Outing The Wildflower Inn

Outing The Wildflower Inn
By Alan Sears
8/18/2011

I haven’t been to the Wildflower Inn in Lyndonville, VT, but it sounds like a beautiful place. A glimpse at their website shows a near-definitive New England setting of clapboard buildings with panoramic views of rolling, tree-covered hills and blossoming meadows.

And families. Wildflower Inn was voted Best Family Resort by Yankee magazine last year, and the word “family” pops up repeatedly on the website and in the Inn’s brochures. Clearly, that’s the favored clientele, although the Inn’s owners allow that their place is also ideal for romantic weekends. The Inn used to offer its facilities for weddings, too.

Not anymore. That aspect of Wildflower hospitality ended several months before a young couple filed a lawsuit against the Inn. According to the complaint, an employee refused the mother of the bride’s request to hold the wedding reception at the Inn, once she revealed that there were two brides and no groom.

The women’s motive for the lawsuit seems, shall we say, mixed. On the one hand, the two New Yorkers insist that they both just love Vermont, travel there often, and saw the Wildflower Inn as the perfect embodiment of what they enjoy about the state. But they also say that the courage of other same-sex couples who’ve braved the courts to secure and defend the right to practice homosexual behavior anywhere, anytime, inspires them to take a similar brave stand for the cause.

One can’t really help but wonder who the courageous ones are here – a same-sex couple who’ve managed to trap one of the most popular resorts in the state into an expensive lawsuit, at a time when homosexual behavior is surfing huge waves of legal, social, and cultural indulgence … or the Wildflower owners, who—according to the complaint—operate their family’s business in line with their personal moral convictions.

Moral convictions! One can hear the outrage now, from the activists pressing the homosexual agenda. What’s moral about refusing service to two people in love? Would the owners of the Wildflower Inn be just as justified in turning away blacks? In refusing a reception for a mixed-race couple?

No. For one thing, homosexual behavior, unlike race, is a choice. And there’s nothing intrinsically threatening to the families Wilflower caters to in being black, or of any other ethnic origin. Same-sex “marriage,” on the other hand, like any other open practice of homosexual behavior, undermines the basis of family relationships.

Says who? The Bible, for one, and the thousands of years of civilized behavior based on the biblical delineations (and the common sense conclusions of other cultures) of what’s morally right and acceptable and healthy for families and society. The Vermont legislature may have finally decided that same-sex “marriage” is a-okay, but the Bible and the history of Western Civilization still trump their authority in the courts that ultimately matter.

That probably sounds rather quaint to the young couple suing the Wildflower Inn, and things like the Bible and human history are unquestioningly passe’ in the eyes of the ACLU, which is pressing their case through the courts. It always feels braver to “change the world” than it does to admit that, on some things, the world was right all along.

And like it or not, most of us know that’s true. If a heterosexual couple freely admitted they were checking in to a family inn to consummate their adulterous affair away from the prying eyes of their spouses, few would flinch at the Wildflower management for deciding there was no room in the inn.

If a man inquired if he could bring a neighbor’s 11-year-old girl in, so as to have sex with her, the law would race to the side of the proprietors. If a dedicated polygamist was turned away from his plans for a romantic weekend with his five wives, his lawsuit wouldn’t have a chance. (At least this year, before activist courts decree those to also “just be another way to love.”)

The moral sensibilities that balk at such outrageous assaults on conviction spring from the same eternal passages of truth, the exact same enduring social traditions, that tell us that marriage is and should be the union of a man and a woman, not two people of the same gender.

To deny that, as the courts and legislature of Vermont seem so determined to do, is not to embrace a more malleable morality, or to codify a new definition of love – but to deny a truth we know in our bones. And, ultimately, to impoverish a society we think we’re enriching, and destroy the lives of those we believe we protect.

It doesn’t take courage to ride the wave of support for same-sex ‘marriage.’ It takes courage to stand against the surging tide. At the Wildflower Inn, so high in the Vermont hills, the water is rising fast.