont House and Senate will not be running for reelection. So who will fill their shoes?
Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, said she’s running for Senate president pro tempore.
Ram Hinsdale has served in the legislature for 14 years and is the first woman of color to serve in the Senate.
“I have seen so many types of leadership, so many tools in the toolbox that you can use to move people in the same direction,” she said.
While spending more than a decade in the Legislature, Ram Hinsdale said she’s lived through many crises and charted the state’s path through them. She was a lawmaker during the Great Recession, the Covid-19 pandemic and two years of record breaking floods.
With multiple long-serving legislators retiring this year, Ram Hinsdale said she thinks she will bring needed institutional knowledge and experience, along with a willingness to rally new people.
Along with Ram Hinsdale, lawmakers have eyed Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, who currently chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, as a future pro tem.
Perchlik said Friday that he’s considering running for the position, though he didn’t want to definitively say until after the primary election in August.
“I’ve been approached by many senators asking me to do it,” Perchlik said. And he said he thinks it makes sense, given his past leadership roles as the whip for the majority party in the Senate and his former role as chair of the Senate Transportation Committee.
Perchlik has chaired the appropriations committee for the last two years, receiving bills from every committee and managing the state’s funds. That role has allowed him to work with lawmakers across the chamber and different parts of the executive branch, he said.
“You get a really broad picture of the entire government,” Perchlik said.
Just a day after House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, surprisingly announced that she won’t seek reelection, a handful of likely Democrats to succeed her said they were mum on their plans to run for speaker.
House Majority Leader Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction, said it’s too soon to say if she will run, though she didn’t rule out the possibility.
“She just announced yesterday,” Houghton said, adding that she’s trying to focus on finishing out the session.
Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, similarly said she’s considering running, but right now she’s focused on finishing legislative work, too.
Rep. Charlie Kimbell, D-Woodstock, said, “I haven’t made up my mind about it.” Kimbell previously ran for speaker in 2020 before dropping out of the race to endorse Krowinski. He also ran for lieutenant governor in 2022 before losing in the primary.
Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, who challenged Krowinski for speaker at the beginning of 2025, said, “I have not ruled it out.”
In the know
At the eleventh hour, lawmakers let the law enforcement masking bill supported by immigrant rights activists, S.208, die.
“I’m very disappointed with what has happened to S.208,” said Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham, the bill’s lead sponsor, on the Senate floor Friday.
The decision comes after a committee of lawmakers from the House and Senate agreed on a version of the bill that would have largely banned all law enforcement operating in the state — including federal agents — from wearing masks or failing to visibly identify themselves.
Committee members decided to make that provision of the bill go into effect March 15, 2027, rather than upon passage, reasoning it would give the state time to see how similar laws in other states play out in the courts.
The bill the committee approved would have given the Vermont attorney general’s office the responsibility to enforce it, bringing a civil lawsuit if officers violated the law.
Upon passage, the bill also would have required a Vermont law enforcement board to create a statewide policy on masking and identification for local and state police.
All members of the conference committee signed on to support the newest version of the bill except the committee’s lone Republican appointee, Sen. Chris Mattos, R-Chittenden North. During a committee meeting Thursday, Mattos said he was unsure he could support the bill because the committee hadn’t heard from the attorney general’s office about whether it was on board to enforce the policy.
After the conference committee approved the bill, it sat on the House’s calendar Friday but was not taken up on the House floor.
For the bill to pass before adjournment, lawmakers would have needed three-quarters of the House to suspend legislative rules, which would allow lawmakers to speed up the legislative process. That would have required Republican support.
Lawmakers on the Senate floor decided to adjourn around 5:50 p.m., giving up on the idea of receiving the bill from the House.
“It was barely a year ago that I watched Mohsen Mahdawi be taken by masked men in unmarked vehicles,” said Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, expressing her frustration that the bill didn’t pass.
— Charlotte Oliver
Lawmakers on the House floor Friday made a failed attempt to override the governor’s veto of a bill, H.727, that would have set strict guardrails for any future huge data centers in Vermont.
The bill contained provisions that would prevent any large data centers in Vermont from increasing electricity costs for average ratepayers. The bill also contained provisions that would restrict how data centers discharge chemicals and use water to stay cool in an attempt to limit environmental impacts.
Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the bill Thursday. In his letter to lawmakers, Scott said he believes Vermont’s existing regulations would prevent harmful impacts from data centers.
Lawmakers voted 83-52 in favor of overriding the veto, but they needed 90 votes to do so.
— Charlotte Oliver
On the move
Vermont’s House and Senate budget writers reached a deal Thursday night on a state spending package for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July.
Agreement on the budget bill, H.951, came with likely just a day left in this year’s legislative session. Overall, the joint House and Senate conference committee’s version of the budget totals $9.38 billion, close to the amount of spending Gov. Phil Scott proposed at the start of the session in January.
The bill was expected to get a final sign-off on the House floor Friday after weeks of both public and closed-door negotiations. The conference committee signed off on the bill around 11 p.m. Thursday.
Among the last pieces of the nearly 150-page legislation to get resolved in the committee was a controversial plan to take money out of a state-run college scholarship fund to help pay for a long-stalled athletic complex at the University of Vermont instead. The fund, called the Higher Education Endowment Trust Fund, saw a historic infusion of cash last year from Vermont’s tax on the estates of high-wealth individuals.
Read the full story here.
— Shaun Robinson
Say cheese
“A crime has been committed, and we do need justice by the end of the day.”
Rep. Conor Casey, D-Montpelier, told his colleagues on the floor Friday morning that he was set on getting to the bottom of a putrid predicament that has been vexing him and other members of the House Corrections and Institutions Committee for weeks.
As he told it: Casey walked into the committee room a couple of months ago to “a rancid smell.” After weeks of searching high and low, he realized that the desks making up the committee’s table had small drawers underneath that he had never noticed before. He opened his drawer, only to find “a moldy, disgusting, offensive glob of cheese,” with a note that read, “say cheese.”
Casey is well known around the Statehouse for pulling pranks on his colleagues, so the cheese may have been an effort to get back at him before he steps down from the House. He then pulled open the drawer of his seat-neighbor, Barre Town Republican Rep. Gina Galfetti, to find yet another glob of cheese.
“It was a bipartisan cheesing, Madam Speaker,” he exclaimed Friday.
If the person who lodged the offending dairy did not come forward by the end of the day, Casey said, he would subject his colleagues to a full recitation of James Joyce’s mammoth novel, “Ulysses,” on the floor. Coming from the man who recited part of a play he wrote during a floor session last year, that seemed far from an empty threat.
As of this newsletter’s deadline, at least, the mystery remained unsolved.
“The craven still hides in the shadows,” Casey wrote in a text. “But rest assured they will be brought to justice. The session may end, but my lust for vengeance will endure…”
— Shaun Robinson
Nearly 1,000 Vermont students will bring live jazz to downtown Burlington this June as part of the 2026 Discover Jazz Festival, with dozens of school ensembles scheduled to perform free concerts on Church Street.
According to a community announcement, 44 ensembles from 36 schools, representing 993 students from across Vermont, will take part in the festival’s 43rd year.
The student concerts are organized by The Flynn, which produces the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival and oversees its education and community programs. All student performances are free and open to the public.
Student performances highlight statewide participation
Participating schools span Vermont, including Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties, central Vermont, Addison County, Lamoille Valley, the Northeast Kingdom and southern Vermont, along with visiting ensembles from New York, according to the announcement.
Chittenden County schools listed include Burlington High School, Champlain Valley Union High School, Charlotte Central School, Colchester High School and Middle School, Edmunds Elementary and Middle schools, Essex High School and Middle School, South Burlington High School, Winooski Middle High School and Vermont Commons School, among others.
The student performances will take place during the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, which runs June 3–7 and features free outdoor concerts alongside ticketed performances by internationally recognized artists curated by MacArthur fellow Jason Moran.
Featured collaboration includes Vermont Youth Orchestra musicians
A featured performance during the festival, “My Heart Sings: Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington”, will include musicians from the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association jazz ensemble, according to the announcement.
The concert will also feature guest vocalist Rachel Ambaye, a South Burlington native studying with Moran at Berklee College of Music. Ambaye will join the student ensemble for a collaboration tied to one of the festival’s signature performances.
Flynn Executive Director Jay Wahl said in the announcement that bringing student musicians into the center of the festival highlights jazz as a living tradition shared across generations.
This story was created by Dave DeMille, ddemille@gannett.com, with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – Republican Gov. Phil Scott filed Thursday to seek a sixth term in office while the heads of both legislative chambers announced they will not run for reelection.
Thursday marked the deadline for candidates to get on the ballot for the August primary elections. For months, it has been unclear if Scott would run again.
“I don’t want to see anything move backwards; we need to keep pushing ahead,” Scott said.
Scott filed the necessary 500 signatures on Thursday. If he serves a sixth term, he would be the longest-serving consecutive governor in state history.
“It’s not easy work, it weighs on you, but at the end of the day, I feel the responsibility to stick this out,” Scott said.
The governor has won by larger margins each cycle. Potential Democratic challengers have waited to see whether Scott might step aside, providing a chance not to run against a popular incumbent.
Those who political observers speculated might be interested in the governor’s race included Democratic Attorney General Charity Clark and Treasurer Mike Pieciak. Both instead decided to seek reelection.
Pieciak told reporters he has experienced several personal tragedies this year and wants to continue with his office’s work. “It’s really been a year of reflection, and I think I’m excited about continuing this job that I enjoy,” Pieciak said.
Scott will face an opponent in November. Democrats Aly Richards and Amanda Janoo will face off in the August primary.
Three other Democrats, Molly Gray, Ryan McLaren, and Esther Charlestin, will face off for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and the chance to challenge incumbent Republican John Rodgers in November.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski received a standing ovation from House lawmakers as she announced she will not seek reelection, joining Senate President Phil Baruth.
“The next group of leaders will do a great job continuing on with this work. I wouldn’t be leaving if I didn’t think that we had the right people in places to do this work,” Krowinski said.
That means there will be fresh leadership in the House and Senate next legislative session.
And there is competition in the race for Congress. Republicans Gerald Malloy and Mark Coester will face off in the GOP primary to determine who will face Congresswoman Becca Balint in November.
“To deliver results for Vermont. They are tired of the constant complaining and angry rhetoric,” Malloy said.
There are at least three dozen state House and Senate races that will see fresh faces as another large contingent of lawmakers steps back.
Copyright 2026 WCAX. All rights reserved.
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