Readers who get their news online may have missed some new information about the Courthouse displays/public forum controversy in the print version of the Leesburg Today article. This information came to light on Tuesday, after they had posted the online version but before they went to press. I don’t know why Leesburg Today didn’t update the online article.

Many of the speakers demanding to know “why Christmas is being banned” [sic] also wanted to know, after the board had established a policy last December, “why this is being brought up again.” One could feel the outrage that they were being dragged down to the board room, away from their family dinners and whatnot, to give the very same testimony again. Well, we are now reminded of the answer to that question.

Several residents wondered why they had to come before the Board of Supervisors again, when the issue had been dealt with before the holidays last year. Tuesday, Vice Chairman Susan Klimek Buckley (D-Sugarland Run) addressed that question head on, pointing out that the staff report shows that Delgaudio made an amendment to the board’s December motion requiring the Courthouse Grounds and Facilities Committee to return to the full board with any of its recommendations. This issue was brought forward by the committee earlier this month and referred to Tuesday’s meeting for action.

“There’s your explanation. The courthouse committee has made a recommendation. This board voted that those recommendations should come before this body,” Buckley said, adding that board members “should remember that fact” when discussing the issue of the displays.

There you have it: Mr. Delgaudio issued an overwrought plea to his followers, exhorting them to sacrifice their personal time for this “urgent” issue… that he himself had made sure would come before the board for the purpose of just such an event. This was a spectacle due entirely to his own orchestration. Gosh, does it sound like an election year might be around the corner? This is masterful political manipulation, because the people being used as props are actually angry with everyone but the politician who is using them. If I found this sort of thing remotely palatable, I might say “Well done,” but in fact I find the cynical disregard for his constituents and others used in this way too nauseating for words.

There is another irony to note, also the product of Mr. Delgaudio’s overactive propaganda mill: The Courthouse Grounds and Facilities Committee has been made the target of wrath and accused of declaring a “war on Christmas,” but did not in fact do anything to interfere with Christmas displays. In the span of years during which there were only Christmas displays on the courthouse grounds, the committee made no recommendation to prohibit them. It was only after other types of displays became a reality that the committee recommended a ban. While those who cherish the idea of a public forum open to all and free from viewpoint discrimination might take exception to this, those who are only concerned about the right to express Christian beliefs should not.

Although I disagree with their goals, the latter group certainly has a lot to be angry about. If they took a good hard look at the facts, maybe they would notice how that anger has been misdirected and used.

As my able colleague tells us, over 40 Loudoun projects are being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – and he names a few of them here. One Loudoun recipient that he discovered but did not name is this one, awarded the amount of $1,800 for the purpose of “reviewing applications”: Patrick J. Nolan, resident of Leesburg and Vice President of…wait for it…Prison Fellowship Ministries.  Prison Fellowship is of course the creation of one Chuck Colson, the “hatchet man” of Watergate turned “conservative Christian” bully, and it happens to be headquartered – tax-free – in Loudoun County. (For background on my concerns about Prison Fellowship activities, see Prisoner reentry initiative: Beware of manipulated data and Your tax dollars at work: Funding religious discrimination.)

It was embarrassingly easy to find pages of material produced by Prison Fellowship and its associated “Colson Center for Christian Worldview” deriding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as “statism” and promoting the view that government “intrusion” in such matters as an imploding economy is “unbiblical.”

Here, Mr. Colson himself says that “the so-called stimulus package was nothing more than a pork-barrel potpourri of political favors,” and here he refers to it as “a buffet of $800 billion in what I can only call one of the biggest grab-bag boondoggles in American history” (there appears to be a food theme). I think this is my favorite, though. In this piece, Colson complains about the stimulus package (and government assistance in general) because it might lead to lower religiosity. You see, if people in need are receiving help from their fellow citizens in the form of government assistance, they are less likely to seek help from churches and have their (voting, one suspects) behavior directed by the religious authorities favored by Mr. Colson.  

Other Prison Fellowship writers refer to leaders “who fritter away trillions-sapping our economic vitality and options-on second-tier issues such as “economic stimulus,” “disagree with the stimulus package as a matter of economic principle,” rename it the “Generational Theft Act,” and call it a “covert strategy” to “overthrow capitalism.”

It just goes on and on.

As we also know, Congressman Frank Wolf (who is in turn heavily promoted on all the Prison Fellowship media outlets) voted against the Act. I expect that Congressman Wolf will contact Mr. Nolan immediately about his breach of principle.

Put it back in the “grab-bag,” Mr. Nolan. You should be ashamed of yourself. Give it back.

“At some point — maybe only once in their life — everyone agrees with the ACLU,” Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the ACLU told the Washington Post.

Because at some point, each of us will manage to offend someone else with our freedom of expression, and the ACLU will be there to remind that person that there is no Constitutional right to not be offended. As a general rule, it’s the right to express “unpopular” views that needs a Constitution to defend it, but it’s good to have an occasional reminder that the principle applies across the board.*The ACLU sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors yesterday in advance of the public hearing, urging them to keep the Courthouse grounds open as a public forum for all who wish to erect a display. This puts the allegedly “liberal” group on the same side as Dick Black (who made a predictably kooky “War on Christmas” public comment) and Eugene Delgaudio, a detail that was lost on none of our local media.  

Since viewpoint discrimination is not an option on public property (and as much as certain parties might wish otherwise, they know better by now than to say it), the choice is between “all” who wish to express themselves, or “none.” I admit to having been on the fence about this one. The right to free expression is a fundamental liberty, as most of those advocating for the “all” position are pointing out. The best antidote to speech that offends is not censorship, but more speech. So when the Klan or another hate group inevitably demands the right to erect a display in the public square, that’s just the price of being a free society. There is no right to not be offended.

“We should all be supportive of preserving traditional town center forums,” says Willis in the ACLU letter. “They are not only an important part of our cultural and political heritage, but also of our ongoing vitality as a nation.”

And he’s right about that. But hold on – why the Courthouse? If the issue is having a forum in the public square open to all, why is it important to use the Courthouse when there are other centrally located public sites – like the Loudoun Government Center or the Leesburg Town Hall, which the Town Council has already offered?

As critical as the right to free expression is, there are other interests just as fundamental. Sometimes there’s a situation in which equally fundamental rights are in conflict – which is why then-Chief Justice nominee John Roberts’ remark that judging is just a matter of “calling balls and strikes” will go down as one of the more thoughtless and shallow in the history of judicial nominee hearings. If weighing such competing interests was so straightforward, we wouldn’t need that branch of government.

This decision happens to involve one of those competing interests situations, because one of the interests is equal justice. As a leader from one of our religious communities explained the other side of the argument to me, the Courthouse is different from other public spaces because it represents the principle that everyone (in theory, at least) will be treated equally under the law. Anything that could be a barrier to someone seeking justice (and that could easily take the form of a display expressing hostility to that person’s identity or very existence) doesn’t belong at a courthouse. There are faith communities that were invited, but chose not to participate in the interfaith holiday display two years ago, and the location at the Courthouse – not just any public space – is the primary reason.

Significantly, Judge Horne, whose decision years ago allowed the original display of the holiday creche, has asked for the judges to be “given the opportunity to consider, should they wish to do so, the impact of the use of the grounds on the operation of their Courts.” Supervisor Delgaudio cast the only vote this morning to deny that requested delay. My conclusion? He cares less about governance than about politics, or rather politicizing a conveniently inflammatory issue – which is nothing new. That conclusion is supported, robustly, by the fact that he and/or his aide were busily making phone calls all day exhorting his followers to attend the hearing, and the related facts that virtually every pro-display speaker was identifiable as a Republican activist, and that Suzanne Volpe was holding court in the back of the boardroom, bloviating about “putting God back in government.” In fact, the public hearing was indistinguishable from an LCRC meeting, minus the “moderate” wing.

So this is, notwithstanding the appearance of genuine constitutional issues, in practice about nothing but politics. Fortunately, there is a solution that addresses both competing interests. Apparently, when this came up last year Supervisor Miller suggested moving the whole shebang to a different public location. As noted earlier, the Leesburg Town Council has already said that if the courthouse grounds prohibition is reinstated the displays can be erected on the Town Hall grounds instead. An added benefit is that some voices excluded by choice from the courthouse location would join the public forum. This seems like a very reasonable compromise. For those for whom the issue is access to a public forum open to all (the ACLU position, and my position) this should be satisfactory. For those who are still unsatisfied, they will have the opportunity to explain why the expression of their views must be linked to the visible symbol of equal justice in our community.

* In fact, the ACLU is always neutral in upholding the principle of free expression, and applies it without regard to content. As a side note, this raises some interesting questions about the purpose of the sound-alike group “American Center for Law and Justice,” with its claim to be the only group defending the expressive rights of Christians. Since in reality the ACLU already defends the right to all religious expression in accordance with the Constitution, as we see here, what is it that the exclusive ACLJ is intended to do?

In her acceptance speech when receiving her recent Chesapeake Climate Action Network award, Supervisor Andrea McGimsey said this: “Just start wherever you are, and DO something.”

So we did. We had rented a skid loader for another project, and while we had it onsite we also built a bio-swale to better manage the flow of rainwater through our yard. “Swale” is a term that’s being used a lot in the ongoing kerfuffle over the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act and its application in Loudoun, so let’s start by clarifying what one is. Although we have seen the terms used as if they are interchangeable, a swale is not the same thing as a drainage ditch. Drainage ditches are what VDOT installs along the roads; their purpose is to direct water off the road surface and then down grade parallel to the road, into some larger conduit, and eventually into the bay. The purpose of such drainage ditches in residential developments appears to be getting the water away from the property as quickly as possible, before it gets anything wet.  You can see this application in a conventional Loudoun residential development here.  

An actual swale of the sort under discussion here has a very different purpose – retaining the water. A swale is constructed perpendicular to grade. Its purpose is to interrupt the flow of water down a slope, slowing it down so that it has a chance to percolate into the soil. The occupant of the land benefits because the swale retains moisture to grow plants without supplemental watering, and the rest of the community benefits because it filters and reduces the storm runoff that overwhelms and sickens our waterways at the same time that it recharges our groundwater. Our swale has the added benefit of creating a level area under our clothesline.

The swale that we built is the most basic manifestation of this principle – simply a long, shallow depression cut along the contour of a slope with a berm on the downward side, like this:

Our house is built into a hillside. Those of you who have built houses here know that the final inspection for occupancy requires the site to be “seeded and mulched.” Having just built a house, we were tired. Consequently, that seeded and mulched hillside had stayed exactly what it was: a long, unbroken grassy slope, down which rainwater flowed unimpeded into the stream, then into the creek, then into the Potomac River at the bottom of the mountain. There was plenty of riparian buffer before it got there, but I’d rather keep that water up here where it’s useful for growing food. Both the problem and the process for addressing it are illustrated in the photos below.

As the post linked above describes, conventional stormwater management is centralized and requires engineering and materials to which the average homeowner does not have access; it cannot be, in other words, a DIY project. Under conventional design, the homeowner is dependent on Those Who Have Concrete and Big Machines to magically whisk the water away – and then typically must buy the water back for irrigation.

Low Impact Development design is different. Because it is decentralized, with its elements distributed across a project, individual homeowners can apply a single practice that works for their site, like our swale. Communities can pool resources to improve the water management of a common area, and – even better – developers can design projects from the ground up using Low Impact Development practices, which would both conserve our water resources and save significant costs over conventional development. These decentralized practices don’t require large-scale infrastructure maintenance, such as land-devouring retention ponds and huge concrete culverts. They can be built and maintained by ordinary people using basic landscaping equipment, enabling a diversity of small local operators and businesses to thrive.

Start where you are. Just do something. This is individual responsibility and empowerment, the antithesis of reliance on government agencies and big corporations to solve our problems. If individuals, communities and developers decided to solve the problem of our degraded waterways, there would be no need for a Chesapeake Bay Protection Act to argue about in the first place.  

Crossposted on Equality Loudoun.

Allowing gay men and lesbians to marry would “be a victory for the worthy ideas of tolerance and inclusion…[and] a victory for, and another key expansion of, the American idea,” and it would also “likely be accompanied by a wide-ranging and potentially valuable national discussion of marriage’s benefits, status and future.”

Also, marriage equality “would probably reduce the proportion of homosexuals who marry persons of the opposite sex and, thus, would likely reduce instances of marital unhappiness and divorce.”

So testified a key expert witness in the Proposition 8 trial.

You are probably assuming that this was a witness for the plaintiffs suing to overturn Prop 8. If so, you are wrong. This is the testimony under cross examination of David Blankenhorn, witness for the proponents of Prop 8.

The closing arguments are today, and are being live-blogged at prop8trialtracker.com

Bye, Marshall-Newman. It’s been fun.

This explains a lot – such as people who simultaneously demand lower taxes and more and wider roads, those who proclaim that “now is not the time” to take steps to protect our perennial streams (which is sort of like saying “now is not the time to begin treatment for your cancer”), and those who insist that their religious freedom has been stolen from them when they are prevented from interfering with the religious expression of others.

I suppose it’s comforting, in a way, that this is nothing new.

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to question the activities of Prison Fellowship Ministries, why would some guy from Alexandria named “Donny Ferguson” – instead of, say, a representative from the organization’s Lansdowne headquarters – be writing letters in its defense to our local newspapers? Oh yeah; Ferguson used to be Eugene Delgaudio’s aide – an interesting association he failed to disclose in his letter.  Ferguson also misrepresents the facts in at least two significant ways, a subject we’ll return to later – but one has to begin by wondering why he would be so interested in protecting this recipient of a hefty Loudoun tax exemption from criticism.

The previous post Prisoner reentry initiative: Beware of manipulated data described how Prison Fellowship Ministries and its political allies in the Bush administration grossly misrepresented the success of Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative in order to justify government endorsement and public funding of the program, and suggested keeping a close eye on Governor McDonnell’s recently announced “prisoner reentry initiative.” I cited criminology researcher Dan Mears, who singled out the InnerChange program for criticism, reporting that the real data actually show a higher recidivism rate in comparison to control groups. Mears further questions, “particularly where some degree of coercion is possible, the appropriateness of using any taxpayer dollars for religious programming.”

It is to the issue of coercion that we now turn. In June 2006, a federal judge determined that the operation of InnerChange at a state prison in Iowa constituted an impermissible use of public funds in violation of the Establishment Clause. Judge Robert W. Pratt found that “[f]or all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates.” Accordingly, “the InnerChange treatment program is hereby permanently enjoined from further operation at the Newton Facility, or any other institution within the Iowa Dept. of Corrections, so long as it is supported by government funding.” Pratt found the violations so egregious that he took the unusual step of ordering Prison Fellowship Ministries to repay more than $1.5 million in state funding. He reasoned that the well-connected activist organization knew exactly what it was doing:

[Prison Fellowship] retained experienced, knowledgeable legal counsel that should have been aware of the constitutional risks associated with state funding of InnerChange. The Defendants, here, are not poorly funded nonpublic schools, but well-financed and sophisticated entities who know every contour of First Amendment law. In addition, evidence shows that the California Department of Corrections provided InnerChange and Prison Fellowship a full legal memorandum explaining why that agency could not, in good conscience, support state funding of InnerChange in its prisons given Establishment Clause jurisprudence.

Among the court’s extensive findings:

• Inmates enrolled in the InnerChange program were afforded privileges not available to other inmates, such as extra visitation time with family members, more books and computers, and earlier access to classes necessary for parole consideration.
• Inmates enrolled in InnerChange were housed in “Unit E,” previously used as the prison’s “honor unit” to reward those inmates “with the highest security or privilege levels associated with low risk behavior… When InnerChange moved into Unit E, inmates already residing there were moved to other [General Population] living units if they did not join the InnerChange program.” Unit E provided such amenities as separate bathrooms with privacy partitions, real doors to which the inmates had keys, and the absence of security cameras.
• InnerChange staff “shared many of the same duties as state correctional officers and other state prison employees,” and were vested with the authority to issue disciplinary reports and impose punishment.
• Although InnerChange/Prison Fellowship makes the claim that all inmates are welcome to participate and that the program does not attempt to convert inmates to Christianity, in practice participation meant renouncing one’s faith if it deviated from the Prison Fellowship-approved form of Evangelical Christianity. For example, the text for one class instructed that “the first step toward experiencing your freedom in Christ is to renounce…any other non-Christian religions or cults.” And although the civic values taught in the program could theoretically be separated from sectarian content, in this case they were not. “The intensive, indoctrinating Christian language and practice that makes up the InnerChange program effectively precludes non-Evangelical Christian inmates from participating.” Practitioners of other faiths who tried to participate testified that they were told by their “Biblical Counselors” that their faith practices were “the worship of false idols,” “against the Bible,” “of darkness,” and other deprecating remarks.
• Decisions regarding inmates’ “progress” were at the sole discretion of InnerChange employees. Here is an excerpt from an evaluation which ended with the dismissal of an inmate from the program:
  

  [y]our conduct has been excellent according to security standards, and you are a hard worker. With you as a member you have always completed your work and assignments, however, you are not displaying the growth needed to remain in the program. Your Focus is not on God and His Son to Change you.

  Another inmate who was expelled from the program was a Native American. He was asked repeatedly by staff if he was “saved,” and why he was continuing to practice his own faith traditions. The reason given for his ultimate dismissal was that he “was not growing spiritually,” and didn’t show enough enthusiasm during worship services. Numerous inmates of other faiths gave similar testimony about why they left or were dismissed from the program.

• To remain in the program through Phase IV (after release), former inmates were required to regularly attend a church approved by InnerChange.
• Public funding accounted for 30 to 40 percent of  InnerChange’s operating costs in the Iowa state prison system. On paper, state funding was supposed to be limited to “non-religious aspects” of the program – but according to InnerChange’s own documents there were no non-religious aspects. The curriculum was designed to be pervasively sectarian and had the intended purpose of indoctrinating InnerChange inmates into a particular form of “the Evangelical Christian belief system.” This description is from the InnerChange White Paper (at p. 59 of the District Court ruling):
  

  Biblical principles are integrated into the entire course curriculum of [InnerChange Freedom Initiative], rather than compartmentalized in specific classes. In other words, the application of Biblical principles is not an agenda item-it is the agenda.

  There was no serious attempt at distinguishing between secular and sectarian aspects of the programming (likely because the directors knew that, in reality, there was no such distinction);  reimbursement was “based on InnerChange’s representations to the state about how each InnerChange employee’s time was utilized” according to “a general understanding of how the time would be spent.”

In summation, Judge Pratt affirmed that “As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, one of the few absolutes in Establishment Clause jurisprudence is the ‘prohibit[ion against] government-financed or government sponsored indoctrination into the beliefs of a particular religious faith,'” and found that “[t]here is no set of circumstances under which state funds could support the…treatment methods employed in the InnerChange program.”

Prison Fellowship appealed the ruling – and here enter the misrepresentations of Mr. Ferguson. In his letter, he states that the three judge appeals panel, which included former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “tossed out” the lower court ruling, “allowing the program to operate.” That isn’t even close to the truth, and I suspect Mr. Ferguson knows it.

In fact, on every claim made by Prison Fellowship with regard to the Establishment Clause violation, the appellate judges strongly upheld the district court ruling. There is only one area in which the appellate judges reversed the district court, and that is the matter of “whether recoupment [the $1.5 million Prison Fellowship was ordered to pay back] is a proper remedy.” The order to return funds that had been paid for services rendered before the ruling was handed down was, as already noted, somewhat unusual. And that’s it. That’s the extent of what was reversed in the appeals ruling that “affirms in part, reverses in part, and remands.”

The case was never about the right of Prison Fellowship Ministries to operate a sectarian religious program. They were not enjoined from operating InnerChange in the Iowa prison system, only from operating it “so long as it is supported by government funding.” It is this distinction that both Prison Fellowship Ministries and Mr. Ferguson wish to confuse, with language about “public expressions of religious faith.” At trial, Prison Fellowship lawyers also tried to make the issue their own freedom of religious expression. This did not go over well.

If Prison Fellowship wants to contract its services at public expense, the court said, “they are burdened with the same responsibilities of any state employee: to respect the civil rights of all persons, including the First Amendment’s prohibition on indoctrinating others in their form of religion. In the context of this case, the Defendants have no legitimate interest in the accommodation of their own religious beliefs, but just the opposite. [Emphasis added]”

It is Orwellian to suggest, as does Mr. Ferguson in his letter, that the use of taxpayer money to fund the religious indoctrination of a (quite literally) captive audience is tantamount to “public expressions of religious faith.” The InnerChange program accomplishes exactly the opposite of free expression of religion within the prisons in which it operates: It marginalizes and punishes through disparate treatment all expressions of faith other than those approved of by the unaccountable staff of the InnerChange program. As the appellate ruling points out in one of its many affirmations of the lower court, “the inmate had no genuine and independent private choice; “he could either exercise his freedom of religion or avail himself of the one comprehensive treatment program, but not both.

Likewise, objections to Prison Fellowship’s continuing tax exemption here in Loudoun have nothing to do with the organization’s right to religious expression, which is not threatened in the least. That right is guaranteed to all of us under the First Amendment. Since they’re trying so hard to convince us that religious expression is the issue at stake when it clearly is not, Prison Fellowship must want something more.

There is absolutely no indication that Prison Fellowship concedes any wrongdoing in the Iowa case – in fact, they have continued to make themselves out to be the victims of discrimination – or that they wouldn’t engage in exactly the same behavior again if given the chance. For example, in Virginia.

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

This is an interesting one from Chuck Colson (of Prison Fellowship Ministries; read more about them here). In case you’re not aware, PFM operates a tax-free multi-million dollar headquarters located in Ashburn, and founder Chuck Colson produces both a daily radio and email commentary, broadcast nationwide. His topics rarely have anything to do with ministering to prisoners; rather, they represent salvos in the Republican/Christian nationalist-manufactured “culture war,” and reliably telegraph the talking points we can expect to hear from the rest of the Republican noise machine on any given issue.

Today’s commentary concerns the coming repeal of the disastrous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.  According to Colson, “unless something is done,” military chaplains will be drummed out of the service en masse when gay and lesbian servicemembers no longer have to lie about this important part of their humanity in order to serve their country. Why? Because the hypothetical chaplains will have to “confront a profoundly difficult moral choice” between providing spiritual support to all servicemembers who ask for it, and…what? Refusing to do that? It seems that a military policy that actively encourages people to lie has not created any moral dilemmas for these hypothetical chaplains, but never mind.

Here, Colson approvingly quotes some retired chaplains quoting Colson, from his own “Manhattan Declaration”:

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

Consider: Are the armed forces of the United States “Caesar’s,” or are they “God’s”? What are the implications of this (I assume) hasty and unexamined admission by Chuck Colson that he thinks military service is not in the realm of service to our nation, but is instead something to be rendered unto his God? And why are we, the taxpayers of Loudoun, supporting this anti-democratic nonsense?

Crossposted on Equality Loudoun

The Loudoun Times-Mirror this week published a very peculiar interview with Eugene Delgaudio. The first thing that jumps out at you is the incompetence. There is video, from which the reporters (the task required two of them) extracted the most coherent parts for inclusion in the story:

Q: What do you say to the statement that Kincora would force the county to take on a huge amount of debt?

A: I think that the debt issue is false because for a long time we have had a companion debt that no one has heard about. No one in Loudoun has ever once mentioned, factually, the [Community Development Authority] debt from Dulles Town Center. The facts are staff is playing to the ideological liberal elite that is statist in nature and anti-prosperity and essentially wants to enslave the 80 percent that pay the residential taxes. So the residents of Loudoun will see economic slavery forever if they’re fearful of a debt that doesn’t exist.

Keep in mind, this would be the part of the answer to question 3 that made the most sense. The debt “doesn’t exist”? I bet the county administrator and the rest of the board will be happy to hear that.

This answer isn’t even the most damning example. The rest of the interview is very much like this; incoherent denials of reality, devoid of serious policy content, studded with self-promotion and ideological buzzwords. See if you can make any sense of this one:

Q: Your concern regarding the immigrant community seems to be rooted on crime issues. What is your objection to the gay community?

A: Similar. It’s in their best interest that there not be federal legislation marking them. As a supervisor, we passed a law that no one understands and how can they implement it?

I can tell you that the defamatory, dehumanizing language Mr. Delgaudio uses to spread fear about these two targeted communities is “similar,” but I still have no idea what he means by this answer. His objection to the gay community is in some way “rooted on crime issues”? Mr. Delgaudio has commented here before; perhaps he can clarify for us what he was thinking. As for the statement that “it’s in their best interest that there not be federal legislation marking them,” the only thing this could mean is that he fundamentally does not understand the principle of the Fourteenth Amendment – or at least that is what he wants us to think. There is federal civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, and that mandates the reporting of violence directed at people because of their religion. Which religious community is “marked” by these laws? Catholics like Mr. Delgaudio? Obviously not; these laws don’t “mark” people of a particular faith. Laws that make reference to “sexual orientation or gender identity” work exactly the same way. It’s one thing to make a casual error by referring to a marginalized group instead of to the general characteristic (“religion,” “sexual orientation,” “political affiliation”), but to actually claim that such laws apply only to a specified community reveals either profound ignorance or profound dishonesty.  

Then there’s “we passed a law that no one understands.” Again, this reveals what would seem to be just a lack of basic competence in policy matters. An amendment to the county EEOP is not a “law.” It’s an amendment to a policy which the board has the legal authority to create. And it really does suggest a high degree of narcissism for someone to believe that because he doesn’t understand something, “no one understands” it. The policy wording is very simple to understand; the county government is prohibited from making employment decisions on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, which it obviously shouldn’t be doing, and from all accounts wasn’t doing anyway.

What is noticeably absent from the interview is the kind of abusive and defamatory language Mr. Delgaudio uses from the dais and in his constituent letters, not to mention in his day job activities. Some might be tempted to think this shows that he doesn’t really mean it – and that’s actually the problem. My question is why would that be better? What it means is that the use of “hyperbole,” as he describes his hate speech and emotional outbursts, is calculating and cynical.

Please understand: When I use the term incompetence, I’m speaking of policy and governance, not politics. One of the commenters on the LTM site has it right: Mr. Delgaudio is “a gifted politician,” meaning, unfortunately, someone who can speak of his concern for “the best interests” of people he has openly accused of sexual crimes against children and called perverted, filthy, disease-ridden, deviant, dangerous, a less-than-human “it;” in other words, people he regularly lies about and invites violence against. I no longer think that Mr. Delgaudio believes a word of his hate rhetoric; it is simply a part of his business model. These are the words of a charlatan who likely has a sociopathic personality disorder and sees nothing wrong with using such “hyperbole” to get attention and money. He buys direct mail marketing lists, crafts his appeals to a certain silly, fearful slice of the populace (see, for example, the much-ridiculed recent fundraising letter written in the style of bad pulp fiction that actually begins “One stormy night..”), and generates a monetary return. He runs his permanent political campaign the same way. There’s no law against what he’s doing, it’s just immoral.

Here’s what is even more reprehensible, though: Others who know exactly what he is and don’t care. His only Republican colleague on the board, Lori Waters, supported his venomous tirade against transgender people by repeating some of his insults herself, so don’t bother expecting moral courage from her. Self-styled “moderate” (!) Frank Wolf endorsed him. I’m not aware of a single Republican office holder who has stepped up to say that this sort of rhetoric goes too far. In addition to Frank Wolf, Mr. Delgaudio bragged of endorsements by Delegates Tom Rust and Joe May, County Treasurer Roger Zurn, Sheriff Steve Simpson and County Clerk Gary Clemens. That was in 2003. Will any of them now step up and say no? If not, then what will it take? Gentlemen, this is what doing the right thing looks like:

I’m curious: What race would you expect a person to be if that person recorded their race as “American” on their census form?

I ask because there is a Loudoun County blogger who recently invited readers to share their stories of “close encounters with the census.” I’m not going to link to this person, because 1) the political portion of her blog is nothing but an outlet for anti-Obama and anti-government paranoia, devoid of any reputable source material, and 2) it upsets her. Instead, I will link to this parody.

Here is the comment she used to illustrate, without a trace of irony, the sort of story she was looking for:

I filled in our census form and mailed it in. I made sure to put “American” for the race of all in my family. We got a call over the weekend to “verify that the information is correct”. My husband ruined my good fun because he was asked if anyone was black or latino and he says “No” and then the person asked “so you’re white” and my husband responds “yes”. ugg… I wish I had answered the phone.

A bunch of other people then chimed in, saying they had put down “American” as their race, too.Now, to be fair, there are legitimate and compelling reasons for objecting to the way race as a category was handled in the current census. None of them were to be found in this post, but they do exist. One is the use of offensive, anachronistic language, which the Census Bureau answers essentially by saying that part of the generation that used that language is still living, and it’s the job of the Bureau to get accurate information, not police language. It’s also true that there is no such thing as “race” in a literal sense. Individuals can’t be reliably categorized by race using some objective biological measure, so it’s fair to ask: Why do it at all? However, it matters who is doing the asking.

The idea of writing “American” in the race box seems to have its origin in a post on NRO’s The Corner by Mark Krikorian (he’s the anti-immigrant crank who claimed that Haiti is “screwed up” because it “wasn’t colonized long enough,” and that there isn’t enough pressure in American society for “Anglo-conformity”). It’s part of the general conspiracy-theory nonsense about the census, with one prominent claim being that the Constitution only requires enumeration, and that any questions beyond the number of people living in a residence are an illegal intrusion by the government.

Here is what the Census Bureau says about the collection of other demographic information:

Census information affects the numbers of seats your state occupies in the U.S. House of Representatives. And people from many walks of life use census data to advocate for causes, rescue disaster victims, prevent diseases, research markets, locate pools of skilled workers and more.

And they provide specific examples of how the data can be used in community organizing:

“Low-income families have clearly been targeted in this study.” The Organic Consumers Association used census data to lobby the Environmental Protection Agency to halt testing dangerous chemicals on low-income children in Florida. The testing was eventually stopped due to the petition.

This seems to be the issue. You might ask, for whom would “advocating for causes” and “more” on the basis of demographic characteristics like gender, ethnicity, family composition or income be a problem? For those who have an interest in denying the facts of ongoing discrimination, the first line of defense is to make discrimination difficult to prove. If you can prevent collection of the data that would make it possible to detect and demonstrate systematic discrimination against a community, voila! It doesn’t exist. It’s no surprise that this disinformation is being peddled by those resentful of losing “their” country, an Archie Bunker world in which white = normative, and everyone else is “other.”

Here is just a small sample of reasons, items that happened to land in my inbox just over the last three days, to think that we might still need to be monitoring systematic discrimination on the basis of that fiction we call “race.”

• “Black or White: Kids on race,” a series currently running on Anderson Cooper 360, reports the conclusions of a new study of children’s attitudes about race. Both white and (to a lesser degree) black children express overwhelming bias toward whiteness.
• The Texas Board of Education, among other revisionist changes to history textbooks, would like the slave trade to be renamed “the Atlantic triangular trade.” Because that’s so much more appealing, don’t you think?
• The new Republican Senate nominee for Kentucky, Rand Paul, believes that the market should have been allowed to determine whether or not Woolworth’s lunch counters must serve non-white citizens.
• In one of Loudoun County’s high income gated communities, two African-American women were reported as “suspicious” for taking a walk in their neighborhood, and were then stopped and investigated by Sheriff’s deputies a few blocks from their own house. One of the women reports that she was asked if they were “coming off service.”

There are people – some of them in our own community – who very much would like everyone to forget the standard argument against passage of the Civil Rights Act: That private business owners should be free to determine which members of the public they serve, and that losing this freedom was a violation of their First Amendment rights (history is now repeating itself, with this exact argument being deployed against passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act). They would like everyone to think that racism is somehow created by people identifying, analyzing, talking about and working to combat racism and its pervasive effects. Such is the sanctimonious, smug ignorance of people who actually think they are being “color-blind” when they write “American” as a synonym for “white.”