I realize that our beloved Tim Kaine fighting against gays in VA has already been blogged here - but frankly the awareness of the seriiousness of the issue to the lives of gay people seems somewhat lacking.
(You know - single issue nutjobs like me)
I wanted to provide just a touch of perspective.
Gov.-elect Tim Kaine intends to sign a bill calling for a referendum banning gay marriage in Virginia.
Paradise Lost
By Michelle Boorstein
Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page W14
After years of hiding their love, Barbara Kenny and Tibby Middleton found a place where they felt comfortable being a couple -- until Virginia's lawmakers chased them across the Potomac
Link
Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers
This landmark volume chronicles the history of laws banning interracial marriage in the United States with particular emphasis on the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman who were convicted by the state of Virginia for the crime of marrying across racial lines in the late 1950s. The Lovings were not activists, but their battle to live together as husband and wife in their home state instigated the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that antimiscegenation laws were unconstitutional, which ultimately resulted in the overturning of laws against interracial marriage that were still in effect in sixteen states by the late 1960s.
American anti-miscegenation laws were first enacted in Maryland in the seventeenth century and continued to the year 2000 with a section of the Alabama Constitution forbidding the state legislature from legitimizing interracial marriage. An increasing number of citizens marry across racial lines today, and there have been radical changes in laws regarding interracial marriage in the past few decades. But even as other landmarks of the civil rights movement have been the subjects of numerous scholarly tomes and personal memoirs, this is the first comprehensive treatment of the Loving case and the only study to tell the Lovings' story within the full historical context of interracial marriage bans.
In Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving, lawyer Phyl Newbeck describes how the laws banning intermarriage came about, how they were perpetuated, and how they were finally struck down. In addition to detailing the story of the courtship, marriage, and arrest of the Lovings, the volume describes the growth of antimiscegenation legislation, the subsequent fight to eliminate racially discriminatory practices, and the litigations that continued years after the Supreme Court had ruled on the issue. With consummate skill, Newbeck looks at a generous and representative sampling of court cases that invalidated marriages and imprisoned couples during the twentieth century, including ones in which inheritance rights were severed and child custody was terminated due to interracial unions.