Features
Political Pride... Don't Walk Away!
Mo and Mautner say,
"Check Your Breasts!"
Representative Bill Lippert (D. Hinesburg) has been our most visible member of the state legislature over the past several years. In a recent conversation on this year’s legislative concerns for the GLBTQ community, he first offered what he called a biennial perspective. The entire Vermont legislature is re-elected every two years (biennium).
“This biennium in the House has seen the most ... members who were elected in the backlash to civil unions. They came not only to repeal civil unions, but there was also a hard core of Republicans who came to the State House feeling entitled to attack gays and lesbians in the broadest way,” said Lippert.
“There were meetings in the State House sponsored by members [of the legislature] that involved putting out lies and misinformation under the guise of providing information,” he continued. “Last year a nonprofit group – you probably know that nonprofit groups are invited to the State House to educate us about their concerns on a particular day – Parents and Teachers Against the Sexual Seduction of Students displayed their material in the Statehouse [PATASSS]. It was just shocking to me.”
Lippert recalled that while the House (barely) passed a repeal and replacement of civil unions with the reciprocal partnership bill, the more moderate and Democrat-controlled Senate gave it no consideration. “As an element of what took place, the Education Committee considered a bill from Nancy Sheltra that would have prohibited any education department employee or teacher or staff member from ever saying anything positive about homosexuality within the hearing of students or in public (later identified by opponents as the “no-promo-homo” bill). No bill was passed. But, said Lippert, “it was the first time any legislative hearing was given to any such homophobic legislation.”
From Lippert’s perspective, “The current House leadership, which came into power on the backlash against civil unions and gay and lesbian people, felt they owed the extreme homophobic wing of the Republican Party. Those legislators are still there, still running for re-election. But at top levels, in the governor’s race,” he suggested, “there’s a desire to keep those people in the fold, but not cater to them too much. Unfortunately, I think we’ll see a constant catering [by the Republican Party] to their political desires.”
The civil union backlash that resulted in the election of conservative Republicans had an even bigger impact on other issues that affect all Vermonters, Lippert explained. “Water quality standards are degraded, the expansion of arrest powers, a tax policy that caters to the wealthiest Vermonters. Those are the kinds of things they’ve been able to do more of.”
Lippert praised the Senate’s moderating influence. “We are extremely fortunate in that the Senate has remained a counterbalance. But it remains so only by one seat and the Lieutenant Governor’s presence at the podium. So many times in the House we’ve said, ‘The Senate will fix this.’ Our community has so powerfully benefited from the Senate.”
“Our community needs to continue to be highly politically involved,” Lippert declared. “The principled stands taken in the civil union struggle by Democrats and a few Republicans came at a cost, and they took those stands knowing that other issues would suffer when the backlash vote took place.”
There was discussion among knowledgeable Democrats at the time of the civil union hearings that the legislature should refuse to act, let the Vermont Supreme Court impose a solution and take the political heat, a strategy designed to save seats for moderate and liberal Democrats in tough districts. But the vote was held, the bill passed, and the backlash unseated some moderate legislators.
Perhaps the most important factor mandating GLBTQ political involvement, Lippert continued, is that “the window opens again next year for a constitutional amendment repealing civil unions.”
In addition, looking further down the road, in 2006, the Supreme Court justices come up for review by a committee of House and Senate members. Each justice is voted on individually by secret ballot. Lippert said that “certain of the spokespeople for the backlash organizations made it clear that their goal was to take over the House and Senate, in order to ‘defang’ the Vermont Supreme Court.”
“We don’t have the luxury of sitting back,” Lippert declared. “We owe it to the legislators who stood up so incredibly for our community to not walk away.”
In light of the election of the backlash candidates and very conservative Republicans who controlled the House in the 2001-2002 biennium, the House vote in favor of a liberal medical marijuana bill is, to say the least, anomalous. Observers have agreed that the bipartisan vote was most heavily influenced by the individual stories of severe chronic diseases brought by members of the public and by House members. “There was an acknowledgment of the HIV/AIDS community, though it was not couched in those terms. A Republican-controlled House could do this in the same way as Nixon could go to China.” Few would accuse right wing Republicans of being “soft on crime” or “soft on drugs.”
Lippert suggested that fellow Democrat Governor Howard Dean “is not going to move on that issue in the context of his broader political ambitions – and to be fair, his personal convictions are the same. It would be unfair,” he said, “to characterize Dean’s stand as being against the gay and lesbian community.”
Representative Bob Dostis (D. Washington-Chittenden-1 district) is the quieter, more conservative member of Vermont’s gay caucus. He agreed that because of the backlash vote, the House has gotten much more conservative. “We are seeing things in the House like the reduction in pollution standards, issues about women’s right to choose, the Champion Lands issues, reinstatement of highway advertising signs which would only support large companies, the reciprocal partnership bill – which showed how far the House would go to repeal civil unions – even as far as promoting incest, allowing family members to join reciprocal partnerships.”
Dostis offered a differing opinion on the role of civil unions in the next election. “The whole Civil Unions thing is pretty quiet,” Dostis said. “The dire predictions pronounced by the opposition obviously didn’t come true. They said there would be a loss of tourism dollars, that people would not come to Vermont. Just recently I offered a bill on floor – with some irony – that shows that we are up in tourism dollars, we’re up over $2 million over what was forecasted, 4.6 percent. The revenue from rooms and meals tax is going up and may even hit $100 million this year. It is clear that civil unions had no negative impact and may have had a positive one. The bill outlined a funding formula to ensure we continue to market Vermont.”
Dostis agreed that most of the new Republican legislators got voted in on a backlash vote, “but not all, and there are some who are quite moderate and wish the whole issue would just go away. More Republicans get in because of the Progressive Party splitting the liberal Democratic vote. I wish they could just be comfortable as the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”
Asked how he got elected as a new legislator in the year of the backlash vote, Dostis said, “I got elected because I worked very, very hard. I was above-board and honest, I set a moderate tone, and I got people out to vote and registered hundreds of people to vote.” Neither he nor his opponent made an issue of his sexual orientation, but, Dostis said, whenever anyone asked about it, he gave an honest answer. “I wasn’t running as a gay candidate. I think people respected the experience I bring to the position. And I knocked on every single door in my district at least once.”
“My issues were child care, school programming, developing downtowns to minimize sprawl, seniors getting prescription drugs, property tax relief, all issues that resonated with the voters,” Dostis said. Among his achievements, he pointed to his work on the House Commerce committee, including a comprehensive downtown bill, which offers tax credits and other incentives to develop current structures downtown; village centers got a new designation similar to downtown, in order to focus growth in village centers by investing in infrastructure; buildings.
Dostis also served on a summer study committee whose report resulted in the creation of the Children’s Cabinet by executive order of the Governor. The order requires departments of the state dealing with children to communicate with each other when doing so will help the child. He also cited a renewable energy bill that would create more jobs, and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
This fall’s campaign, Dostis suggested, would be primarily about budget issues, “especially with IBM jobs in question – the ripple effect of the loss of a thousand of those jobs will be extremely damaging. There will be a loss of income tax revenue as well as significant secondary effects.”
The second major issue Dostis cited was “Medicaid and prescription drug coverage. Even if the cigarette tax is raised to 67 cents, that will only bail us out for 2 years.” Asked about the governor’s comment that the legislature “lacked the spine” to cut the Medicaid budget, Dostis supported the governor’s position. “Governor Dean is looking at bottom line and the numbers. We’re going to be in bad financial shape. If we don’t have the revenues, we can’t make the expenditures.”
Asked what issues should make the glbtq communities pay attention in the upcoming primaries and elections, Dostis suggested that the primary goal should be taking back the House for the Democrats and widening the party’s majority in the House. But, he said, “Progressives make that more difficult.” Watching Republicans recruiting very conservative candidates worries him.
“Remember, under a Democratically controlled House there would be no civil union repeal, no wholesale sellout of the environment,” Dostis concluded. “The Democratic Party is a big tent. I think I’m more conservative than most of the Democrats in the party, but I feel very comfortable under that tent. We have the same overall ideals, one being civil rights for all. Under Republican control, that would be lost.”