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KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, March 23, 2007
Prior to the turn of the 20th century, Wyoming was considered progressive. It earned the nickname the Equality State because it extended equal voting rights to women before any other state or the federal government even considered the idea.
More than a century later, the idea of Wyoming as a leader in civil rights has faded.
It was notable, then, when Wyoming state representative Dan Zwonitzer (R-South Cheyenne) made a speech during a committee meeting against a bill that would ban the recognition in Wyoming of gay marriages obtained elsewhere.
“I believe this is the civil rights struggle of my generation,” Zwonitzer, who is straight, said during the meeting (see page 44 for full text). In the brief speech, he emphasized the importance of promoting equal rights so future generations wouldn’t look back on lawmakers with dismay.
“In the argument on how you want your children to view you in 30 years, that hits home,” Zwonitzer, 27, tells the Blade. “I thought I’d do my part to kill [the bill] in committee before it got out.”
He was successful in that goal and the feedback from his fellow legislators was certainly unexpected.
“They all came up after the speech,” Zwonitzer says. “Even the ones that disagreed with me and voted for it said that they were happy that it died.”
VARIOUS GAY BLOGGERS, including Michael Petrelis and Pam Spaulding, picked up the story even before it became news through the Associated Press. Zwonitzer hadn’t intended to speak up during the meeting, but after hearing one of the bill’s proponents speak, decided he should.
“One of the proponents of the bill, very political and very Catholic, said he wanted to talk about human history for the last 7,000 years, what theology and religion and society’s been about,” Zwonitzer says. “He said some pretty infuriating things that a lot of people took offense with. When a couple of people starting nodding their heads in the committee, I thought, ‘Ooh, I better get up there, too.’”
For Zwonitzer, who studied history and government at Georgetown University, the proponent’s selective retelling of history was over the line.
“I thought I needed to offer some correction on his view as to how human history has gone,” Zwonitzer says. “Nobody, I think, on the committee, really wanted to deal with the bill. It’s a divisive issue. We were all just tired of them. A lot of people on the committee felt pressured to vote in favor of it, but they were looking for a reason not to.”
The reaction from local gay groups was, as expected, positive.
“We’ve known that he’s been supportive of us, but we didn’t know that he was going to be speaking publicly at the meeting,” says Bob Spencer, social change coordinator for Wyoming Equality. “We were very pleased that he did. Of course, we’re also concerned about his political future, but he seems to be a pretty astute politician and I think he did a very courageous and good thing.”
Zwonitzer mentioned in his speech that he realized standing up for equal rights for gays may cost him his seat. The concern over his future is intimately tied to the conservative nature of Wyoming.
“There’s a deeper root issue … and that is to prevent gays and lesbians to have any equal say or equal rights in what’s going on,” Spencer says. “We’re hopeful that we can keep this from becoming a major issue again. We definitely are not sitting back and saying this was a win for us. This was a postponement for us.”
WYOMING EQUALITY ONLY recently began to take on policy issues. Previously, the group was called United Gays and Lesbians of Wyoming and it functioned as more of a social group than a political body.
“It’s a very conservative state,” says Spencer, who has lived in Wyoming for
11 years. “I think marriage is a big issue for the conservative religious groups here in the state. I know that we have had a lot of discussion about hate crimes and bills to add a hate crimes law to the books, and that has not been a popular thing for people to talk about here.”
Zwonitzer counters that Wyoming isn’t as intolerant as some may consider it.
“I don’t see Wyoming as a bastion of social conservatives as other people in the country do,” Zwonitzer says. “People think Matthew Shepard and ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ We’re not intolerant.”
Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother and the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which has offices in Casper, Wyo., near where she grew up, agrees that the state isn’t an outlier in terms of intolerance.
“I think the perception is that Wyoming is more homophobic than most states because of what happened to Matthew,” Shepard wrote in an e-mail. Matthew Shepard was killed in a hate crime in Laramie, Wyo., in 1998. “It is a misguided assumption. Wyoming is neither more nor less homophobic. However, in terms of recognizing that gays are repeatedly denied their basic civil rights every day is a concept beyond the majority of current legislators.”
The politics of Wyoming conservatism, Zwonitzer says, are more of a traditional conservatism than the intense religious and social conservatism that one might find in southern states.
“In Wyoming and the other Rocky Mountain states, I’d say we’re almost kind of anti-government,” he says. “We resist that heavily — government [regulation of daily life.]”
Shepard disagrees with Zwonitzer’s view of Wyoming politics.
“I think he is part of a younger generation that thinks that way about Wyoming and the country as a whole — that things are not as socially conservative as they once were,” Shepard says. “I’m part of a generation that by and large is more socially conservative than his and unfortunately, we are still the majority in Wyoming.”
Zwonitzer, a fifth-generation Wyomingite, says he became more conscious of the needs for civil rights for gays during his four years at Georgetown, where he was friends with several gay students.
“I guess I really began to understand their struggle and the struggle of the gay population to get basic rights,” Zwonitzer says. “It’s not special rights, it’s just equal rights. I guess it really was the politics of the East that broadened my horizons. Hopefully, I brought that back to Wyoming and expanded our horizons back here.”
He’s served as a state legislator for two years but Zwonitzer says if presented with the opportunity, he’d be open to serving in a higher political office.
“I think I have the support here, but there are some conservative parts of the state that I would have some trouble with,” Zwonitzer says. “Things change over time, but we’ll see what happens.”
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