Pants can droop, morals can't

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Pants can droop, morals can’t				February 23, 2005

Though I’m not a big fan of Sen. Tommy Norment (R-3^rd), I must say that my respect for the man was revivified when he admitted last week that he was “embarrassed.”

What embarrassed the good senator this time had nothing to do with driving tipsified. Nor was he talking about Paul Jost’s latest rants against him.

No, his present state of embarrassment was brought on by the fact that he awoke one morning to find that Virginia was being ridiculed mercilessly on CNN and in papers from Fargo, N.D. to Sydney, Australia. It seems that Algie Howell Jr., a Democratic delegate from Norfolk, had cajoled the witless House of Delegates into sending along to the Senate a bill that would outlaw droopy drawers and the revelation of underwear above the droopy drawers.

What the Republicans had put in the water fountains in the House to cause Howell to come up with such hare-brained legislation no one knows. But red-faced Norment and his fellow senators were having none of it and mercifully killed the bill in committee.

Would that they had been just as embarrassed over the flap about choosing a state bat, but that didn’t happen. Next year they’ll no doubt be debating the state worm.

What I suspect is genuinely troubling Norment is the fact that in recent sessions the differing philosophical approaches to legislation between the House of Delegates and the Senate have created a divisiveness hitherto unknown. All too often the House, which seems psychotically driven to push its extreme social agenda, winds up sending to the Senate a plethora of bills doomed on arrival because of their inexcusably radical approach to an issue.

One such bill, HB 2921, would have virtually removed gays from the adoption process. The Senate Committee on Courts and Justice, on which Norment sits, overwhelmingly killed the bill because of already existing legislation that includes moral factors in adoption procedures.

Nor did it help that the bill’s sponsors introduced “experts” on homosexuality, such as Paul Cameron, the director of the Family Research Institute. Cameron, who has been dumped by several professional psychiatric and sociological groups because of his bogus views, left the committee somewhat aghast when he informed them that he knew that most gays died before age 50. This he divined as a result of reading the obituary columns in the Washington Blade, a gay D.C. newspaper.

Other similarly irrational bills to make access to abortion clinics more difficult and to outlaw gay-straight alliance clubs in public schools were also quickly quashed by the Senate.

All this led one contritely moderate delegate to wonder aloud why the House had spent most of this session “whacking gay people.”

No doubt Norment and some of his more moderate Senate colleagues are wondering the same thing.

Why, in addition to the bills mentioned above, has the House regurgitated no less than 76 constitutional amendments, two of which ban gay marriage? Why did they refuse to retract Virginia’s sodomy law, which the Supreme Court struck down last year? Or legislation from the dark ages that prohibits the cohabitation of two unmarried consulting adults? Why pile restriction after restriction on a woman’s legal right to choose?

Such social engineering is eerily reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws regulating Jewish marriages in 1935 or of the Third Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion created by Heinrich Himmler in 1936. As a result of that, women who had abortions or men who engaged in homosexual sex were sent to prison for ten years. In 1938, 8,000 homosexuals wearing their pink triangles were sent off to concentration camps, never to be heard of again.

When Virginia gets into the business of legally marginalizing and thus denigrating any group it deems asocial or impure, it runs a tremendous risk of bringing itself perilously close to events in history that are far more than embarrassing. They are repulsive and disdained by any society that dares call itself democratic and free.

Uncannily synergistic are the agendas of the Republican rightists in the House and the Virginia Family Foundation, an advocacy group opposed to gay rights and abortion, and for prayer in the schools. If such a connection exists, the homophobic hucksters of hooey in the House have labored diligently for their dubious sponsor.

Yet there may be a glimmer of hope that the brand of conservatism that pervades the sexually-oriented legislative radicalism on the state and national levels may be jarring awake those Christians in whose name invasive and discriminatory laws are being enacted.

As Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister who writes a column for the National Catholic Reporter, put it: “The (conservative) agenda is simply too narrow, too concentrated on issues around human sexuality alone, and too self-centered to be the agenda that drove Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem curing lepers, feeding the hungry and raising the dead to life.”

Perhaps it is that narrow agenda that is the real source of embarrassment for Norment. We can hope only that he and his more moderate colleagues in the Senate continue their search for reason and a justice that fosters the pursuit of happiness for all Virginians.