Gay-bashing strikes real parents, real lives

This from Virginia... but will any of them listen?

Discrimination sits a little sourly on the stomach when it’s your own flesh and blood. Del. Dick Black illustrates how personal experience breeds contempt for injustice, as well.

Black, a Loudoun County Republican and one of the most socially and fiscally conservative members of the House, emerged as a surprise champion of indigent defendants this year.

A former judge advocate in the military, Black knows firsthand that prosecutors and defense attorneys need roughly equal resources. Save for his military experience, he might never have noticed the startling mismatch in legal services for Virginia’s poor.

Too bad Black’s personal empathy quotient doesn’t overlap with Cheney’s.

If it did, Black might have been a little less willing to damn lesbian and gay parents with outlandish claims about child abuse on the floor of the House of Delegates last week. [...]

As passed on a 71-24 vote, the bill requires pre-adoption investigations into whether “the petitioner is known to engage in current voluntary homosexual activity” or is unmarried and living with an unrelated adult.

The bill doesn’t say the adoption can’t occur.

But the new language comes right after a section requiring investigators to consider whether the birth parents are morally unfit. There’s not much doubt what the legislature intends. [...]

To have such families tarnished and made fearful by wild accusations and mean-spirited laws feels intolerable. These are not dry statistics or theoretical debating points. They are real people, watching horrified as the General Assembly encroaches further and further into their lives. (source)