Word: vermont
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None of that has happened. Instead, Vermont is enjoying a modest boomlet in gay tourism: 80% of the 2,000 gay civil-union licenses granted so far have been issued to out-of-state residents. (In that time, about 5,000 traditional marriage licenses have been granted.) Inns and B and Bs advertise civil-union packages on gay and lesbian websites. At the Moose Meadow Lodge in Waterbury, couples willing to pay $1,850 get two nights' accommodation for eight people, breakfast and the use of the pond meadow for their civil union or reception. K.C. David...
...economic terms, it's barely a snowflake. The gay and lesbian couples coming to Vermont to wed are but a tiny fraction of the 4 million visitors the state attracts each year. What's significant is that in some Vermont towns, civil unions have become a part of the fabric of everyday life. In Brattleboro, a bucolic community of 12,000 residents in liberal southern Vermont, there were 292 civil unions from July to December 2000--the same number as there were straight marriages for the whole year. Even the Chamber of Commerce is a one-stop referral service. Along...
Brattleboro is one of Vermont's more liberal enclaves. Conservative farming communities, by contrast, saw a ferocious backlash shortly after the law's passage. Thousands of TAKE BACK VERMONT signs sprouted on lawns. Half a dozen town clerks quit rather than grant licenses to gay couples. Five state legislators who supported civil unions were defeated at the polls. But other civil-union proponents, such as Governor Howard Dean, survived, and the Take Back Vermont campaign eventually fizzled. Efforts by opponents to overturn the law have failed...
...lawsuit for the right to marry. So far, more than 30 states have passed "defense-of-marriage laws," which state that same-sex unions sanctioned elsewhere are null and void. Yet even though the licenses are worthless in their home states, for many gay couples making it legal in Vermont is better than nothing at all. "You wait all your life for something like that," says Vivienne Armstrong, a nurse from Dallas who has been with her partner Louise Young for 30 years. "We would have crawled to Vermont...
...some, marital bliss may be short-lived. No one in Vermont has yet filed for dissolution, but town clerks and local attorneys are already getting calls asking how to terminate a civil union. As it turns out, that's harder than getting hitched. Though residency isn't required for a civil union, it is to get out of one. That's a six months' stay in Vermont for at least one partner. But couples in the throes of marital bliss rarely bother to read the fine print...