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Our View
Democracy
at work
It could be the best of times and the worst of
times, if recent new laws out of Richmond are
any indicator, and nothing acts quite so much as a measure of our collective thinking, confused and otherwise ordered, as what our lawmakers feel the need to impose on those whom they presumably represent. Theirs is democracy at work, we guess, which is something we celebrate on the Fourth of July, but sometimes their products lead us to wonder about their thinking.
One new law provides public school students with “alternatives” to animal dissection in biology class. Who could have conceived of this? What alternatives will squeamish children use, model frogs and plastic mice that bleed Kool-Aid and ooze Jello? At what cost in time and money and sheer inconvenience?
Here’s another one. Starting July 1, we can only Hick a pet that is not our own if that pet happens to attack our pet on our property — otherwise, we get slapped with an “animal cruelty” charge. Tell that to the person whose hairless Chihuahua is being savaged in a public parking lot by Rottweilers.
Two other new laws we probably could live without — that only give the legal profession new fertile ground to plow — call for a penalty of a year in jail and/or a $2,500 fine for anybody caught recording a movie while it is being shown in a theater. Is this how you watch a movie? And under another new one, landlords can no longer peep into dwellings to spy on tenants. Is this, we ask, a whole unpublicized new class of criminal?
One law makes us wonder again why lawmakers feel the right to be so self-righteous. The new Affirmation of Marriage Act for the Commonwealth states that a civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obliga
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