One by one they came before the microphone, in bulky sweaters, down vests, business suits, blue jeans, their voices quaking with anger or fear. It was wrong, they said, and they tried to give the word powerful meaning, as if speaking it with extra force would make it persuasive. It was just wrong. And what they felt in the gut, they confirmed in the mind with the word of God himself. There it was, Leviticus 19:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Abomination was a word they probably used in no other context, but for many of them the idea of a man lying with another man deserved its own term of opprobrium. They were not biblical scholars, these citizens of Vermont on this winter evening. They conceived of themselves as good Christians, and their ministers had shown them this passage from Leviticus. The language was plain. They felt it in the gut, and it was wrong.
It was a winter night in 2000 at the Vermont State House. The house and senate judiciary committees had called an extraordinary hearing to give the people a chance to speak on the issue of gay marriage. A blizzard set in that night, but about 1,500 people came anyway. Those whose names were drawn had two minutes before the microphone, speaking to the committee members, who had gathered around a long table in the well of the house. In December 1999 the Vermont Supreme Court had issued a ruling in the case of Baker v. the State of Vermont requiring the legislature to approve either gay marriage or some kind of legally sanctioned domestic partnership that would parallel marriage. The ruling had touched off a political, social, and cultural upheaval. That night at the statehouse supporters and opponents of gay marriage spoke in roughly equal numbers, and the language they used and the emotional tenor of their appeals showed the ways that what we often describe as a cultural divide—between Right and Left, religious and secular—represents a fundamental difference in how people look at and describe the world.