Features
Ahead of the Game
Community Compass
VFMTF Field Director Robyn Maguire
Elevates the Conversation
by Euan Bear
"We did everything backwards," laughs Robyn Maguire, recounting how she came to Vermont just three months ago. "First we bought our house, and then we looked for work." The "we" is Robyn and her partner Naomi Freedner, who has been winding things up in Massachusetts before finally reuniting their lives in Winooski.
And fortunately, Maguire didn't have to look very far for work, finding the timing just right for her to take on leadership of a re-activated campaign for marriage equality with the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force. She is also working part time for the Vermont Council on Domestic Violence. Those two areas mesh well with her background: she's been working with the Massachusetts Freedom to Marry Coalition as its director of field development and training since before the Goodrich decision, and prior to that, spent two years at Elizabeth Stone House, a women's shelter.
Her accent doesn't show the years she spent growing up in Pasadena, Texas, whose claim to fame is "Gillie's," the bar where Urban Cowboy was filmed. Maybe that's because her parents moved to Texas from Worcester, MA for work. After graduating from the University of Texas in Houston with a degree in journalism and public relations, she made her way back to Massachusetts and extended family.
When the Vermont legislature passed its civil union law in 2000, "I wanted to move here then!" And five years later she's here. Much of the work she did in Massachusetts, she says, was based on learning about Vermont's campaign for marriage and then to retain the compromise of civil union. "I can't imagine just how hard it was to be breaking new ground, to be having a dialogue no one was used to having," Robyn adds, sitting in the OITM office.
"But now it's five years later. People know our faces. They can't demonize our families in the way they did then. People know what same-sex couples look like, that we care about our communities," she continues. "That places us in a much better position."
The fact that Vermonters have been through the process of discussing civil unions and facing and expressing their fears – no matter how painful that process was – puts us "ahead of the game."
The job now, she says, is to "elevate the conversation here in Vermont, to really talk about marriage." She acknowledges a diversity of opinion in the gay and lesbian community about marriage. The real point is not whether every couple would choose marriage, but whether it’s available as a choice, in the same way it is for straight couples.
"It's not just about the word marriage, but a whole sweeping range of benefits and rights. It is only fair for us to be recognized in all these matters."
Robyn and Naomi might know something about that. They just got married on June 25 in Massachusetts, a "shotgun wedding" of sorts. That is, they realized that once they moved to Vermont, they would not be able to marry within the United States – at least until the Cote-Whitacre v Department of Health lawsuit is resolved. That lawsuit involves eight couples from outside Massachusetts who were either denied licenses to marry there or whose marriages were ruled invalid because of a 1913 law called the "Reverse Evasion Act."
"When Naomi and I decided to move to Vermont and began thinking about a family, we realized we would have to get married before we left. There were all these milestones in our relationship that were being compressed. I actually felt some resentment at having to make that decision and squeeze that into a three-month period. [Without the move,] we would've waited another year and a half to get married," Robyn explains.
That's a very personal example of "discrimination dictating what we could and could not do." The government should get out of the business of discrimination, she declares, the passion she feels about the issue unmistakable in her voice and body language.
"At a speakers training for the Freedom to Marry Coalition I met Ralph and Paul, who had been together 48 years. Ralph's family didn't quite ever accept them as a couple. Now that they were aging, Paul told me, he wanted to share their story publicly because without marriage, he wasn't sure he would have the right to claim Ralph's body at a hospital." She shakes her head in amazement at the many small and large and intimate ways that marital status affects our lives.
"I am extremely committed to this work. How marriage discrimination affects our families is very harmful.
"I want us to win."