Out in the Mountains Domestic Partner Rights Continued from page I Frothingharn voting for it and Hallowell and Aswad against. Mayor Peter Clavelle has been consistent in his support. One of the consistently strongest support- ers of the proposal has been Councilor Maurice Mahoney who chaired the Per- sonnel Committee that drafted the lan- guage of the proposal and heard testimony fiom dozens of Burlington citizens prior to the historic vote of the whole Council. The decision by the City Council has gen- erated another focus of concern, that of lo- cal religious communities and members of the clergy. The Reverend Charles P. Da- vignon, Director of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, issued a news re- lease stating the position of the Roman Catholic Church with a reference to “so- called domestic partners....It saddens us to see the traditional definition of the family devalued and eroded. Our society is al- ready suffering the effects of the under- mining of the family system and such pol- icies only encourage further abuse.” Reverend Gary Kowalski, minister of the Unitarian Society in Burlington, has per- fonned many union marriage services, ser- vices to which the Very Reverend Dan Riggall of St. Paul’s Cathedral makes ref- erence as “Blessing the union of homo- sexual people.” Kowalski maintains that the Burlington City Council would never have had to endure the divisive debates which occurred for several months if the State of Vermont “provided a legal way for people to live together; then churches or synagogues could decide if they want to recognize that or not.” The Unitarian min- ister maintains that “marriage is a legal status. The religious component is separ- ate.” He believes that were marriage op- tions available to all adults in the State that “the theological chips would fall as they may and thereby prevent the dilemma the City Council had.” ' Rabbi Joshua Chasan of the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue in Burlington testified twice before the Personnel Committee sup- porting the proposal and maintained that the City could not deny rights to domestic partners when the State denied the rights of marriage to some of those same people. The Conservative Jewish professional or- ganization to which Rabbi Chasan belongs has confronted the issue of homosexuality with a range of views including “some with positions of courage” and has sub- sequently taken the position that each Conservative rabbi is free to formulate his own views with the exception of being able to marry a homosexual couple. “Sim- ilarly, I cannot officiate at a marriage of a Jew to a non-Jew.” Rabbi Chasan has been personally chal- lenged by issues related to homosexual persons as a result of a life-long friendship with a gay man with whom he lost contact for a few years. “When I met him again and he had ‘come out,’ he was the same person I had known all these years. Only now he came to visit my wife and me with his partner. Up to that point I’d not been able to sort through my attitudes to- ward homosexuals. I was probably as much a victim of what Norman Mailer was putting out as I was open. My thought and feelings were all trans- formed. The whole question of not of- ficiating at a union marriage never came up for me until my professional organiza- tion determined what wasn’t appropriate. I, along with many of my colleagues, am doing a whole lot of thinking about it.” On the other hand, Rabbi James Glazier of Temple Sinai Reform has not given much thought to the domestic partners is- sues, claiming that as a South Burlington resident the issue has not been important for him to consider. He does not perfonn union marriages although as a Refonn rabbi he could do so. “I know only one or two Reform rabbis who do perfonn those ceremonies out of the approximately 1500 in the country.” Glazier maintains there is little information available to him about the religious views pertaining to homosexual marriages and that he has not yet formulated any specific positions about the issue. ‘”I‘he world is moving fast. Sometimes we are faced with issues we haven’t crystalized in our minds. I need to probe the subject more deeply." 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