By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — Sporting a Confederate uniform and a walrus mustache, Col. Camillus Albert Nash of the 61st Virginia Infantry Regiment proudly stares out from his portrait.
His flesh and blood great-great-granddaughter Drewry Nash Fennell returns his gaze, her piercing blue eyes shining from beneath straight white hair and over a broad smile.
“I’m from an old Southern family,” says Fennell, 46, the executive director of the Delaware affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, from an easychair in the spacious living room of her family’s rambling home.
There are other clues besides the portrait.
Her unusual first name, Drewry, is her mother’s maiden name. Nash, the colonel’s name and her daughter’s middle name, was Fennell’s father’s mother’s name.
“That’s the way we name people in the South,” Fennell says.
So, how does a Southern girl, the oldest of three sisters who grew up in segregated Portsmouth, Va., and within a short bicycle ride of Pat Robertson’s nascent “700 Club” ministry, come to direct a chapter of an organization considered by many to be the bane of religious conservatives everywhere?
Circuitously.
Fennell, who survived cervical cancer two years ago, shares her home with her partner, Lisa Goodman, her three biological children, plus a fourth, David Drewry, 7, to whom Goodman gave birth and whom Fennell adopted when he was a baby.
“I have everything I always wanted,” she says. “A house full of children, a wonderful partner, funny and smart friends, and work I find engaging and important.”
For nearly six years she has headed an affiliate of one of the more contentious civil rights organizations in the country. She receives several e-mails, faxes and phone calls each week excoriating the ACLU’s positions.
And many get personal.
“A lot of people we stand up for are subjected to ill treatment,” she says. “Part of my job is to take it.”
But some in the state see Fennell as ameliorating the ACLU’s hard-edged reputation.
“People try to paint the ACLU as a wild-eyed group of radicals,” says Rep. Bill Oberle (R-Beechers Lot), who has worked with Fennell specifically to try and pass House Bill 99, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. “But Drew and the ACLU in Delaware have always been fair and reasonable.”
An opinion that still holds six years after Fennell revealed to the public, via the state legislature and those attending a hearing on HB 99 (which has not passed), that she also realized she was a lesbian after being married for a decade.
That doesn’t mean her ideological enemies are delighted with her.
“She’s an extremely intelligent, capable woman,” says Moria Sheridan, president of Delaware Right to Life. “It’s just a shame she doesn’t direct those energies toward things that lift society up than those that mire us down.”
It does mean, however, that at least one person who thought he should be an opponent of the ACLU has learned not to be.
“It’s always assumed that there could be difficulty between the ACLU and the Christian community,” says pastor Earl Cooper, who runs the Success Christian Center for at-risk youths in Wilmington. He has worked with Fennell on educating children about their rights, and on prison reform.
“There appears to be a big difference, but we were able to put aside differing religious and political beliefs for the community.”
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Drew Fennell grew up in the heart of evangelical Christianity, and within a racially segregated culture.
Portsmouth, Va., was not only home to Pat Robertson, but it also was near the stomping grounds of Jerry Falwell and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Fennell remembers sitting with fellow Girl Scouts as a member of the audience during one of the Bakkers’ early TV shows.
The family of her mother, who died in 1997, hailed from nearby South Hampton County near Norfolk. Her father’s mother’s family goes back ot the settlement of Norfolk.
Her father, whom Fennell describes as “My Atticus Finch,” the noble lawyer-father of the main character in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a lawyer who opposed segregation.
Her parents were strong Episcopalians, and Fennell became, and remains, a weekly church-goer. Two windowsills in the living room of her home are stacked with Bibles and prayer books.
Her understanding of segregation developed as she grew into her teens, she says.
“I couldn’t fathom it as a little kid, but when I hit my teens it hit me. It made no sense logically or morally. The cognitive dissonance was intense,” Fennell says, using the term that refers to the psychological tension that comes with simultaneously holding two contrary thoughts in your head.
Nevertheless, throughout her elementary, middle and high school years, she attended Norfolk Academy, a private prep school founded in 1728, which held only a handful of African American and Jewish students.
Her best friend during that time, Stephanie Calliott, 47, now a Wachovia Bank senior vice president who lives in Norfolk, says Fennell was very popular.
“When we were in school, there were only four who were Jewish,” she says. “I was one of them. Drew was involved in her [Episcopal] church, and there was no issue about the fact that I was different.”
Although Calliott says she was not allowed to become a debutante because of her religion, and was never invited to country clubs, “When Drew invited me to things, she didn’t make a deal of it.”
Fennell did make a name for herself early as a negotiator.
In one instance, a friend of Fennell’s and Calliott’s was caught plagiarizing. The friend, the daughter of a prominent local attorney, was being treated with kid gloves until Fennell argued that she should be treated just like everyone else.
“It was a huge scandal,” Calliott says of the incident. “This was a 17-year-old girl talking with 45-year old adults and faculty, and she was arguing for being just and fair.”
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After graduating, Fennell attended the University of Virginia for two years until her father, only 42, died of a heart attack in 1981. It shocked her, Calliott recalls, and changed everything.
For one, it brought Fennell back home because the money for college ran out. And it reinforced her feelings toward an assistant pastor at the local church, Edward Godden, seven years older than she, whom she had started dating before she went to college.
“This congregation had a tradition of marrying off its young curates,” says Godden, now a pastor at Immanuel on the Green Episcopal Church in New Castle. “The parish secretary said I should take her out, even though I was dating someone else at the time.
It didn’t take him long to find Fennell “compelling,” Godden says.
During their first date at a local bar, they debated the use of power in government and society. Two years later they married, and moved to Elkton where Godden ran his first church.
Fennell gave birth to three children in four years — Mary Nash in 1985, Thomas Wolcott (called Witt) in 1988, and Caroline Eastman in 1989.
“I always wanted to be a mom,” Fennell says.
She took classes on the side at the University of Delaware on her way to completing an English degree in 1986.
And she began seriously longing to become a lawyer like her father.
But shortly after they moved to New Castle in 1989, where Godden took the position of pastor at Immanuel on the Green, Fennell reached and passed 30, and, during that time, she says she realized she was “different.”
She says she discovered she was gay: “I realized I wasn’t exactly who I thought I was.”
It was cataclysmic for Godden and the family.
“There’s always a sense of betrayal when that happens,” Godden says of their 1993 divorce. “But it was much more difficult thinking about being good parents. The kids were 7, 4 and 3, and I had a full-time job that took 50-60 hours a week.”
Godden, who counsels couples, understands from many angles the pain of marriages disintegrating.
“Divorce is always difficult,” Godden says. “But the fact that she’s a lesbian, it was inevitable that she would want to live with someone else. And I didn’t qualify. It’s never easy dealing with loss and rejection, but I think we did it pretty well.”
Fourteen years later, he’s long over it, he says.
“As I look back on it, I focus on what we gave to each other — companionship and love, and these wonderful children. There was not a way for us to live together, and if you can’t do that, isn’t it wonderful to give thanks to what you can have?”
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After both Godden and Fennell agreed to remain in the area and equally share custody of the children, Fennell decided to pursue her dormant dream of becoming a lawyer.
She attended Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, N.J., earning a law degree with honors in 1997.
She clerked for Judge Bernard M. Balick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, with Andrea Unterberger, now an assistant general counsel for the Corporation Service Company.
They became friends because they had a lot in common, including children. As they grew closer, Unterberger invited Fennell to dinner, after telling her she was happy she found someone with whom she could connect. Then, Fennell told her she had some news.
“She told me she was gay,” Unterberger says. “And I went, ‘OK, is that it? Is that what you’re telling me?’ I was waiting for her to tell me she wasn’t going to be my friend.”
Unterberger soon told her about Lisa Goodman, a lawyer at the Wilmington firm of Young, Conaway, Stargatt and Taylor.
Goodman met Fennell during a women’s lawyer’s conference in the spring of 1997.
Preoccupied with friends, Goodman didn’t want to be bothered. “But I saw her walk down the stairs, and I thought, This won’t be so bad after all.”
Fennell came to work for the law firm that fall, and, Goodman says, “Pretty soon thereafter it became apparent to both of us that we had an interest in more than friendship.”
They moved in together two years later, and bought their home in 2001.
That year, the ACLU directorship opened up when Judy Mellen, the director for more than a decade, retired.
Goodman, who was on the board of the organization before she met Fennell, said after she heard the news of Mellen’s retirement, “I dug Drew in the ribs with my elbow and said, ‘That’s the job you ought to have.’”
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The ACLU’s defense of individual rights is absolute, Fennell says.
“Our mission is to protect the Constitution, especially the Bill or Rights,” she says. “Most people think the Bill of Rights are wonderful when applied to them but not necessarily to others. Some people have a hard time putting themselves in the place of others.”
Widener law professor Robert Justin Lipkin agrees, but argues it works both ways.
Lipkin was a member of the ACLU until the late 1970s, when the organization filed suit against the town of Skokie, Ill., arguing that three town ordinances outlawing Nazi parades and demonstrations were unconstitutional.
The organization’s defense of the neo-Nazis against the town, whose majority of 70,000 citizens were Jewish, caused thousands of ACLU members to resign.
Lipkin did not renew his membership, and has yet to do so.
“My grandfather was the 15th child in his family, and 12 of them were killed in the Holocaust,” he says.
The ACLU’s absolutist positions on issues such as hate speech, and the idea that “money is speech” when it is used during political campaigns, shows a weakness in the ACLU’s ability to put themselves in others’ shoes, he says.
“Before I joined the ACLU, I was a devotee of the First Amendment, and believed in the most expansive view of it,” Lipkin says. “My leaving because of hate speech was not intuitively emotional at the time. But it’s developed into that.”
The values of the ACLU and its black and white understanding of the Bill or Rights is necessary, Goodman says, and points to Skokie as a perfect example.
It’s a classic clash of principles, she says. “Even with Skokie, you can’t just say, ‘I agree with the principle, but not in this case.’ You can’t say everyone gets free speech but not this group.”
Despite his trepidations, Lipkin says he still believes in what the ACLU stands for.
“We have a deliberative democracy, so issues must be hammered out in the court of public discourse of the nation,” he says. “To protect that, we have to overprotect it, so thus we protect hate speech. When we make nuanced judgments and exceptions, we start down a slippery slope.”
But it’s those judgments and exceptions – often not all that nuanced — that propel others to vehement opposition.
“Many people are upset with the ACLU because they support things that can be morally reprehensible, such as pornography,” Moira Sheridan says. “To say it has no connection with societal ills is very wrong.”
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Most of Fennell’s time is spent lobbying legislators, and negotiating complaints from those who want the ACLU’s help. Much of this negotiating precludes any court appearance.
Many legislators say they welcome her help.
“She is a resource in the hall on individual liberties,” says Sen. Patricia Blevins (D-Elsmere). “It’s helpful that she doesn’t just come to Dover with her own issues.”
Rep. Karen Peterson (D-Stanton) says Fennell has helped her when Fennell worked on two of her pet issues: banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, and prisoner health reform.
“I had a brother who committed suicide in prison 24 years ago, and it had a lot to do with how he was treated,” Peterson says.
And as the one-time director of division of industrial affairs, Peterson says she knows how many complaints come in concerning discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Like Fennell’s work with the state on many of these issues, her home is a work in progress. Built in 1925, it took the couple nearly a year to get it in good enough shape to live.
Now, its wide-planked floors, red, Oriental rugs, and a plethora of equestrian paraphernalia, from saddles to paintings – Goodman grew up on a horse farm – give it a cozy, eclectic and lived-in feel.
“It’s a house with children,” Fennell says.
Placed in the formal dining room, Col. Camillus Albert Nash of the 61st Virginia Infantry Regiment and his perpetual stare seems to stick out.
But the painting is so important to her, two years ago she told producers of “Trading Spaces,” a cable TV series in which professional designers help families redesign part of each other’s homes, that the portrait was off-limits on any redesign they had in mind.
“When my mother died, we (she and her two sisters) split everything up,” she says, and she took the painting.
Asked why, the local director of the ACLU smiles at the colonel’s daunting gaze.
“I didn’t want to sell it to anyone who’d want to buy it.”