ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609040034
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT JOHNSON
IN MID-AUGUST, Sharon Bottoms tentatively decided not to continue her fight to regain her son Tyler from her mother, Kay Bottoms. Three years ago, Kay Bottoms won custody of her grandson on the grounds that Sharon, as a lesbian, is an unfit mother.
This development - and the recent ruling by the trial judge, Buford Parsons, banning Sharon from even visiting her son in the presence of her lover, April Wade, because of some imagined harm it would cause - closes a small, sad chapter in the long history of injustice in the commonwealth.
While some Virginians surely are ecstatic with the outcome so far, the more civilized society waiting somewhere in our future will undoubtedly look back on these events the way most of us today recall the disgraceful legal treatment of the Lovings, an interracial couple forced to leave Virginia 30 years ago because they broke its anti-miscegenation laws, or with the same mixture of incredulity and disgust we reserve for the U.S. Supreme Court's pre-Civil War decision in the Dred Scott case.
Most people's limited appreciation of the sweep of time makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to imagine how their actions might be regarded by later eras.
Tell them that their behavior toward a particular group is identical to that of zealots of the past. Try to explain that their attitudes toward those who do not share their views of sexual behavior are basically the same as the prejudices of misogynists toward women, of racists toward minorities or of religious fanatics toward "heretics." They inevitably will claim that while the situations may seem similar, they are really totally different, because their own views are true and therefore not biased. This is, of course, what every bigot says.
Judge Parsons obviously believes that homosexuality is rightly unlawful, and no amount of reasoned argument will change his mind. A majority of the members of the Virginia Supreme Court also apparently feel there is something wrong with homosexuality - though they had a hard time saying what. Their ruling ultimately boiled down to this ridiculous assertion: Tyler should be taken from his mother because he would be damaged if he lived with her by the prejudice of society toward gays and lesbians.
That finding is contradicted by every study known. Even if it were true, of course, then black and Asian and Hispanic and Italian and Irish and Indian and Muslim and Catholic and Jewish children should all be taken from their parents because of the great damage that society's prejudices would cause them. The court apparently did not feel that the great prejudice toward gays and lesbians exhibited by Tyler's new custodian, his homophobic grandmother, would hurt him, though he will be living with it, by court order, every single day.
It is not quite fair to call such people hypocrites, though their actions justify the term. Like millions of others of us, they are fearful of what they do not understand - and convinced that if they don't understand, it must be evil and they should do their utmost to destroy it.
Buford Parsons will be remembered by his admirers as a man who enforced morality at a time when it was crumbling all around. History will regard him as a rabid, provincial ignoramus, in the mold of a Father Coughlin, or a petty Joe McCarthy, twisting facts and logic when he needed to. He held that Sharon Bottoms' admitted homosexuality meant she must have engaged in oral sex, which is a felony, and was therefore an unfit mother - as if half the judges and legislators in Virginia had not done the same.
In the Deep South when I was teen-ager, black males often were sent to prison for several years for the crime of "eyeballing," or staring at a white woman - a felony committed every day by the white county attorneys who prosecuted them and the white juries and judges who convicted and sentenced them. While the victims of judicial bias are frequently chosen by sexual orientation these days, rather than skin color, they are victims all the same.
Legal mistreatment of racial minorities ended. Statutory and judicial discrimination against gays and lesbians in Virginia will end someday. Events now regarded by the misguided as victories, like the courts' theft of Tyler from his mother, will be seen for the outrages they are. Women and men looking backward to our time will shake their heads in bewilderment and dismay, wondering how anyone could have been so deluded as to judge the worth of another human being by the gender of her partner.
Legal homophobia, like Jim Crow, will have faded into antiquity. And like us, the men and women of that future will find a hundred thousand ways to let themselves believe that those marked for persecution in their own new, enlightened age are somehow different from those poor unfortunates - like Sharon Bottoms, her son and her partner - whom we tormented in our dark, benighted past.
Scott Johnson is director of clinical training and an assistant professor in the doctoral program in marriage and family therapy at Virginia Tech.
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