In a posting on his Overlawyered.com site, Walter Olson (who is also IGF's webmaster and a contributing author) takes aim at the new Virginia statute that declares null and void not only civil unions but also any "partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage"
Taking issue with National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and other conservative pundits who defend this indefensible statute, Olson writes that couples who have a Vermont civil union "might be in for a very rude surprise after their I-95 accident when Virginia treated them as legal strangers for purposes of hospital visitation and the like." Moreover, since at least one of the measure's sponsors has said he hopes the law will invalidate guardianship arrangements:
children who had lived uneventfully for years with the surviving female partner of their deceased mother in New Jersey or California might be subject to being seized and handed over to the Virginia social service/foster care bureaucracy because the family was so ill advised as to attempt a vacation trip to Williamsburg or Mount Vernon.
Olson also reminds us that "Virginia is the only state where
companies not large enough to underwrite their own insurance
policies are prohibited from offering domestic partner benefits,"
and that "it is perhaps needless to add that Virginia's powerful
religious-right lobby has vocally supported that prohibition." Yet
supposedly mainstream conservatives still refuse to condemn these
dangerous and damaging statutes that erode fundamental contractual
rights.
They Can Have Mississippi.
This isn't new, but it's a hoot. A reader points out a website,
www.christianexodus.com, is
from a group of fundamentalists preaching secession from the United
Sates to oppose the nation's embrace of gay marriage and abortion,
banning school prayer, and other abominations. They note on
their "Plan"
page
that the three states under consideration, due to their relatively
small populations, coastal access and Christian-conservative
citizenry, are Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. Guess they
never heard that the civil war kind of settled the issue of whether
states can secede. And how in the world did they overlook
Virginia?