Apr 30, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

RICHMOND, Va. — Perched atop a hill overlooking the James River, the Virginia state capital, with its portentous columns and classical porticos, is defensible to attack from all sides. It came under siege only once, in the last battle of Richmond during the Civil War, when embers from the fires set downtown by retreating Confederate troops landed on its roof and started to burn.

Historians have attributed the capital’s 215-year survival to both its height and its distance from the other buildings in Capital Square, which house government agencies and interest groups, businesses and partisan organizations.

Exactly 140 years after the last battle of Richmond in 1864, however, some gay Virginians are saying the capital is again being besieged, this time from inside the chambers of the House and Senate, by the social conservatives who occupy downtown Richmond.

The latest battle occurred two weeks ago, when the Virginia state legislature overruled by a veto-proof margin Gov. Mark Warner’s amendments to legislation that the Democrat says will strip same-sex couples of their rights to form any private legal contracts resembling marriage.

The intact passage of Del. Robert Marshall’s “Marriage Affirmation Act” explicitly added civil unions to the state’s DOMA law, making it clear that Virginia would not recognize civil unions performed elsewhere. That portion of the law had Warner’s support and would not have been affected by his amendments.

The lopsided votes in both chambers, despite the governor’s directive, demonstrated a need for progressive lobbyists — up against a conservative stronghold — to revise their approach.

“The gay community has to work five times harder than the social extremists with this legislature,” said Ellen Qualls, Gov. Warner’s press secretary.

Conservatives force issues
When socially progressive legislation — and progressive candidates — across the country meet with defeat, gay rights advocates typically attribute it to the insidious power of conservative groups. But the story behind what went wrong with the Warner amendments illustrates that, in the case of Virginia’s political landscape, they aren’t always crying wolf.

As soon as Warner’s office announced its proposed amendments on April 16 — amendments that would have nullified the contractual provisions of the law, but kept in place the provision banning recognition of civil unions — Dyana Mason, the executive director of Equality Virginia, went into action at her office three blocks away.

Though unhappy with the civil union prohibition, Equality Virginia hoped to at least push through the amendments. Although under a complicated best-case scenario, the measure could have rejected Warner’s changes, leaving him in a position to either sign or veto entirely an intact bill he did not like. But when the changes were defeated by a veto-proof margin, Warner signed the measure in its entirety.

Self-described as the gay advocacy group’s “media department, legislative department, and development department,” Equality Virginia’s sole employee e-mailed an action alert to the organization’s 10,000 members and personally placed briefing materials in the hands of key legislators by the end of the weekend.

Mason said she personally met with Warner during the amendment process and was told that Warner, though not a voluble stalwart of gay rights, would limit the scope of the bill, keeping Virginia law prohibiting same-sex marriage at the status quo.

“We have a good relationship with the governor and lieutenant governor [Tim Kaine],” said the 33-year-old Mason, looking a bit beleaguered as she sat at an ancient conference table in Equality Virginia’s two rooms — littered with banners and boxes of letterhead, indicative of its grassroots nature.

“We felt sure they would do everything they could to prevent this bill from passing.”

As Mason “e-mailed, snail-mailed and hand-delivered” Equality Virginia’s viewpoints across Capital Square, Mason’s counterpart at the Family Foundation of Virginia, Legislative Director Victoria Cobb, “provided a medium on our Web site for our supporters to call or e-mail their legislators.”

Dressed in a formal pink suit adorned with a diamond-embedded cross necklace, Cobb, 25, explained from her modern conference room on the 11th floor of one of Richmond’s new high-rises, that “in our viewpoint, legislators would see the governor’s amendments as a matter of semantics.

“All we had to do was point out the politics of his changes. They all know his hesitancy toward banning civil unions.”

But according to Richmond insiders, the Family Foundation doesn’t have to take much action during the legislative session because of its mobilization during election season.

In two Republican primaries last year, the foundation supported two conservative candidates to run against more moderate incumbents as retaliation for votes against issues important to ...