Baker v. Vermont
| Baker v. State of Vermont | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Court | Vermont Supreme Court |
| Full case name | Stan Baker, et al v. State of Vermont, et al |
| Decided | December 20, 1999 |
| Citation(s) | 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999) |
| Case history | |
| Prior action(s) | Claim dismissed |
| Subsequent action(s) | Creation of Same-sex Civil Unions |
| Court membership | |
| Chief Judge | Jeffrey L. Amestoy |
| Associate Judges | John A. Dooley, James L. Morse, Marilyn S. Skoglund, Denise R. Johnson |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Amestoy joined by Morse, Skoglund |
| Concurrence | Dooley |
| Concur/dissent | Johnson |
Baker v. Vermont, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), was a lawsuit decided by Vermont Supreme Court on December 20, 1999. It was one of the first judicial affirmations of the right of same-sex couples to treatment equivalent to that afforded different-sex couples. The decision held that the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage denied rights granted by the Vermont Constitution. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to either allow same-sex marriages or implement an alternative legal mechanism according similar rights to same-sex couples.
Following their initial success in Hawaii in 1996 that was later undone by a popular referendum in 1998, advocates for same-sex marriage selected Vermont for their lawsuit on the basis of the state's record of establishing rights for gays and lesbians as well as the difficulty of amending its constitution.
Vermont enacted hate crimes legislation in 1990, one of the first states to do so. From the time the legislation that became the Hate Crimes Act was introduced in 1989, it included sexual orientation. Most of the testimony and statistics that supported the legislation related to the gay and lesbian community and one incident of anti-gay violence helped secure its passage. It added sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination statute, the Human Rights Law, in 1992. In 1993, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the case In re B.L.V.B. that a woman could adopt her lesbian partner's natural children. The statute provided that an adoption terminates the rights of natural parents, unless the person adopting is the spouse of the child's natural parent. The Court decided that the statute did not intend to restrict adoption to legal spouses only, that safeguarding the child was its "general intent and spirit", and that adoption by a second woman was therefore permissible. In 1995, in the course of reforming the state's adoption statute, a Senate committee first removed language allowing unmarried couples, whatever their sex, to adopt, but after months of work the legislature passed a version that made same-sex couples eligible to adopt.
On July 22, 1997, three same-sex couples, who had been denied marriage licenses in the towns of Milton and Shelburne and the city of South Burlington, sued those jurisdictions and the state. They were Stan Baker and Peter Harrigan, Holly Puterbaugh and Lois Farnham, and Nina Beck and Stacy Jolles. Two of the couples had raised children together. The couples sued their respective localities and the state of Vermont, requesting a declaratory judgment that the denial of licenses violated Vermont's marriage statutes and the state Constitution. The plaintiffs were represented by Mary Bonauto, an attorney with Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and two Vermont attorneys, Susan Murray and Beth Robinson.
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