The Rev. Jerry Falwell called it “one of the most unlikely gatherings of our times.” Certainly 15 years ago, when the founder of the Moral Majority hired a Pasadena minister named Mel White to ghost-write his autobiography, he couldn’t have forecast that White would one day come out as a gay man, denounce the leaders of the religious right for whom he once worked, form a national group of faith-based people working for gay rights, and demand that Falwell meet with him to discuss bringing an end to the war of words raging between conservative Christians and lesbians and gay men.
But meet they did in this town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, each flanked by hundreds of clerical and lay supporters. From his Thomas Road Baptist Church and church-affiliated Liberty University, Falwell recruited 200 straight, buttoned-down evangelical fundamentalists to
participate. From 30 cities and various faiths White amassed 200 gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight people who had signed on to Soulforce, his pacifist social change organization that is modeled on Mahatma Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophies.
Dressed in their Sunday best, the participants gathered Saturday afternoon in the
gymnasium of Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church where they sat together, prayed together and listened as, for the first time, two major religious leaders — one gay, one straight — sat down to discuss the impact of hate speech and hate-motivated violence on the lives of their followers.
Generically billed as the Anti-Violence Forum, a title seemingly designed to deflate controversy and establish a common ground, the stated purpose of the event was to diminish the “hateful rhetoric” on both sides of the fence. Both men came to the table because they agree that too much hateful rhetoric flows between gay people and conservative Christians and that hate speech and violence needs to end.
Oddly, Falwell believes that rhetoric from gays has contributed to a wave of violence against Christian fundamentalists. As examples, he has cited the teens at the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and Columbine High School who he believes were killed “because of their faith.” After the Wedgewood shootings, Falwell told a reporter, “Most hate crimes in America today are not directed toward African-American or Jewish people or lesbians. They are directed at evangelical Christians.”
White, meanwhile, maintains that there is a direct link between the anti-gay remarks that pepper Falwell’s sermons and fund-raising literature and the long-standing epidemic of violence against gay men and lesbians. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, there have been 28 murders of gay people since Matthew Shepard’s killing a year ago.
Although White and Falwell came seeking reconciliation,
they were both, in very different ways, equally lead-footed. During an appearance on “Good Morning America” Friday, Falwell apologized for judging all gay people based on the actions of a few “kooks.” He also told the News and Advance newspaper that there was “no way” he would ever veer from his view that homosexuality is a sin. Though White was relentlessly
diplomatic and openhearted, imploring his followers to love Falwell and his
people as family, he went into the meeting speaking of his determination to “bring [Falwell]
truth, in love, relentlessly until he, too, is set free.”
On Saturday, participants on both sides were jittery. Two hundred yards from the church, a less pacifist form of democracy was in action. Protestors jeered at meeting participants, waving signs reading “Mel wants to sodomize your sons” and “Falwell insults church with fags.”
Gathered together in the church parking lot before the meeting, the Soulforce delegates, some in clerical garb, all wearing palm frond leis, attempted to cut some of the tension by launching into a hymn, as they are wont to do. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” the Rev. Jimmy Creech of Raleigh, N.C., sang out. A tall, slender heterosexual Methodist minister who performed a same-sex marriage after the church forbade them, Creech has the distinction of being the first man to be put on trial for defying the 200-year-old church’s “social principles.”
Cathy Thompson, a married, 28-year-old Lynchburg resident, was ready to roll. “I want to say to Falwell’s people: This is the face of a woman whose best friend is a lesbian, and let me tell you about her and her partner and how they used to have to sneak around and let me tell you about how they love each other.”
But even though hopes were high and unlikely new friends were made (many Soulforce participants attended church with some of Falwell’s people the next morning), after an hour-and-a-half of speeches and a follow-up press conference, the two men, who continued to refer to each other as friends, also continued to see things differently.
At a press conference following the meeting, Falwell addressed what hadn’t been discussed. “I happen to oppose same-sex marriage and we didn’t talk about that,” he said, nor did they address “special rights and privileges,” a turn of phrase that has long irked gay rights supporters, who prefer to call theirs a struggle for “equal,” not “special,” rights.
Falwell also praised White for never having interfered with his preaching on the belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality. “And I hope that evangelicals might build a bridge to gay and lesbian people just as we have built a bridge to drug addicts, alcoholics and unwed mothers.”
After hearing himself being cast alongside groups who are the white American Baptist equivalents of untouchables, White asserted, “religious rhetoric kills people when it builds fear towards gay people” and in a weird display of killing the enemy with kindness, lavishly praised Falwell, asserting that his openness to dialogue was “the solution.”
After asserting that his “ultimate goal is to bring [homosexuals] out of the lifestyle and into the Lord,” Falwell infuriated White and his supporters by introducing Michael Johnston, founder of Kerusso Ministries, a ministry that attempts to convert gay people to heterosexuality via “treatments” that the American Psychiatric Association has condemned.
Johnston spoke of his twin journeys out of drug addiction and homosexuality, which he now looks back on as equally depraved, and urged listeners to follow him. On Oct. 11, Johnston’s message, given in San Francisco to coincide with National Coming Out Day, was squelched by a well-aimed blueberry pie delivered by two members of ACT UP and the Biotic Baking Brigade. This time his reception was less fruity, but no warmer. Creech labeled Johnston’s comments “spiritual violence” and following the press conference a shocked White, red in the face, informed Falwell’s associates that if Johnston spoke at Falwell’s church service the next morning, White and his followers would walk out.
Falwell later told White he didn’t know anything about Johnston or Kerusso Ministries, and asserted that Johnston had approached him that day and asked to appear at the press conference to tell his story. Likewise, Falwell asserted that the anti-gay rhetoric disseminated in his recent fund-raising letters and on his Web page (including such choice nuggets as “the America [homosexuals] demand is a sewer of moral filth … an environment that’s incredibly dangerous to our children … a culture that despises Christian faith and morality”) were neither written nor approved by him. Falwell’s refusal to accept responsibility echoed a similar denial he issued last year when his organization was widely derided for stating that handbag-toting Teletubby Tinky Winky is a recruiting tool for gays.
“Every time he claims ignorance on something he does, we’re going to confront him,” White said firmly.
“I like Jerry. He’s wrong about gays and lesbians, but he’s sincere about it. We’re primarily people of faith gathered here, and he still compares us to bootleggers.”
When Falwell countered that “homosexuality is not a sickness, but like drinking is a sin to be forgiven,” White finally delivered a swift counterpunch to this “love the sinner, hate the sin” line of reasoning. “Calling people sinners over and over again,” he said simply, “becomes hate language very quickly.”
Falwell’s retort, delivered in the velvety Southern voice that has moved hundreds of thousands, “I don’t agree with your lifestyle, I will never agree with your lifestyle, but I love you” and more significantly, added “anything that leaves the impression that we hate the sinner, we want to change that” and that “henceforth … we love the sinner even more than we hate the sin.”
Such words were a big step for Falwell, whom many believe has built his church by fueling homophobic fears, working since the fall of communism in 1990 to repeatedly invoke the specter of depraved, power-hungry homosexuals bent on world domination in order to raise funds and recruit volunteers.
Reached by telephone prior to Saturday’s meeting, Wayne Besen, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington gay rights lobby, quipped, “If White could get Falwell to come around, then I think a lot more people would believe in miracles than ever before.”
But in a way White did move mountains, simply by engaging Falwell on his home turf, as a fellow minister, and backed by people of faith. HRC and most other national gay and lesbian organizations are largely focused on policy issue — training their sights on secular goals that aim to avoid any appearance of activity that the right might label an attempt to “legislate morality.” Namely, they’re intent on securing equal rights under the law.
Activist groups such as ACT UP have shown more interest in taking on the church, but historically only as a target for direct action, not as a partner in debate. And while many lesbians and gay men believe that organized religion is the primary source of homophobia, the church is a form of family for many gay men and lesbians, just as it is for many Americans, period. The Metropolitan Community Church, a predominantly lesbian and gay denomination that combines many Christian traditions, is the largest gay and lesbian organization in this country, and one of the most popular gay non-fiction books this decade has been Daniel Helminiak’s “What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality.” For some, turning away from the church, as so many gay people have done, is not an option.
After Falwell’s sermon on Sunday, in which he stressed that parents should love their children, regardless of their “lifestyle,” a number of the Soulforce delegates went out to lunch with members of Falwell’s church — a group that included Liberty University’s president, the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, students, faculty and Liberty’s student body president, who dined with a transgender person.
During this one-on-one exchange, Soulforcers agreed, the real work of changing hearts and minds took place. The idea that homophobia can only be erased by having fearful or ignorant straight people get to know real live homosexuals and see them as plain old people is a central tenet behind much gay and lesbian organizing.
For Brian Randall, a 30-year-old gay Soulforce delegate and Liberty graduate, it was a deep and complicated homecoming. After his evangelical fundamentalist parents shuttled him into deprogramming at ex-gay ministry Exodus, Randall spent four closeted years at Liberty, living in fear that his secret would be revealed, his scholarship cut off and his parents humiliated.
Randall said Falwell told him that he loved him and extended an invitation to come back to Liberty anytime.
“There were things that disappointed me about the weekend, but I had to put them in the perspective that this has never happened before, that I’ve been invited back to my alma mater as an openly gay man, that I could sit down with Dr. Falwell and have him say, I’m sorry, I was wrong.”
But Randall also expressed some doubt about the historic meeting’s impact. “This did not end on Saturday night or Sunday morning. This is my family. These are my roots. I fully expect Dr. Falwell to return to this kind of language. This time we were here for negotiation and if it happens again, it will be for direct action. I can forgive, but I can’t forget.”
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Virginia Tech officials said a police officer and another person were shot and killed on the school’s campus Thursday and the university locked down the campus, where 33 people died in 2007 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The gunman remained on the loose. A news release from the school said the police officer had pulled someone over for a traffic stop and was shot and killed.
Witnesses told police the shooter ran toward a parking lot on campus. A second person was found dead in that parking lot.
TV footage showed heavily armed officers walking around campus, caravans of SWAT vehicles and other police cars with emergency lights flashing as they patrolled nearby.
Virginia State Police will be taking over the investigation, according to the news release.
“The campus community should continue to shelter in place and visitors should not come to campus,” the school said.
The suspect was described as a white male wearing gray sweat pants, a gray hat with neon green brim, a maroon hoodie and backpack.
A message left with the university wasn’t immediately returned. Campus police referred all questions to the university.
“It’s crazy that someone would go and do something like that with all the stuff that happened in 2007,” said Corey Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore from Mechanicsville, Va., who was headed to a dining hall near the site of one of the shootings, but stayed inside after seeing the alerts from the school. “It’s just weird to think about why someone would do something like this when the school’s had so many problems.”
Harry White, 20, a junior physics major, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that he was in line for a sandwich at a Subway restaurant in a campus building when he received the text message alert about the shooting.
White said he didn’t panic, thinking instead about a false alarm about a possible gunman that caused the campus to be locked down in August. He used an indoor walkway to go to a computer lab in an adjacent building, where he checked news reports.
“I decided to just check to see how serious it was. I saw it’s actually someone shooting someone, not something false, something that looks like a gun,” White said.
White said the campus was quieter than usual because classes ended Wednesday and students are preparing for the start of exams. He said he didn’t see anyone outside from the windows of the computer lab after he received the alert. But he also didn’t detect any signs of panic.
The shooting came the same day as Virginia Tech, which has an enrollment of about 30,000, was appealing a $55,000 fine by the U.S. Education Department in connection with the university’s response to the 2007 rampage, when a student gunman killed 32 students and faculty and then shot himself.
A report of a possible gunman at Virginia Tech on Aug. 4 set off the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since the 2007 bloodbath led the university to overhaul its emergency procedures. No gunman was found, and the school gave the all-clear about five hours after sirens began wailing and students and staff members started receiving warnings by phone, email and text message to lock themselves indoors. Alerts were also posted on the university’s website and Twitter accounts.
That incident marked the first time the entire campus was locked down since the 2007 shooting, and the second major test of Virginia Tech’s improved emergency alert system. The system was revamped to add the use of text messages and other means besides email of warning students.
The system was also put to the test in 2008, when an exploding nail gun cartridge was mistaken for gunfire. But only one dorm was locked down during that emergency, and it reopened two hours later.
Eric Tucker and Ben Nuckols in Washington and Michael Felberbaum and Larry O’Dell in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
Every day, it becomes a little bit harder for women to get the healthcare they need in America, particularly if that healthcare has anything to do with sexual and reproductive health.
The “war on women” began almost the moment that 2011′s new class of legislators took their oaths of office, and it’s still going on as we speak. Anti-choice groups have successfully created blueprint legislation for waiting periods, parental consent laws, mandatory ultrasounds and targeted regulations of clinics. These kinds of laws have been passed in statehouse after statehouse.
With such a steady attrition of rights, it’s hard to keep up the momentum, anger and outrage that we felt this winter and spring. But people should still be outraged, because a number of states are avidly participating in a race to the bottom, determined to outdo each other in restricting access to abortion, chipping away at the fundamental promise of Roe v. Wade, and belittling women and their healthcare providers in the process.
Leading the way are Ohio, Virginia, Kansas and South Dakota. Other states, like Indiana and Missouri, already have so many restrictions of various types in place that they’re going to be hard to catch up with.
Here’s a rundown of what’s happening state by state, and which states are really making it worse for woman.
Ohio: A fetal heartbeat law that would outlaw abortion before most women know they’re pregnant
Ms. Magazine’s Holly L. Derr reports from Ohio on a new law that has dire implications:
Now that the Ohio Senate is back in session, the bill may be taken up at any time. The measure would outlaw abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is often as early as six weeks into the pregnancy. At that point, many women don’t even know they are pregnant. The bill passed the House in March and stands a good chance in the Republican-dominated Senate. It then needs just the signature of proudly pro-life Governor John R. Kasich.
Derr notes that this law, too extreme even for Ohio Right to Life, is designed to trigger a lawsuit and get entangled in a costly court battle — even though its proponents claim to be against frivolous government spending. She writes that the situation in Ohio is already dire: “I hate that this same state Legislature has already passed House bills to ban abortion after 20 weeks (before the Supreme Court-recognized threshold of viability), to prevent private insurance companies from covering abortion and to prevent public hospitals from performing the procedure altogether.”
Indeed, it’s the combination of restrictions like these that makes it more and more difficult for women to find help when they need it.
Kansas and Virginia: Back-door regulations to shut down clinics
There’s another kind of threat at work in Kansas and Virginia. TRAP, or “targeted regulation of abortion provider” laws, are burdensome restrictions that are designed to put abortion clinics out of business. And in Virginia, passing a new set of these laws has been deemed an “emergency.”
The new rules attracted the attention of the editorial board of the Washington Post, which called them “onerous and unnecessary”:
The rules will require existing clinics to meet construction and design standards mainly intended for new hospitals — not existing outpatient facilities such as abortion clinics. The rules mandate the minimum width of hallways; ceiling height; the size of operating rooms; numbers of parking spots; and other requirements that will be physically impossible, or prohibitively expensive, for many clinics to satisfy.
In a state where abortions are already difficult to obtain, these regulations mean one thing: Clinics will shut their doors, and low-income, disabled, single parents, and otherwise disadvantaged women who can’t travel out of state will be out of options and out of luck.
These laws are based on similar TRAP regulations in Kansas that are now the subject of an intense legal battle.
South Dakota: “Informed consent” laws full of lies and manipulation
South Dakota has been the focus of endless legal, legislative and ballot-box battles over abortion — even though the Guttmacher Institute tells us there are barely any providers in the state: “In 2008, 98% of South Dakota counties had no abortion provider. 76% of South Dakota women lived in these provider-free counties.”
Nonetheless the Legislature and anti-choice lobby in the state has remained zealous, producing a number of insanely difficult restrictions that center around the bogus concept of “informed consent.” Right now a judge has upheld parts of a law requiring any woman seeking an abortion to be told that she will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” a statement that of course is subject to debate. The court did strike down the part of the law that says abortion can lead to suicide.
Another judge blocked an even worse law, perhaps the most paternalistic, biased and dangerous law of its kind, requiring a 72-hour waiting period combined with a visit to an anti-choice, almost exclusively Christian, “Crisis Pregnancy Center” before an abortion could be obtained. This law actually made it through the legislative process.
Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah and others: Nearly every restriction on the book, including limitations on insurance coverage.
While these states vie for the most obscene anti-women laws, a number of other states continue to have a panoply of restrictions, as this interactive chart from “Remapping Debate” indicates (see this post for the chart).
Indiana, for instance, isn’t one of the states with the fewest number of providers. But it does have limitations on abortion coverage for insurance, counseling and waiting periods, parental involvement laws, hospital requirements, and TRAP laws on the books, among others.
The “limitations on insurance coverage” stipulation that well over a dozen states have adopted is a particularly alarming restriction because it means that abortions will have to be paid for out-of-pocket, creating a nearly insurmountable obstacle for poorer women.
Fighting Back Strategically
With this race to the bottom seeing no end in sight, what are pro-choicers doing to fight back? The answer is, carefully vetted lawsuits that aim to hit the anti-choice movement where it’s most vulnerable.
Back in May, as the war on women gained national attention, Emily Bazelon covered the issue for the New York Times Magazine, explaining which lawsuits the pro-choice movement was focusing on:
Instead, lawyers representing their side have been challenging the laws that hurt women most — which are also the ones most likely to sway public opinion back to their side. Can it really be good politics for a state to tell private health insurers what kind of coverage for women’s health they can and can’t provide? Or to take away the money that allows Planned Parenthood to prescribe birth control and treat S.T.D.’s? Quinnipiac and CNN polls from earlier this year both found majority support for continuing government financing of Planned Parenthood. There’s also a clear argument against laws like the ones that permit Virginia to regulate abortion clinics like hospitals …
Bazelon wrote that she believed this strategy would work, even though it’s frustrating not being able to go on the offensive and push back against every single bad law coming down the pipes:
These are precisely the kinds of cases that lawyers in support of reproductive rights should pursue, because they portray abortion foes as radical. The South Dakota fight shows that in the name of protecting women, abortion opponents are willing to demean them — by forcing them to visit a crisis pregnancy center and listen to unsupported medical claims … It’s not just a good legal strategy; it also offers the movement the strongest chance of taking back the statehouses, where the real action is.
She’s right, of course, that the end-game has to be electoral: Only changing the makeup of state legislatures, electing more Democrats and, more important, more pro-choice women, will be able to effect a more widespread rollback of these restrictions.
Only a solidly pro-choice government can stop the endless competition between states to make themselves more and more inhospitable to women at a time when jobs, money, childcare and healthcare are already sparse.
<p>Virginia Tech was locked down Thursday after three children attending a summer camp said they saw a man holding what looked like a gun on the campus where a 2007 massacre left 33 people dead.</p>
<p>The university issued an alert on its website at 9:37 a.m. telling students and employees to stay inside and lock their doors. Text and phone messages were sent to more than 45,000 subscribed to the school’s alert system, along with an email sent to the entire campus, said school spokesman Mark Owczarski. The school’s outdoor sirens also sounded, he said.</p>
<p>The school posted an update on its website around 1 p.m., saying authorities were combing through buildings on campus. Classes were canceled for the day, and the school said searching the buildings would be a long process. Police had received no other reports nor found anyone fitting the description the children gave. A composite sketch was posted on the school’s website.</p>
<p>Officials told students, employees and others on campus to stay indoors.</p>
<p>Several thousand students attending summer classes, as well as the school’s 6,500 employees, were on campus when the alert was issued, said University spokesman Larry Hincker. Many of the school’s 30,000 students are on summer break and will return when the fall semester begins Aug. 22.</p>
<p>Maddie Potter, a 19-year-old rising sophomore from Virginia Beach, said she was working on a class project inside Burchard Hall when a friend received a text message from the school at 9:41 a.m. Soon after, staff locked the doors and turned off the lights.</p>
<p>Potter, an interior design major, said she was still holed up in a wood shop inside the building Thursday afternoon. She said things had calmed down since the alert went out.</p>
<p>”I was pretty anxious. We had family friends who were up here when the shooting took place in 2007, so it was kind of surreal,” she said. “I had my phone with me and I called both my parents.”</p>
<p>Hincker said he was not certain when the lockdown might be lifted.</p>
<p>”That’s the $64,000 question,” he said. “You get this report of a sighting that someone might have had a weapon. Then you’ve got this one-square-mile campus, 150 major buildings with several million square feet of space to search.”</p>
<p>The school’s website was inundated throughout the morning, and school officials said they were bringing additional servers online to deal with the traffic.</p>
<p>The children told police they saw the man quickly walking toward the volleyball courts, carrying what might have been a handgun covered by some type of cloth.</p>
<p>The children who made the report were visiting the campus as part of a summer academic program for middle schoolers in Washington, Richard Tagle, CEO of the group Higher Achievement, said in an emailed statement. All the students who were with the group are safe, he said.</p>
<p>An alert on the school’s website said the gunman was reported near Dietrick Hall, a three-story dining facility steps away from the dorm where the first shootings took place in the 2007 rampage.</p>
<p>”We’re in a new era. Obviously this campus experienced something pretty terrible four years ago … regardless of what your intuition and your experience as a public safety officer tells you, you are really forced to issue an alert, and that’s where we believe we are right now,” said Hincker, the Virginia Tech spokesman.</p>
<p>S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors how colleges react to emergencies, said it appeared Virginia Tech responded appropriately. Carter’s organization had pressed for an investigation into the school’s handling of the 2007 shootings.</p>
<p>”You have to take all of the reports seriously because you cannot take the risk that there’s something serious going on and you failed to act,” Carter said. “The key is the community was informed so they were able to take steps to protect themselves.”</p>
<p>Carter said having various forms of notification — sirens and message boards in addition to text messages and e-mails — are important in instances like Thursday’s, when many on campus are there for summer camps or otherwise not registered to receive alerts individually.</p>
<p>Virginia Secretary of Public Safety Marla Decker said the lockdown would have to remain in effect until the entire area is searched. She said she was glad the children reported what they saw.</p>
<p>”We’d rather have a report come to us, investigate it and later in the day say there was nothing to it,” she said.</p>
<p>Rachel Larson, a 22-year-old English and communications student from Winchester, Va., got a text message alert at her off-campus apartment.</p>
<p>”At first I was a little confused because Virginia Tech — ever since 4/16 — we’ve been so paranoid. We hear about everything that goes on on campus, which is good, but sometimes people freak out when it’s a false alarm,” she said. “Then I realized my boyfriend was on campus and I started to freak out a little bit.”</p>
<p>Larson said her boyfriend was locked down in the student union for several hours but eventually was allowed to leave.</p>
<p>”In the morning everyone was kind of concerned, but as the day went on we kind of realized it’s not anything. No one is really that worried anymore,” she said.</p>
<p>Last month, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion that said public university policies generally can prohibit people from openly carrying firearms in campus buildings and at events. However, such a policy would not apply to someone who had a valid concealed carry permit and carried a concealed firearm.</p>
<p>Federal authorities fined the school in March after ruling that administrators violated campus safety law by waiting too long to notify staff and students about a potential threat after two students were shot to death April 16, 2007, in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dorm near the dining facility.</p>
<p>An email alert went out more than two hours later that day, about the time student Seung-Hui Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty and himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.</p>
<p>The school’s alert system also was activated in 2008, when an exploded cartridge from a nail gun produced sounds similar to gunfire near a campus dormitory. It was the first time the system was activated after the 2007 massacre. After the shootings, Virginia Tech started using text messages and other methods besides emails to warn students of danger.</p>
<p>In 2009, a woman was decapitated while having coffee with a fellow student in a campus cafe. Police said at the time that officers detained the suspect within minutes of being called. The school said it sent some 30,000 notifications by voicemail, email and text message, though they were not sent as emergency alerts because the suspect was already in custody.</p>
<p>On Thursday, officials said they were looking for a 6-foot-tall white man with light brown hair. Officials said the person was clean-shaven and wearing a blue and white striped shirt, gray shorts and brown sandals.</p>
Back at the beginning of the month, I wrote about Virginia’s “mandatory gay adoption” fight. Some proposed new regulations for licensed adoption agencies were just muddling, ignored, through the public review process, of interest to no one besides adoption agencies in Virginia, until some right-wing culture warriors noted that the new regulatory language prohibited “discrimination based on race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, disability, or family status.”
Because discriminating against people based on many of those categories is why they get up in the morning, these culture warriors instructed their minions to flood the Virginia Department of Social Services with their comments. And in order to get everyone nice and mad, people like Maggie Gallagher and the foot soldiers of other religious right and anti-gay groups told everyone that these rules would force god-fearing child-placement group to shutter their doors rather than give children to deviant homosexuals (or atheists). And then the children would suffer!
After the Internet commenters did their important work, the elected Republican officials joined the fight. Governor Bob McDonnell and conservative superstar Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli adopted the talking points of the right-wing groups wholesale, with Cuccinelli declaring that the Board of Social Services was forbidden from forbidding discrimination, and with McDonnell having everyone in his administration work together to make the board vote on new regulations without the discrimination language. The new regulations were voted on before members of the board had time to fully review them, due to pressure from the governor’s office.
From a Virginian-Pilot editorial:
Vice chairwoman Trudy Brisendine also pleaded for a one-month extension, noting that staff with the attorney general’s office and social services had refused to answer questions about the regulations until the day of the meeting.
“Unfortunately, I’m in a position of being forced to vote on this before I’m ready,” she said.
The Virginian-Pilot also says that Republicans were incorrect when they said the regulations as drafted would’ve allowed gay couples to adopt children, as that is already prohibited by Virginia law (because they are so, so pro-family there).
So misinformation and bigotry won the day in Virginia. And the children, I’m sure, will be so grateful:
“There are many people in the system who cannot find people who will adopt them,” said Guy Kinman, a 93-year-old former Presbyterian minister.
“We have a problem when it comes to wonderful faith-based groups that have to do with adoption. But we also have a problem if, in recognizing their rights as churches, we do not find other families that would adopt the children we’re concerned with.”
As the Washington Post reports, there are 1,300 children in Virginia ready to be adopted, out of 5,700 children in the foster-care system. And Virginia currently forbids unmarried couples — heterosexual or otherwise — from adopting.
The Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT civil rights groups got involved in the fight eventually, but the anti-gay groups got there first and were much louder about it. And they won.
You know those lists of “wacky” old laws from across America that are still on the books? (A widowed man cannot wear a striped hat on Sundays in Missouri!) Well the rules banning gay couples in Virginia from adopting are like those, except they’re blatantly anti-children and still being enforced, in 2011. So not that funny.
Virginia Tech campus (Credit: Wikimedia/Epicv27) 
A pro-choice activist protesting in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington November 30, 2005(Credit: Reuters) 
Weird Al performs this way. 
The orginal seal of the state of Virginia 
