By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

  It’s fun, every once in a while, to wander back and read a 5-year-old column and see how fresh it still feels. Here’s one that ran Sunday, Jan. 18, 2004, as my Political Notebook. It isn’t as stale as I feared. Perhaps Virginia still changes at the pace of dear old sea slugs. The headline then read:

Little bills, big impact on mores

RICHMOND—

    The boys are back in town, so a raft of creative little bills to regulate the reproductive mores and sexual rights of individuals are back on the table.

    The male-dominated and conservative atmosphere of the General Assembly remains conducive to protecting the right to bear arms and bear children. Virginia’s men look out for their women in peculiar ways.

    The best little bill in the 2004 session of the General Assembly is a small morality measure that could temporarily spare the life of a few convicted criminals.

    Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Manassas, introduced the measure to ban the execution of anyone who is pregnant.

Halting executions?

    This extremely limited moratorium on capital punishment is less a baby step toward elimination of the death penalty than perhaps an attempt to enshrine in the state code certain rights afforded a small number of the unborn.

    Marshall’s legislative creativity knows no rival in Richmond.

    A bill-drafting giant, he is smart, principled and owns a sizable sense of humor, but the unintended consequences of his anti-death penalty measure are hard to imagine and may exceed even Marshall’s ability to foresee.

    The value of sperm samples on death row could skyrocket. Who is to say when a female inmate there is not pregnant? After All, Marshall considers a woman pregnant before a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus.

    In Virginia’s not-too-distant past, female lawbreakers and troublemakers could easily find themselves sterilized involuntarily, but the commonwealth abandoned such barbarity several decades ago.

    Death-penalty advocates could call for emergency contraception, or “morning after” pills on death row.

Promoting pregnancies?

    “All we are doing is encouraging sex in prison,“ said one legislative aide unsure if Marshall has anticipated fully the unforeseen effects of keeping pregnant women on death row locked up until they give birth.

    Inmate F2005 could be told to give a first and last kiss to her healthy, soon-to-be-motherless baby girl. The infant could become a poster child for banning executions.

    Expensive devices to detect and guard against contraband sperm may be needed on a more sterile death row where better-paid female guards would remain vigilant.

    Marshall’s other bills include a few that could curb abortion, which presumably would not be desired by a pregnant death row inmate unless she became depressed and suddenly wanted to speed her executiion.

    One bill to restrict abortions would require the procedure to be performed in a hospital “or in a medical facility or clinic located no more than 15 highway miles from a hospital emergency room.“

    Marshall’s legislative package includes more than life and death measures. The Manassas delegate also intends to protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage from out-of-state gay couples who might enter into a civil union and then move to Virginia and seek some sort of official recognition of their status.

    His House Bill 727 is not named after an airplane bringing gay couples to relocate in Virginia, of all places, but is titled “Same sex marriage; impeachment of judge.“

    Just as Marshall does not trust governors to do the right thing by pregnant death-row gun molls, he isn’t too sure Virginia judges are to be trusted when civil unions are considered. His bill “provides that any judge who rules Virginia’s prohibition against marriage by persons of the same sex unconstitutional is deemed to have committed malfeasance in office and may be subject ti impeachment under the Virginia Constitution.“

    If threatening to impeach judges doesn’t do the trick to protect the sanctity of marriage, Marshall has another couple of bills, dubbed the Affirmation of Marriage Act, one of them an emergency measure. That act would provide that Virginia is under no legal obligation to recognize a marriage, civil union or partnership contract “or other arrangement purporting to bestow any of the privileges of obligations of marriage under the laws of another state ... unless such marriage conforms to the laws of this commonwealth.“

    One of the bills quotes former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in its text as saying “that in terms of legal rights there is no practical difference between same-sex civil unions and marriages.“ Marshall asserts in the legislation that “neither status is needed for the exercise or enjoyment of civil rights by citizens with same sex attractions.“

    Marshall truly enjoys his status as the creative conservative gadfly of the House.

    “He is very dedicated to his cause and is always looking for new ways to promulgate legislation in the areas that are important to him,“ said Sen. Jeannemarie A. Delovites, R-Vienna.

    His efforts to enshrine his Roman Catholic beliefs about sex and marriage are becoming more and more the talk of the House.

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