Newsletter

February 20, 2005

Dear Friends:

HEARTS AND FLOWERS

Week Six began with the annual Valentine’s Day ritual all over the General Assembly Building. Streamers, balloons, and flowers were everywhere. Cards were exchanged among the secretaries and legislative aides. Bowls filled with huge amounts of chocolate were on every desk. Somebody mounted a Valentines-decorated flamingo on my door. I don’t know where this tradition came from, but it was well established when I got here. It seems to be building momentum year by year – this time, we had contests between the offices for gaudiest decorations. Well, I guess there are worse things we could commemorate in the halls of the GAB. NASCAR, for instance, would be much noisier.

TRIBUTE TO A PIONEER

Monday was also the day I helped celebrate Black History Month in the Assembly by honoring Dorothy Hamm, a civil rights advocate who lived most of her life in Arlington. In her early years, Mrs. Hamm was a plaintiff in five landmark court decisions including the cases that led to the desegregation of Arlington’s public schools, hospitals and theatres, the elimination of the poll tax, and the removal of racial designation from public forms and voting records.

One of her family’s most distinguished contributions to Arlington and the Commonwealth was their role in desegregating Stratford Junior High, a school in their neighborhood that had been barred to them because of the color of their skin.

On February 2, 1959, nearly five years after Brown v. Board of Education, Stratford became the first public school in the Commonwealth to be integrated.

Last May 17th, on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a historic marker was unveiled at the old Stratford Junior High (now the home of the HB Woodlawn program). Sadly, Mrs. Hamm was not there. She had died three days earlier. But everybody there that morning knew that her efforts had made that day possible.

The House recognized the presence of Mrs. Hamm’s husband Leslie; her daughter Carmella Hamm, who works in the GAB Television Studios; her son Edward, Director of the Virginia Department of Minority Business Enterprise; and her grandson Bernard Hamm, who is assistant registrar for VCU.

POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

A brief procedural lesson: usually a bill is on the floor of the House for three days. On first reading, it is introduced with little fanfare. On second reading, the patron of the bill says why this bill is needed, debate ensues, and floor amendments can be added. This is where the heavy lifting is done. Sometimes the bill is killed here, but most often it is passed on to its third reading. On third reading, the bill is voted on, often without further comment. A patron may address the bill briefly, but debate is over.

This procedural norm was violated on February 7 on the bill that would restrict the eligibility of gay and lesbian Virginians to adopt kids. The original wording of the bill was stark in its language and its intent:

“No person under this statute may adopt if that person is a homosexual”

The prettied-up version of the legislation had the same target, but attacked it obliquely: it would have required the folks conducting the adoption investigation to determine whether the petitioner “is known to engage in current voluntary homosexual activity”. (During debate on this amendment, I suggested several ways the investigator could make this determination: possibly he could inventory the petitioner’s CD collection, seeing if it leaned too heavily toward show tunes or Judy Garland box sets. Or maybe the investigator could case karaoke night at the local bars, taking down the names of those who performed Village People songs with a bit too much enthusiasm.)

The ridiculous turned ugly on February 7, when, on third reading, the patron of the bill unloaded the following on the House:

“There is data that indicates that 29% of the adult children of homosexual parents had been specifically subjected to sexual molestation by that homosexual parent, as compared to about point six percent of adult children of heterosexual parents. That is an increased risk of incest with a parent of a factor of about fifty times.”

Think back to the procedural lesson: there was no way to question, rebut, or debate that incendiary assertion. After multiple hours of Googling, though, I was able to track down the truth.

A “Point of Personal Privilege” can be invoked when the honor of an individual member, or of the institution, has been called into question. This Wednesday, I rose to speak on this matter, because I felt the integrity of the House’s deliberative processes had been violated.

The statistics that were cited on the floor of the House, it turned out, originated in an article in an obscure social science journal. Since then, the allegation that homosexuals were inherent child molesters had bounced around the Internet, gaining legitimacy by its repetition.

The author of this data runs an outfit called the “Family Research Institute,” which has made a cottage industry of taking anti-gay political positions, gussying them up with footnotes and bibliographic references and other trappings of academic research, and passing them off as objective social science.

But this individual’s professional standing as a social scientist has been thoroughly discredited. In 1983, the American Psychological Association expelled him from membership on ethics charges. Three years later, the American Sociological Association went so far as to pass a resolution publicly stating that he was not a sociologist, and condemning his “consistent misrepresentation of sociological research.”

As for the actual data that was the basis of the statistics quoted on the floor:

An independent review of that data identified at least six serious errors in its sampling techniques, survey methodology, and interpretation of results. The review went on to say, “The presence of even one of these flaws would be sufficient to cast serious doubts on the legitimacy of any study’s results. In combination, they make the data virtually meaningless.”

In other words, the information we were presented was a crock. It was junk science.

I reminded the Members that legislation targeting homosexuals, such as this bill, has a disturbing historical context:

“Throughout history, disfavored minorities have been depicted as preying on the vulnerable, with tragic consequences. The Medieval claim that Jews used the blood of Christian babies for their Passover celebration was a pillar of the anti-Semitism that still plagues the world. In the South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the vicious canard that black men were animals who lusted after white women served as a tool to perpetuate segregation and suppression.

“That brings us to Virginia in the year 2005, and the current disfavored minority: homosexuals. Recall the words we heard last week. We were asked to believe that some of our fellow citizens, solely by virtue of their sexual orientation, are predisposed by a factor of 50 to 1 to molest their own kids – their own kids. On the basis of this bogus statistic, generated by junk science, we are urged to stigmatize homosexuals in the adoption process. And all of this is done in the name of ‘protecting the children.’”

Winston Churchill once observed, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” The Internet has only accelerated the lie’s advantage. I hope that my speech helped to stop this particular lie in its tracks, and to give the truth a fighting chance to catch up.

A hopeful note: That afternoon, the Senate Courts of Justice Committee heard the anti-gay adoption bill that we had passed. Incredibly, the patron of the bill brought along the researcher whose junk science he had cited on the floor the previous week as an expert witness. After questioning him vigorously, the committee killed this bad, bad bill.

Next week I’ll catalogue more of the genius of bicameralism.

Bob Brink

Bob Brink