Speaking Out: Bogus Legislative Report Cards

When 'Family-Friendly' Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Arlington Journal, May 26 1999

During my first two years in the Virginia General Assembly, a number of surveys and questionnaires from special-interest groups have crossed my desk. I've found many of these groups try to slant their questions and select their issues to fit their ideological and political agendas.

Sometimes those efforts stretch credibility to the limit. But for out-and-out distortion, nothing can top the Virginia Family Council's ``Family-Friendly Report Card" touted so enthusiastically by Walt Barbee in his May 14 Journal column.

Make no mistake about it: Government policies should support and strengthen our families, and our elected officials should be held accountable for their votes on those policies. But the Family Council's Report Card is utterly useless as an objective tool to measure legislators' concern for issues affecting the family.

It is a political document designed purely to achieve partisan purposes.

Take the United Nations Biodiversity Treaty. Do you oppose it? If you do, you're ``family-friendly." The Virginia Family Council says so. I'm not making this up.

On the other hand, do you think we should reward Virginia teachers who demonstrate their professional skills by acquiring national teacher certification? If you do, you're ``family-unfriendly.'' Just ask the Virginia Family Council.

Sometimes the world of the Family Council Report Card becomes Alice's Wonderland, where black is white, up is down, and a word means whatever you say it means at a given moment.

An example: The Report Card's ``Criteria for Determining `Family-Friendly' Votes'' proclaims, ``Bills which increase the intrusion of government agencies into the home ... are not family-friendly."

Now, Virginians know the most outrageous instance of the government forcing itself into a family's personal affairs was last year's Hugh Finn case. There, political intervention in a family's decision over a comatose man's end-of-life care turned a wrenching private tragedy into a garish public spectacle.

Yet, through the Virginia Family Council's looking glass, if you voted for a bill making partial amends to Hugh Finn's widow by compensating her for some of the costs she incurred defending her family against this government-sponsored invasion of privacy, you're ``family-unfriendly."

The Report Card's handling of the food tax issue clearly exposes its blatant partisan bias.

The sales tax on food has a damaging impact on all of Virginia's families. The Democrats' initiative to reduce this most family-unfriendly of taxes overcame initial Republican opposition and gained widespread support during the 1999 General Assembly session.

Indeed, the food tax vote selected by the Family Council for its Report Card was bipartisan and unanimous.

But there's more to the story. With this year's $1 billion state budget surplus, many of us in the General Assembly felt we could and should take the additional family-friendly step of accelerating the timetable for eliminating the food tax. We put the question to a vote in the House on Feb. 9; unfortunately, it failed by the narrowest of margins.

Did the Virginia Family Council include this pivotal vote on its Report Card? Of course not. If they had, they would have caught their Republican friends on the wrong side of a real

"family-friendly" issue. So they punted by counting only the safe 100-0 food tax vote.

That free-ride issue of food tax reduction was one of the two "right" votes (in the eyes of the Virginia Family Council) that I cast in 1998-99, earning me my Report Card score of 11.

I guess that means I failed their litmus test, but, considering the Family Council's warped notion of what constitutes "`family-friendly" public policy, if I had scored any higher I would have asked for a recount.

- Del. Robert H. Brink, a Democrat, represents the 48th District in Arlington and is a candidate for re-election this fall.