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The Dartmouth
July 25, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Panelists criticize gay marriage bans

Several professors and scholars discussed same-sex marriage on Wednesday during a panel discussion held in Dartmouth Hall.
Several professors and scholars discussed same-sex marriage on Wednesday during a panel discussion held in Dartmouth Hall.
Correction appended

Laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are being inappropriately used to enforce cultural norms regarding sexual conduct, several professors and scholars said during a panel discussion held in Dartmouth Hall on Wednesday. The panel, which sought to address the cultural and political context of same-sex marriage, came just two hours after the New Hampshire Senate passed a bill to legalize same-sex marriage.

The panel featured scholars from the University of Vermont and Vermont Law School, and was the second event in a series hosted by the College for national Law Week. All members of the panel said they supported legalizing same-sex marriage.

The law should not define people solely through the lens of their sexual practices, but instead in terms of their individual identities, several panelists said. The current laws against same-sex marriage are an attempt to preserve traditional social norms, these panelists said.

"As the legislative history shows, the phrase 'defense of marriage' is nothing more than a defense of heterosexuality," Vermont Law School professor and panelist Jackie Gardina said. "When government regulates marriage, it is regulating sexuality."

Vermont Law School professor and panelist Greg Johnson compared the controversy surrounding same-sex marriage to the United States' laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the 1940s.

"Courts firmly believed that interracial marriage was unnatural and against God's plan," he said. "But those bans were so much more than race. They spoke to the generations about the concept of marriage."

Proponents of same-sex marriage can use these parallels to advance their arguments, Johnson said.

"We can use those cases to show that the arguments that were rejected then can be rejected now," Johnson said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "For precedent's sake, there's value to use those cases."

Laws regulating marriage have historically been used to advance society's conception of the appropriate family unit, several panelists said.

"Arguments about racial integrity were of course appropriation arguments, and there are different appropriation arguments being made today [about same-sex marriage]," Johnson said.

The legalization of same-sex marriage would not be as controversial if social roles were not gendered, Brian Joseph Gilley, University of Vermont anthropology professor and panelist, said in his analysis of the way society defines marriage. Gilley focused on how this definition has pertained to American Indians.

"Tradition is at the root of this misunderstanding," Gilley said. "Marriage became a differentiated social element. It became the subject of social institutions and begins to get legislated."

Three states, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa, currently permit same-sex marriages. The Vermont legislature overrode Republican Gov. Jim Douglas' veto of legislation legalizing same-sex marriage on April 7, approving legislation that will take effect on Jan. 1, 2010.

Although New Hampshire legalized same-sex marriage through the legislative process, most states that have legalized same-sex marriage have done so through the judiciary, Gardina said.

"There's hardly a national consensus regarding the status of same-sex marriage," she said.

Gardina pointed to the March 3 lawsuit filed by the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders organization against the Defense of Marriage Act as a potential landmark case. Gardina predicted that the lawsuit, in which GLAD contends that the Defense of Marriage Act violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, will reach the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.

She added that President Barack Obama advocates the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.

The panel was sponsored by the Dartmouth Lawyer's Association, Dartmouth GLBT Alumni/ae Association and the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, among other organizations.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that all panelists came from the University of Vermont. In fact, Jackie Gardina and Greg Johnson are both professors at Vermont Law School, while Brian Joseph Gilley is a professor at UVM.