As if anyone needed it, last week came another reminder that Vermont is becoming downright geriatric.

Meaning maybe we do need it. Memory is one of the first things to go, they say.

(Who says? I forget).

Last week’s contribution was a new report showing that for the second year in a row, Vermont had the lowest birth rate in the country, 10.5 for every thousand residents. Add in the information dating back to 2004 that Vermont has the second-highest (after Maine) median age in the country, and this looks increasingly like a state where the average guy will wear the bottom of his trousers rolled).

(Those wishing an explanation of the literary reference in that last sentence and in the title of this post may click here).

The new numbers from the  National Center for Health Statistics seem to have been ignored by most of the state’s media with the noted exception of WCAX-TV, Channel 3, which gave the story big play last Thursday.

To their credit, the station and correspondent Brian Joyce did not yield to the temptation to moan that the results proved that Vermont must be doing something wrong. Instead, it acknowledged that the state’s relative geriatricity stems less from what Vermonters do than from what they are.

They are white people. Worse, they are white Anglos. Meaning they are bland, boring, and possibly under-sexed. Ergo, they have fewer babies.

Channel 3 stayed away from the boring, under-sexed angle and focused on demographics and economics. Vermont’s potential mothers, it turns out, are not merely white and Anglo, but affluent and educated, precisely the people who have fewer babies.

The station cited University of Vermont economist Art Woolf explaining that these women want fewer babies because they want to earn more money.

It’s hard to argue with that, but one of the problems with economists, including smart ones like Woolf, is that they tend to think economics explains everything. Those women no doubt also want more leisure, and some of them may not want to bring many (or any) babies into what they consider an already over-crowded world.

As Channel 3 noted, aging is not without its difficulties, for a state as well as for a person. All those educated, childless (or one-child) women might get richer, but at the expense of threatening Vermont’s economy if there aren’t enough workers in the future. Employers, Woolf said, will ” go to North Carolina, or Boston, or Arizona, or Texas, or someplace where they can find workers to do the job that they want .”

Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the state will not prosper. First of all, lots of older people still work, often well into their seventies. (Seventy is the new fifty-five, or something like that.). With rare exceptions, older people do not have children living with them; they pay the taxes that support the schools without adding to the pupil population . They also tend to have guaranteed incomes from pensions or investments. When they spend that money, they create jobs.

True, as Woolf said, a living, working-age, person has to exist to fill that job. But if workers are more productive, there need not be as many of them, and Vermont’s educated population (presumably the men those educated women team up with are comparable learned) would seem to be more productive than most. In the inter-connected age, outsourcing some work to places with denser populations could prove a profitable arrangement for a rural state with relatively few people.

Besides, it isn’t as though the rest of the country is going to be awash with working-age folks. According to some projections, one in three Americans will be over 60 in 2030.

In a report issued last fall by the Carsey Institute of the University of New Hampshire called “Grey Gold: Do Older In-Migrants Benefit Rural Communities,” researchers Nina Glasgow and David L. Brown concluded that an influx of older residents into rural areas, including in New England, was certain to increase, and presented both opportunities and challenges to the towns where they settle.

Some of the challenges of having lots of old folks around are obvious. A state would need more health care and emergency medical facilities, more senior centers and meals-on-wheels providers.

Then there’s the drug problem.

What? Grandma’s one toke over the line?

Well, there’s a little of that, and likely to be more of it. After all, all those kids who were, say, 16, in 1967 (roughly when pot-puffing became downright respectable in some circles) will be senor citizens within a decade. Some of the haven’t given up the habit.

But that’s a small part of the senor citizen drug problem. First of all, unless Grandma gets behind the wheel of a car after smoking her joint, she’s not much danger to herself or others. And according to Patricia Facey, the director of the Coalition on Substance Abuse and Older Vermonters, “the real problem is polypharmacy.”

“Polypharmacy means ‘many drugs’ and refers to problems that can occur when a patient is taking more medications than are actually needed,” according to a medical web site associated with the University of Chicago. ” It is a particular concern for older adults, who make up 13 percent of the population but account for almost 30 percent of all prescribed drugs.

Facey acknowledged that there are few reliable statistics as to the extent of the problem, either nationally or in Vermont. But according to the Coalition’s latest newsletter, substance abuse among the elderly is “a growing and often hidden problem,” a problem likely to be more serious in a state with a high proportion of elderly residents.

The typical polypharmacy abuser, Facey said, is someone who takes several drugs – prescription and over-the-counter – often without telling one prescribing physician about the prescriptions written by others.

Sometimes, she said, polypharmacy results from forgetfulness. “But sometimes it’s intentional, because people are trying to kill pain, or they suffer from depression or loneliness, grief, or isolation. They’re trying to numb those feelings.”

In a few cases, she said, elderly patients deliberately go from doctor to doctor getting pain medicine prescriptions, then go from pharmacy to pharmacy getting them filled.

Then there are the senior citizen tipplers. According to the Coalition’s newsletter, 3 million Americans over the age of 60 are alcoholics, and widowed men “75 and older have the highest alcoholism rate of any age group.”

“Problems with substance abuse are frequently overlooked in older people, for a variety of reasons, Facey said. “These include the stigma. It is hard to accept the fact that an older person is inappropriately using drugs or alcohol. Our society associates this behavior with immorality and lack of control.”

Furthermore, she said, it’s easy for others to misinterpret the symptoms of drug abuse by the elderly.

“Caregivers may assume that age related conditions (are) causing the behavior, such as frequent falls, slurring of words, forgetfulness and confusion. They can be incorrectly attributed to Alzheimer’s disease or related disorders. ”

The Coalition,  a relatively new (and low-budget; it survives on a $4,500 grant from the Vermont Department of Health ) organization dedicated to controlling the problem of elderly substance abuse, “meets via VTT interactive television every other month, and then the other months by teleconference,” Facey said. “The interactive TV meetings are presentations where we educate a lot of people.”

So far, its approach is “low tech,” she said. Older people are encouraged to “put all their medications in a bag, and bring it to the doctor with them.” Middle-aged children of older parents are urged to “watch for sings, things like (bank) accounts disappearing, or money getting stolen from you and you don’t know where it goes.”

Grandma, in other words, might be filching it to pay the pharmacy, or to buy lottery tickets in quantity. Gambling is not a substance, but it can be an addiction, and older people – often lonely and depressed – can be especially susceptible to it.

On July 30, 2007, Celso Mena, a 57-year-old  construction worker who was helping put up a school building site in Hinsdale, N.H., fell from scaffolding and broke his ankle.

It was a serious injury, and tough luck for the hard-working Panamanian immigrant, a legal resident of the United States. Not only was he in pain; he was on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and he had to scrounge some way to try to make a living now that he could no longer do construction work. No Workers Compensation benefits for him.

He had agreed to work for a drywall subcontractor, GNPB/Kal-Vin, of Hudson, N.H., not as an employee but as an independent contractor, apparently because he could earn a higher wage that way.

A GBPB/Kal-Vin supervisor told him what to do every day. His starting time and quitting time were determined by the firm. He used the company’s tools. But both he and the subcontractor considered him an independent contractor.

The law did not. Eight months later, the New Hampshire Department of Labor ruled that Mena had been an employee of the company and eligible for Workers Compensation. He was awarded eight months of back pay and the company was ordered to continue to pay him 60 percent of his wages until he could return to work .

Though all this took place east of the Connecticut River, for two inter-related reasons – one general and one particular – there is a Vermont connection.

The general reason is that this misclassification of workers as independent contractors is widespread everywhere, including in Vermont, where some 14 percent of workers appear to be misclassified, according to Steve Monahan, the director of Workers Compensation and Safety for the Vermont Labor Department.

The practice – scorned as “1099ing,” by construction union officials (for the Internal Revenue Service form that freelance workers fill out) -short-changes Worker Compensation, Unemployment Insurance and Social Security funds. It also “creates an unlevel playing field,” in the words of Vermont Labor Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden. Businesses that play by the rules can be underbid by their competitors who do not.

The specific reason is the company, GNPB/Kal-Vin , which sometimes goes by only one or the other of those names, and which is known by contractors, union leaders, and government officials as a company with a spotty labor law record.

The five illegal aliens seized while working at the Loewe’s store in Essex last November were working on a job for Kal-Vin. They, too, were classified as independent contractors, rather than company employees.

The company is also the dry-wall subcontractor for the  $55.7 million James Jeffords Hall (pictured above) now under construction at the University of Vermont. Last year, construction unions led by the New England Regional Council of Carpenters wrote to UVM officials informing them about Kal-Vin’s record and urging the university to find another dry wall firm.

UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera said the university took the labor objection seriously, but “we had already entered into contract with our main contractor (who) had already developed a list of subcontractors . We didn’t feel we were in a position to break our contract, but we (made it clear to) the contractor…that we were not going to stand for any kind of violation on our job.”

According to Commissioner Powden, Vermont has no “responsible employer” statute, as some states do, which bans firms which repeatedly violate labor laws from working on publicly funded projects.

“We find it very disturbing that UVM, a socially responsible college, is allowing companies like this to work on their sites,” said Damon Hall of the Ironworkers Union. “We want it in law that companies that break the law get penalized.”

In response to a telephone message to the company, Val-Kin Faxed a message saying, “the information you intend to publish is false (though the message left with the company did not explain what information might be published). You should refrain from publishing those comments. If you do so, you do so at your own risk.”

In August of 2007, Norman Pomerleau, one of the firm’s two principle owners (the other is Gino Bernard) told the Brattleboro Reformer that “the unions don’t like us because we’re an open shop. And we’re very big.”

A plausible complaint. But almost all construction firms in northern New England, big and small are “open shops” (non-union) and the others have not aroused similar antipathy from organized labor.

But the employee misclassification problem is hardly limited to one company, or to the construction industry. It is found in trucking, hotels, and restaurants, officials said, and in one way or another can cost the public millions of dollars a year.

In the last year or so several states, including New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, have strengthened their laws and intensified enforcement of worker classification. At least in the view of trade union officials, Vermont has not.

“There’s no enforcement,” said Bryan Bouchard,  the South Burlington-based regional manager of the Council of Carpenters. “There’s nobody out there looking at this issue. Nobody is assigned to employee misclassification.”

Actually, one person is assigned to such enforcement, according to Rep. Warren Kitzmiller, the Montpelier Democrat who heads a task force on the issue set up by the Legislature last year.

“We have one enforcement officer for all fraud other than Unemployment Insurance,” he said. New Hampshire has 16 just for Workers Comp. One of the reasons fraud is so prevalent is the bad actors know they can get away it. We’re losing an unknown amount of money. By extrapolation, I can say we’re losing several million dollars. If everybody were fairly paying the cost would go down.”

But Steve Monahan of the Labor Department said the ten Unemployment Insurance enforcement officers come across evidence of Workers Compensation violations, and can tip off the fraud investigator. Unfortunately, he said, the law forbids that investigator from using that information “for prosecution purposes.” He can only use it as a tip. Then he has to make the misclassification case separately.

The task force is made up of two legislators, representatives from business  and labor, and Commissioner Powden. They all seem to agree that the problem is serious and that enforcement should be strengthened. Even the task force’s member from the Association General Contractors,  Ernie Smalley of Rutland, said, “Our association’s take is there has to be insurance across the board. End of the story.

What the task force members do not agree on is how to get from here to there, and, not surprisingly, politics seems to have entered the equation.

Powden said that before adding more enforcement officers, the state should streamline its laws, which now include “no fewer than three definitions” of how to distinguish between employees and independent contractors, so that “it can be  very confusing for small business to know which way (it is) supposed to go.”

With her boss, Gov. Jim Douglas, intent on cutting the state work-force, Powden could hardly support adding more workers to her own department. Bouchard of the Carpenters Union said Powden was too concerned with being considered “anti-business” if her department cracked down on labor law violators. But Powden said one step she favored was increasing the fines that companies in violation now pay.

“Some firms may look at this (fines for misclassifying) as the cost of doing business. A $5,000 fine. Well, whoopee,  I’m saving $35,000. Hitting folks where it hurts is going to have a greater impact on them.”

Two months ago Celso Mena reached a settlement with the Workers Compensation insurance company providing him with a lump sum payment, according to his lawyer, Terrence Daley of Manchester, N.H. Daley, who called employee misclassification, “the biggest fraud in the Workers Compensation System, said Mena is now “able to do a little work,” but did not know whether he had yet found a job.

LATE UPDATE: A comment (since removed) purporting to be from Gino Bernard, one of the owners of Kal-Vin Construction, was deleted after I was unable to confirm that the message was in fact from Mr. Bernard.

LATER UPDATE: Well, it seems really to have been he, and though the comment once deleted can not be restored under “comments,” here it is, word-for-word verbatim as they like to say in Congress: “thank for shoing me my job look nice.”

BUT FIRST, THIS NOTE: In what may be an excess of courtesy (those who are criticized should be given more than ample time to defend themselves) the investigative report originally scheduled for today (the one mentioned in Tuesday’s brief post) will be delayed until tomorrow.

Instead, we will do something unusual today. We will pay the debaters in Vermont’s current squabble over same sex marriage the (perhaps unwanted) honor of taking them seriously.

As this is being written, the debate still rages at the public hearing in Montpelier. No matter, enough has been said on both sides to cast the same skeptical eye on both sides, assessing not their political clout, but their knowledge and rationality, or lack thereof, taking both sides equally seriously.

Uhhhh, except where that’s impossible, such as in Aaron Melville’s Burlington Free Press column asserting that “marriage consists of one slice of bread covered in peanut butter (man) and [one] slice covered in jelly (woman).”

David playing the Harp for Saul, by Rembrandt

In vain, you seek for a sign that this is parody. In mercy, you consider ignoring it. But Melville did have it published, and he is a political quasi-official (chairman of Vermont Young Republicans).

Welcome to the NFL, kid. Next time think before you write.

On firmer ground in opposition to same sex marriage was The Most Rev. Salvatore R. Matano, the Bishop of Burlington, who said the proposed law would “alter the definition of marriage as the…legal union of one man and one woman.”

That’s indisputable because it’s true. Indisputable because it is a statement of faith, rather than an assertion of fact, is Bishop Matano’s contention that marriage is “not a purely human institution,” because “the love of a husband and wife reflects the love between the church and Christ.”

One does not argue that. One either believes it or not. Either way, it is what a Bishop is going to say.

Unfortunately, when he descended to the secular, Bishop Matano was less impressive. He worried that if the law passed religious people would “be penalized for adhering to our beliefs and creeds,” though nothing in the bill justifies such concern. Then he worried that because there are aggressive atheists abroad in the land, the practice of religion might soon be considered “odious,” and Catholics will become “objects of hate.”

Reality to Bishop Matano: The Roman Catholic  Church is among the most august, powerful, honored institutions in…well, in the history of the world. It need not join today’s woe-is-us victimology shtick.

As if to demonstrate ecumenicism in the whining department, Scott Libby, the pastor of the Grace Brethren Church in Irasburg, charged that, “the further civil laws move away from God’s law, the closer Christians come to being persecuted by the government.”

By which standard Jews and Muslims could cry persecution because pork is legal at the supermarket.

Let no one assume, though, that only gay marriage opponents seemed muddled at times. True, they seemed more muddled, not because they are more foolish, but because they made more assertions. The basic message of the bill’s supporters is simply that it is right. They need no factual claim to back that up.

Technically, Tom Torti of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce didn’t make a factual claim. But he suggested one when he said, “Vermont is poised to reinforce its legacy and in doing so to set in place an environment and culture that will foster business growth and development,”

The suggestion, seconded by others, was that legalizing gay marriage would be good for Vermont’s economy. But there is neither evidence that it would have any impact either way, nor much reason to think that it would.

And not everything asserted by the opponents was wrong. When Pastor Ethan Kallberg of the Lamoille Valley Grace Brtheren Church in Morrisville said “homosexuality and by extension homosexual marriage is offensive to God,” and when the Rev. David Lisner of the Newport Baptist Church said the legislation “stands in direct violation of scripture,” they had a point. In Chapter 18, Verse 22, the Book of Leviticus prescribes death for any man who “lie(s) with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination” (King James translation).

In the spirit of taking everyone seriously, let’s take these objectors seriously on their own terms. Accepting homosexuality may not be “in direct violation of scripture,” but only of Leviticus.

Later on, the Bible repeats several times that God kept the House of David on the throne of Judah, because “David had done what was pleasing to the Lord and never turned throughout his life from all that He had commanded him, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” (Masoretic translation)

A sin inspired by rampant heterosexual lust.

A creative enough reader can figure out a way to interpret I Samuel to mean something other than that David and Jonathan, the son of Saul, were teenage lovers. But that’s the plain meaning of the text. It was certainly what Saul thought when he claimed Jonathan had chosen David “to your own shame and the shame of your mother’s nakedness.”

That’s Bible talk for mifkie-pifkie in the bushes.

OK, Saul was the Richard Nixon of Israel’s First Commonwealth – brilliant but bonkers. But if David and Jonathan were lovers, and that was not a sin, then…well, the whole thing becomes substantially more ambiguous, does it not?

Besides, don’t these clergymen realize that no one – no one! -in America has to do anything just because the Bible says so?  Even most of the Ten Commandments can be violated without consequences here on earth. Any one of us is allowed to dishonor our parents, ignore the Sabbath, or covet our neighbor’s ox. In fact, you’d best not do some things the Bible commands, such as stoning to death your stubborn and rebellious son in obedience to Deuteronomy 21:18.

In short, stating that a law should pass or fail because the Bible does or does not approve is saying nothing. Law and government are secular, as should be the debates surrounding them.

Descending to the secular, then, let’s consider a not-so-absurd anti-gay marriage suggestion by writer John McClaughry and Sen. Kevin Mullin, a Rutland Republican, that the question be put to the entire electorate in a non-binding referendum.

A very democratic suggestion that can not be dismissed even while observing the irony of two conservatives suggesting government by plebiscite. Alexander Hamilton would not be amused.

From their own perspective, though, there are two problems. One is that, from the polling available, the electorate would probably vote yes. The other is: be careful about getting what you want. Suppose, say, that anti-hunting forces wanted to put a hunting ban proposal to the entire electorate. They’d probably lose, now. But five years from now?  And what about a referendum on outlawing trapping?  It would win in a walk. Especially for a conservative, representative democracy is not a bad deal. If the Legislature approves gay marriage and the people don’t like it, they can elect new legislators who will repeal the law.

Sadly, some of the rest of McClaughry’s column in the Free Press are less well-grounded, starting with the claim that  ”prohibiting discrimination against same-sex couples seeking marriage cannot be limited to just those couples. If two men or two women can marry, why not two of each as a foursome? Or a Muslim taking four wives?

But nothing stops the members of any democratic society from legalizing any or all of those arrangements now. They are not on the political radar not because gay marriage is illegal. They are not on the political radar because no constituency supports them.

Finally, let’s return to Bishop Matano, who helpfully noted that marriage is not now simply a union between one man and one woman. He pointed out that it is between a man and a woman who love one another. That’s the real definition of marriage: an officially recognized union between a man and a woman who love one another and wish to live together and comprise a family, with or without children.

As Bishop Matano said, passing the gay marriage bill would “alter the definition.” What he did not say was…what else is new? The definition has been altered before, and indeed is not universal now. As McClaughry acknowledged, Moslem men may have four wives, which is legal in much of the world.

This love business isn’t universal either. Arranged marriages happen all over, even in the United States. They used to be the norm. Centuries ago, kings married not for love but for territory. Then they and their consorts each took lovers, not infrequently of the same sex. Henry II didn’t marry Catherine of Aragon for love. He married her for the Aragon. If the movie A Lion in Winter is historically accurate, they developed passionate relationship which ranged between love and hate. But that was incidental.

Passage of this legislation would, as the bishop said, alter the definition to mean an officially recognized relationship between any two people who love one another and wish to live together and comprise a family.

The question then occurs: Just what is so terrible about that?