Democratic and Republican political leaders have universally condemned the killing of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But President Donald Trump lashed out at Democrats and other political opponents, charging without evidence that their “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.” Trump and other top officials are now promising a broad crackdown on the free speech of his opponents.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she would “absolutely target” protesters engaging in what she called “hate speech.”

Critics, including many conservatives, have noted that the first amendment right to speech does not include an exception for “hate speech” and that it would be unconstitutional to target people for their overheated rhetoric.

“So-called ‘hate speech’ is free speech,” asserted Aaron Terr in an essay for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where he is director of public advocacy. FIRE is a national group that advocates for and defends free speech.

“The ever looming threat is that when people are in power, they always are going to have this motivation to crack down on speech that threatens their hold on power, that opposes their policies and their views,” Terr told The Vermont Conversation.

“I'm worried that (Trump) is setting the stage for a broader government crackdown on speech on the administration's political opponents and that will really only make the situation worse,” said Terr. “The remedy that our First Amendment envisions for speech that we find potentially harmful is not to suppress it. It's not to silence the speaker, but to push back against it, to call it out, to counter it with better ideas.”

Notably missing from Trump’s broadsides are actual examples of leading Democrats or liberal organizations “celebrating” Kirk’s murder.

The baseless argument that Democrats and “the Left” are responsible for a violent conspiracy against the country obscures the reality that the overwhelming source of political violence in the U.S. comes from the far right. A study examining terrorism in the U.S. in recent years showed that violent far-right extremists have been responsible for 87% of the terrorism fatalities in the United States and 69% of the attacks.

In a political environment in which the president characterizes his opponents as "evil" and "scum," violence has become normalized. FIRE recently published the results of a survey of college students that revealed that in 2020, about 1 in 5 students said it was "ever acceptable to use violence" to stop a speaker. That number has since risen to 1 in 3 students, a 50% increase in the level of support for political violence among college students over the last 5 years.

“Free speech isn't a conservative or liberal value. It's a constitutional value. It's a check on power," Terr said. "We need the First Amendment because power brings with it the temptation to silence dissent. That's human nature. And the beauty of free speech is it ensures that no single person or administration can declare by fiat what's true or false, what's right or wrong and make it illegal to disagree. And wherever you fall politically, you have a stake in being free from that kind of authoritarian control. My biggest worry is that people are just losing faith in the importance of free speech.”

As President Trump’s immigration crackdown intensifies, many immigrants who have lived, worked and paid taxes in the United States for years are getting snatched by masked agents and disappeared into a vast network of jails across the country.

In Vermont, a small but growing group of young attorneys have thrown themselves into the fight to defend the immigrants’ rights. Newly minted lawyers, including recent graduates of Vermont Law and Graduate School, are now going head to head with lawyers from Trump’s Justice Department.

The attorneys have been going into Vermont’s jails and encountering terrified immigrants, many of whom are being repeatedly shuffled between states in what appears to be a deliberate effort to frustrate their attempts to obtain effective legal representation. Some detainees do not even know where they are. 

Vermont Asylum Assistance Project  (VAAP), headed by immigration attorney Jill Martin Diaz, has been a driving force behind the effort to mobilize lawyers and defend immigrants. VAAP has grown from one staff member in 2024 to what will be a staff of eight by November, including four new attorneys who are part of the national Immigrant Justice Corps. VAAP recently received a $100,000 grant from the recently established Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund to hire staff, bring in attorneys and train Vermont lawyers to handle immigration cases.

Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid. They currently are a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40.

I visited VAAP’s headquarters in Burlington, where I interviewed Martin Diaz, staff attorney Leah Brenner and volunteer staff attorney Andy Pelcher.

“I'm looking around at our office that's not even unpacked and we barely have lights and WiFi. How are we holding our own against Trump's Department of Justice that just got a big, beautiful raise?” marveled Martin Diaz, who described fighting the Trump administration as akin to David vs. Goliath.

Martin Diaz said that immigrants are “canaries in the coal mine.”

“People are really starting to look at what's going on in the immigration system as a microcosm for what could happen to our democracy if left unchecked, not just for noncitizens, but for everyone.”

Pelcher, who graduated Vermont Law and Graduate School in 2018 and went on to get an LLM, or master of laws, described a recent visit to Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, where he encountered a Palestinian man who was a survivor of torture who “had been bounced around to a number of facilities during the 14 months that he had been detained.” Somehow he landed in a Vermont jail. 

“People are being frequently transferred from facility to facility, seemingly as a means to deny access to counsel, family, local networks of support, and any other means by which these individuals can meaningfully prepare for their defense against removal,” said Pelcher. VAAP, together with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, took on the man’s case.

VAAP’s experience finding and aiding immigrants in Vermont’s jails has led Martin Diaz to oppose the idea of closing Vermont’s jails to ICE. “I would not advocate for more beds, but I would also strongly caution against a wholesale end to ICE's ability to detain people in our state,” they said. “The truth is that there is no substitute for lawyers getting in their cars, going to a facility with our bodies and meeting one on one in private with our clients directly.”

“It's really, really difficult to provide people with legal help telephonically, when the people who have your clients in custody have no respect for the rule of law and for individuals rights.”

Is America’s legal system up to the task of defending rights and institutions in the Trump era?

“I do have hope that the rule of law will prevail and that this horrible, horrible, tragic moment in our history, this painful moment for our community members who are being directly impacted, can also be a galvanizing opportunity for us to rethink what do we want our laws to say? What do we want due process to look like? What checks and balances do we want?” said Martin Diaz.

The Centers for Disease Control, the nation’s top public health agency, is in chaos following the firing of its director by President Donald Trump and the resignations of its top leaders last week. Nine former CDC directors wrote in the New York Times this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who spearhead the purge of the CDC and is a longtime leader of the anti-vaccine movement, is “endangering every American’s health.”

States are increasingly spurning Kennedy and taking health matters into their own hands. Northeastern states, including Vermont, have formed a regional health coalition in response to concerns about federal vaccine guidance. The governors of California, Washington and Oregon declared this week said that the CDC has become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science … that will lead to severe health consequences.” The three western states are banding together to coordinate their own vaccine policy.

Meanwhile, the state of Florida has just announced that it will become the first state to do away with all childhood vaccine mandates, eliciting strong objections from public health experts.

Can Vermont trust the health advice coming out of the federal government? What are the leading threats to public health confronting the state and country?

“It pains me to say, I don't know that you want to trust the CDC,” said Dr. Becca Bell on The Vermont Conversation. Bell is associate professor of pediatrics at the Larner College of Medicine and a pediatric critical care physician at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital. She is the immediate past president of the Vermont Medical Society and of the Vermont Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Bell noted that she is speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of the organizations with which she is affiliated).

Bell said that “the officials that have left the (CDC) have really raised the alarm that … we shouldn't trust what's coming out of the CDC in terms of some immunization guidance in particular.”

She encouraged families to look to other sources for accurate information, especially the parenting website of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 67,000 pediatricians. She also recommended the Vermont Department of Health and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Then I ask families to talk to their own child's doctor, because that's going to be a great source as well.” 

Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, announced in May that the CDC would no longer recommend a COVID shot for healthy children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued contrary guidance, recommending a COVID shot for all children under the age of 2 since they are “especially vulnerable to severe COVID-19.”

Bell credited Vermont with being proactive “about how we can keep Vermonters safe," but added, “I feel really sad for the future of this country's child's health, because I think that we're going to see a lot of disparities, not just with access to vaccination but access to health care in general, with the big Medicaid cuts that are coming up as well.”

Bell warned that Medicaid cuts, which will result in some 45,000 Vermonters losing health insurance, will fall hardest on children. One third of Medicaid enrollees in Vermont are children.

“What we're about to see with that One Big Beautiful Bill Act (is) a huge transfer of resources from low income folks to the highest earners in this country,” said Bell. “Accessible, affordable health care is what kids need to succeed and for families to succeed, and so we are deeply concerned about the future of pediatric health care because our foundation is Medicaid. This is how we care for kids. It's what supports our clinics.”

“The lack of investment in children is just really concerning and very short sighted.”

Bill McKibben is one of the world’s leading writers and organizers on the issue of climate change. He admits that his message about the perils of a warming planet can leave some people in despair. Now, with the U.S. at an authoritarian tipping point, McKibben has chosen an improbable time to offer hope.

McKibben has a new book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” He takes readers on a far-flung journey to show how solar and wind energy have suddenly become the cheapest power in the world. People are installing solar panels equivalent to a coal-fired power plant every 18 hours. This is the fastest energy transition in history — and it may just help save democracy.

“There is one big good thing happening on planet Earth and it's so big and so good that it actually has the capacity to help not only with the overwhelming climate crisis, but also with the crisis of inequality and of democracy that we're facing now,” McKibben told The Vermont Conversation. “That one big thing is this sudden surge of clean energy, especially from the sun, that over the last 36 months, has begun to really rewrite what power means on planet Earth.”

McKibben explained that what used to be called “alternative energy” is now mainstream. “Four years ago or so we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning things. And that's a completely epochal moment. Most days, California is generating more than 100% of its power for long stretches from renewable energy.”

“Here's a statistic just to stick in your mind that will give you hope, too,” he offered. “A single boatload of solar panels coming from someplace like China will, over the course of its lifetime, produce 500 times as much energy as that same ship filled with coal. We're not talking about a slightly better version of what we have now. We're talking about a very different world.”

McKibben is currently spearheading Sun Day, which will take place on Sept. 21, 2025. It will be a global day of action celebrating solar and wind power and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind.

“Think about what the foreign policy, the geopolitics of planet Earth would have looked like in the last 70 years if oil was not a valuable commodity,” he said. “Human beings are extremely good at figuring out how to start wars, but figuring out how to start one over sunshine is going to be a trick.”

Vermont is already feeling the impact of this energy shift. “The biggest single power plant in Vermont is now the collection of batteries that Green Mountain Power has helped people put in their basements and garages and that they can call on in time of need to provide power,” he said

Bill McKibben is the author of over 20 books and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He has won the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize.

Alongside his writing, the Ripton resident has founded the global grassroots climate action group 350.org, and Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization now boasts some 70,000 members.

As the country and world teeter on a precipice, what gives McKibben hope?

“Just that we're still here and fighting and that we have this new tool. It's like a Hollywood movie: the bad stuff is happening all around us and here's this new force riding to the rescue over the hills carrying not carbines and repeater rifles but carrying solar panels and lithium ion batteries.”

As President Trump orders federal troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to “do whatever the hell they want” to stop crime, Sen. Peter Welch is traveling across Vermont to share what he insists is the real news that Trump is trying to divert attention from.

Welch has tallied the impact of President Trump’s economic policies and determined that they will cost families in Vermont an average of $2,120 each year. He says that 99.5% of all Vermont families will lose money as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his budget reconciliation bill, which the Senate narrowly passed in early July after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote.

The Vermont Conversation caught up with Welch at Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero, where Welch held a listening session attended by about 150 people.

Welch conceded that even he is “shocked” by the devastating impact of what he calls the “big ugly bill.” His office released a list of those impacts, including:

As many as 45,000 Vermonters will lose health care

As much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue for Vermont hospitals

Over 26,000 Vermonters will lose access to discounted premiums on the Affordable Care Act marketplace

6,000 Vermonters are at risk of losing SNAP assistance

Annual energy bills for Vermonters will rise by $290

The state will lose 1,400 jobs by ending green energy projects

Mortgage payments will rise by $1,060 annually

78,000 Vermonters with student loans will pay $3,694 more over the course of their loans

These cuts will shred the country’s social safety net, undoing social programs that date back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“There (were) a lot of lies that were peddled by the administration and frankly by many of my Republican colleagues about how great the bill was," Welch said, while "ignoring the concrete reality” of how it will hurt the people they represent. Welch said Trump’s budget will add about $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit.

In a rare criticism of Governor Phil Scott, Welch slammed the governor’s recent decision to provide the Trump administration sensitive data on thousands of Vermonters who receive nutrition assistance. “We should not be providing the private information of our citizens to the federal government,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “We should be protecting the privacy of Vermont citizens.”

All together, Welch said Trump’s actions are part and parcel of an authoritarian push. He accused the president of employing a “dual standard” around crime in the nation’s capital. “You had a riot that was inspired and incited by President Trump and those folks who were intent on doing real violence and hurt many of these law enforcement officers have been pardoned by the president.” Welch was in Congress hiding from mobs of Trump supporters who rampaged through the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Abroad, Sen. Welch was also sharply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 soldiers and civilians, Israel has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, detained about 3,000 people — none of whom have been charged with a crime — and waged a campaign of starvation against a desperate population. In response, Welch has called for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and a cutoff of sales of offensive weapons to Israel.

“Being against starvation is not at all being against the endurance of the democratic Jewish state of Israel. It's about being against starvation and that starvation being inflicted by the authority of the state.”

American democracy is “fragile," Welch said.

From the moment that Wilmer Chavarria was pulled out of line by immigration agents at an airport in Houston on July 21, he sensed that he was a marked man.

Chavarria is the superintendent of schools in Winooski. He was returning with his husband from Nicaragua where they were visiting family — a trip they take every summer. Chavarria grew up in Nicaragua, then received scholarships to attend high school in Canada and Earlham College in the U.S. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018, after marrying his college sweetheart, an American citizen.

Without explanation, a federal agent pulled Chavarria out of line at the Houston airport and ordered him into a windowless room. He was separated from his husband and subjected to five hours of interrogation, an experience that he described as “psychological terror.” Agents demanded the passwords to his computers and phones, and he initially refused, since he had his school-issued laptop with student information that is protected by federal student privacy laws. He finally relented after being threatened by the agents.

“You have no rights here,” Chavarria says the agents told him.

Chavarria’s story has made national news. But often overlooked is why Chavarria believes he was singled out.

“I was flagged and put on some sort of list before I even arrived at that airport,” Chavarria told The Vermont Conversation. “When was it that my profile was flagged? And the even better question, why?”

Chavarria has been an outspoken defender of the rights of immigrants, who comprise a large part of the student body in Winooski schools. In February, he led an effort to make Winooski the only sanctuary school district in Vermont.

In April, he publicly refused to sign a certification demanded by the Trump administration that his school not promote diversity, equity and inclusion. When Vermont’s agency of education asked schools to comply, Chavarria responded that the state should “grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”

Winooski is Vermont’s most diverse school district, with a majority of families living under the federal poverty line and dozens of languages spoken in the schools. Nearly 800 students attend the Winooski school, which is home to pre-K through high school.

Chavarria said that the effect of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is “instilling fear and making people afraid to just coming to school because they don't want to be separated from their children."

The line the administration is taking is clear to Chavarria: immigrants don't belong here. "Only one type of people, only one type of language, only one type of race, only one type of culture is considered American. Everything else does not belong," Chavarria said. “They want us to feel like we will never be accepted here, and that if we can leave, then we should leave.”

Chavarria said that his experience of being targeted by federal agents was terrifying because it clarified that even U.S. citizen's are not protected.

“This is not North Korea taking you into an interrogation room and doing all that to you. This is your own U.S. government that's supposed to be there to protect you.”

Chavarria noted that he and his family fled a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s. “The fact that I'm terrified what the government is doing to U.S. citizens right now should speak volumes.”

He said that constantly having to defend himself and other immigrants, whether to fellow Vermonters or to federal agents, has left him “exhausted” but committed.

“Vermont is a good state and the majority of people in Vermont are good people but … that's not enough," Chavarrias said. "The times call for more than just being a good person. The times call for more than just being proud of our reputation of being a good brave state. ... The times call for action.”

“Eighty years ago this week,” writes Vermont journalist Garrett Graff, “a group of physicists and military leaders changed warfare — and the world — forever.”

August 6 marks the 80th anniversary of the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which was followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. These two bombings are estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.

Graff recounts the scientific and political backstory of the dawn of the nuclear age in his latest book, “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.” This exhaustive work includes testimonies from 500 people who “tell the intertwined story of nuclear physics, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the arrival and advance of World War II in the Pacific, and the tremendous effort of the Manhattan Project to deliver two atomic bombs that helped end the war, as well as the haunting on-the-ground stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves,” writes Graff.

Graff says that the story of what gave rise to the nuclear age is “as important now as ever,” as countries around the world, such as Iran, are racing to start or expand their nuclear arsenals.

“The world actually stands much closer to the edge of nuclear danger than we have for most of the 80 years since the end of World War II,” Graff told The Vermont Conversation. “This year has already seen two major world conflicts set against nuclear tensions. We've seen open warfare between India and Pakistan already this spring, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict in world history. And we also saw, of course, the US and Israeli strikes against the Iranian nuclear program.”

“There's a possibility, ironically, 15 years after Barack Obama tried to set us on a path toward nuclear abolition, where in the 2020s and 2030s we may actually see more countries join the nuclear club than have ever existed before.”

Garrett Graff describes himself as a historian whose work is often filed under current events. He writes about inflection points in history with an eye towards how they impact the present and future. This includes his 2024 book, “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” and his 2022 book, “Watergate: A New History,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He is also the editor of an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont that was published earlier this year by the Vermont Historical Society.

Graff has had a busy 2025. This spring, his 7-part podcast series dropped, “Breaking the Internet.” In it, he explores how a tool that promised to bring people together has instead driven them apart and has fueled authoritarian movements. This is the fourth season of Long Shadow, Graff’s award-winning history podcast.

Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.

Graff said that as the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, “We are witnessing an unraveling of our small-d democratic traditions in the United States and sort of backsliding in our democracy and the creeping approach of authoritarianism.”

“It doesn't feel [like] a coincidence to me that we are watching this backsliding in our democracy at the precise moment 80 years later where we are losing the last members of the Greatest Generation,” those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. 

“There is no preordained rule that America remains a democracy," Graff said. "And there's no preordained rule that we remain an economic hegemon. We let both of those things disappear at our own societal and national peril.”

Vermonters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution in 2022. But what if those rights – to abortion, birth control and other reproductive health services – are nearly impossible to access?

Putting care out of reach appears to be the strategy behind the Trump administration’s relentless assault on Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care. President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that he signed into law on July 4 includes a provision to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions. A federal judge has temporarily blocked this provision, but if the Trump administration prevails, Planned Parenthood says that numerous health care centers may close, mostly in states where abortion remains legal.

This compounds a problem in Vermont, since half of Planned Parenthood’s clinics in the state have closed in the last three years due to an ongoing financial crisis with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE).

Medicaid already bans funding for abortions. Most of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid patients who obtain family planning services receive birth control and STI testing. One in four Planned Parenthood patients in Vermont and Maine are insured by Medicaid, and one in five in New Hampshire.

“The absurdity of all of this is just so transparent,” Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, told The Vermont Conversation. “We have long-lasting relationships with our patients. We could be their main provider for years … and to suddenly be told, ‘Sorry, you can't go to that provider anymore because they also provide abortion care’ — that's what's happening here. That's the goal.”

Clegg emphasized that “the overwhelming majority of what we're providing to patients are disease testing and treatment, cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control. Those are the primary needs that people have during their reproductive years.”

Abortion opponents are “no longer interested in the states where they've been successful in banning abortion. They're now really focused on the states where abortion is still legal, so that includes Vermont, and what they're trying to do is go after providers. So that's the new tactic,” Clegg said.

She noted that people seeking an abortion in states where it is banned are increasingly coming to New England for care. She told the story of a couple seeking an abortion who drove from Oklahoma to Vermont “because they felt like that was going to be the safest option for them.”

“We live in an area of the country where we are a little bit insulated from this fear, but this fear is very real.”

What is motivating the attacks?

“It's about abortion. It's about controlling people and their ability to make decisions and decide when to have a family,” Clegg replied.

A 2024 Pew survey found that two out of three Americans – and 79% of Vermonters – believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

“We needed to sort of wake people up by having them lose these basic rights. That's where we are right now.”

One in three women have received care from Planned Parenthood in their lifetime, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

“There's just no other healthcare provider in our country that has that kind of reach and impact,” Clegg said.

I asked Clegg what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like. She cited research on what has happened in areas where a Planned Parenthood health center has closed.

“Worse pregnancy outcomes. Increased rates of cancer. Increased rates of unintended pregnancy. Untreated sexually transmitted diseases. Increased rates of HIV and AIDS.”

Will Planned Parenthood survive?

Clegg noted that this year marks Planned Parenthood’s 60th anniversary. “We have touched the lives of more than a million people” in northern New England, she said. 

“I fundamentally believe we will get through this because people support us. People want to come to us for care. We are embedded in our states and a part of our community in deep ways. We matter too much for our states and our communities to just accept that we would close our doors.”

What explains the fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base, even when he enacts laws that hurt them?

Arlie Russell Hochschild has searched for answers in the heart of Trump country. She is one of America’s most thoughtful writers about right wing movements, whose insights are informed by her deep relationships with people on the right. 

Hochschild is a renowned professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” is based on her work in eastern Kentucky, where she spent seven years exploring one of the poorest and whitest areas in the country. Her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, which recently published her essay, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.”

Hochschild says that communities that have been ravaged by poverty, disinvestment and the opioid epidemic have suffered a deep loss of pride. Trump provides an appealing narrative by telling people that their pride has been stolen from them by undeserving immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans, to name a few. Trump promises revenge for this stolen pride.

Arlie Hochschild spoke to me this week from her home in Maine. 

This week marks the 25th anniversary of civil unions, which were the most sweeping grant of rights to gay couples in the nation when they became law on July 1, 2000.

Civil unions grew out of a lawsuit filed by three gay and lesbian couples who had been denied marriage licenses in Vermont. The lawsuit was known as Baker v. Vermont. In December 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to craft a law that would satisfy the ruling, either by legalizing same-sex marriage or by creating an equivalent partnership structure. 

Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy wrote that the decision, “is simply a recognition of our common humanity.” 

It would take until 2009 for Vermont to legalize same-sex marriage. 

To mark the milestone, I spoke with four of the key participants behind civil unions. Stacy Jolles and Nina Beck were two of the six plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont. Chief Justice Amestoy wrote the decision. Gov. Howard Dean signed civil unions into law. (Rep. Bill Lippert recounted how the Vermont legislature passed the historic law on The Vermont Conversation in an interview in April.)