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  Same-Sex Marriage in Vermont?

  Posted Wednesday, April 01, 2009 10:59 AM | By E.J. Graff

  Speaking of another kind of freedom, last week, the Vermont Senate has passed a bill that would enable same-sex couples to marry, and not just get civilly unionized (civilly united? civilized?).The Vermont House is expected to pass the bill this week. The governor says he'll veto it—despite a survey showing that 55 percent of Vermonters are in favor, a few percentage points more than last year. No one knows whether there will be enough votes to override his veto. If the bill passes, Vermont would be the third American state with full marriage rights for same-sex pairs—and the first to have successfully done it via the legislature. (The California legislature passed marriage bills twice, but everything in California ends up in the initiative process and in the courts ... more details here.)

  I am sure that some of you thought that civil unions and marriage were functionally equivalent. Not really. Vermont public radio interviewed me yesterday about the difference between civil unions and marriage, the hilarious history of marriage, the hard-fought and incremental gender-neutralization of marriage law over the past 150 years, and why same-sex couples belong today. Listen here, if you have a couple of extra minutes to kill. 
  

  Filed under: LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, california, civil unions, history of marriage, Vermont

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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