Green Mountain State Update
Making legal history
If confirmed, Vermont Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson would become the first openly LGBT judge to sit on a federal circuit court in the US, according to The National Law Journal. She’s already the first openly gay Supreme Court justice in the state.
President Biden nominated her to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in early August. In mid-September, Robinson made history once more as the first openly LGBTQ woman to receive a hearing by the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I’m quite sure that no one person in this room will agree with every position I’ve taken and every opinion I have written. But I hope that a thorough review of my record would support my own belief that I try in every case to be evenhanded with fidelity to the law and I try to bring rigorous legal analysis to the cases before me,” Robinson told the committee.
As the hearing began, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced her as “one of our nation’s most important pioneers in advancing LGBTQ rights,” and Vermont Congressman Patrick Leahy said, “She’s been hailed as a tireless champion for equal rights and equal justice in the mode of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s no exaggeration to say that Beth helped Vermont and America to fully realize the meaning of equality under the law.”
Magee elected city councilor
In a special election held in late August, Progressive party candidate Joe Magee, an openly queer man, was voted onto the Burlington city council. Magee received an impressive 47.1 percent of the vote. His two competitors came in with 39.4 (for the Independent, and Democratically backed, candidate Owen Milne) and 13.5 percent (for Republican Christopher-Aaron Felker).
“I’m feeling really good,” Magee told SevenDaysTV.com shortly after his win. “I know we ran a strong campaign. I think the results are a testament to the fact that we were out there from day one, talking about issues facing working families.”
Virtual fire truck pull
Due to its resounding success in 2020 despite the pandemic, Outright Vermont reprised its Virtual Fire Truck Pull fundraising drive in 2021.
This year, the goal is $120,000, with all proceeds going to support the nonprofit’s LGBTQ youth programs.
Traditionally, participants of the annual event compete to pull a fire truck as far as they can through Downtown Burlington. This year though, Outright Vermont’s taking the event online, like they did in 2020, with participants recording “creative interpretations” from wherever they like and then submitting their videos to be judged.
Last year, the virtual version of the fire truck pull was so popular it drew participants across the country!
More: outrightvt.org
‘Pride 1983’
The Vermont Folklife Center reopened in September with an exhibition co-presented by the Pride Center of Vermont. “Pride 1983” explores the origins and lasting legacy of Burlington, Vermont’s first Pride celebration on June 25, 1983.
This first Lesbian and Gay Pride March in Vermont took place 14 years after the Stonewall Uprising. From the very beginning the Pride events in Vermont were a celebration as well as a march. 350 people, many of them women, rallied in City Hall Park and marched through downtown Burlington — a memorable event that has taken place in either Burlington or Montpelier every year since.
Curated by Meg Tamulonis of the Vermont Queer Archives—a program of the Pride Center of Vermont—“Pride 1983” draws on archival materials from that collection as well as from UVM Special Collections, Out in the Open’s Andrews Inn Oral History Project, and the personal collections of those featured in the exhibition.
In addition, Tamulonis worked with the Vermont Folklife Center to conduct interviews with twelve activists and organizers crucial to the establishment of Pride in Burlington. The exhibit includes a series of stunning portrait photographs of these early pride founders taken by Brooklyn-based photographer and Bennington College alumnus, M. Sharkey.
The show runs through March 25, 2022.
More: vermontfolklifecenter.org
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