THE COST OF COURAGE.

Support for Vermont's civil unions law costs five lawmakers their jobs

The civil unions law in Vermont has proved to be good news for gay and lesbian couples. It's also been bad news for Republicans who supported the measure. In the statewide primary held September 12, five months after the Vermont legislature passed the landmark bill awarding gay and lesbian couples the same rights as married ones, voters in the Green Mountain State got a chance to voice their opinion on the issue. It wasn't pretty. Close to a dozen state legislators who supported the historic measure were targeted by a conservative backlash campaign that called itself "Take Back Vermont." Five incumbent Republicans lost in their party's primary: state senator Peter Brownell and state representatives Robert Kinsey, John Edwards, William Fyfe, and Marion Milne. (One Democrat who opposed the bill, Forest Buckland, was also defeated.)

For Milne, the loss was particularly hard. Two years ago she swept her primary and earned the endorsement of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In this year's primary Milne earned just 18% of the vote, trailing far behind a former friend, Sylvia Kennedy, who won the Republican primary and a chance to face a Democratic opponent in November. Kennedy, who ran on a platform that stressed her anti-civil unions stance, criticized Milne for "voting her conscience" because civil unions, like all gay rights, she said, constitute "an immoral issue. It isn't a civil right."

"It's been a difficult summer," sighs Milne on the phone from her family-run travel agency. "I've always been a pretty independent voter," she says, still a little bewildered by the beating she took in the polls. "In the past that's what [my constituents] liked about me."

Milne says that while she knew voting for civil unions could cost her her seat in the legislature, she never realized how ugly her home state could get. She is loath to talk about the reported dip in clients for her travel agency and the slurs directed at herself and her family, including her 13-year-old grandson, who was on the trail canvassing for his grandmother. "I never had anybody tell me I wasn't welcome on their property before or call me names," she says. But despite a summer of brutal campaigning, Milne still says "a lot of wonderful things happened" as a result of her vote, such as receiving a slew of "beautiful letters" and even flowers on her doorstep. "I have no regrets about what I did," she says. "I felt I did the right thing, and I still am very proud of my vote. I knew when I voted--I said on the floor--there was the possibility I might lose my seat over this."

Wildman is a Washington, D.C.--based writer who has contributed to The Washington Post and The New Republic.