Tuesday, June 29
Not guilty
Donna Somerville, a wealthy Orange county widow, was found not guilty today in the 2001 poisoning death of her husband, wrapping up a two-week trial and a steady drumbeat of front-page stories in The Daily Progress. Because it was not a jury trial, Orange County Circuit Judge Dan Bouton made the call, citing discrepancies in forensic evidence as a factor in his ruling. “This was not an acquittal on a technicality, it was an acquittal on the merits, which is the most satisfying,” Bouton told Olympia Meola of the DP.
Wednesday, June 30
Day of rest?
Thanks to a goof made by the General Assembly, employees of any Virginia business that stays open on weekends can now legally refuse to work on Saturday or Sunday, choosing these days as a “Sabbath” or “day of rest,” according to the law. That’s right, your favorite bartender may exercise his religious right to stop mixing martinis on Saturday. The accidentally important legislation, the AP today reports, was part of a well-meaning bill to excise Virginia’s archaic “blue laws” that ban Sunday work. But the replacement law mistakenly omitted weekend work allowances for private businesses. According to The New York Times, worried employers have besieged State government offices with questions, and have gotten few answers.
Thursday, July 1
King David
One day after being sworn-in as a City Councilor, David Brown, a chiropractor and one of four Democrats on Council, was today selected as Charlottesville’s new mayor by his fellow councilors. Brown’s right-hand man is recently reelected Democrat Kevin Lynch, who was chosen as vice-mayor today.
New rival?
Perennial football factory University of Miami and cross-state rival Virginia Tech officially joined UVA in the Atlantic Coast Conference today. The badasses from Miami bring their tropical uniforms to Scott Stadium on November 13.
Friday, July 2
School choice in City
It’s official, almost, that parents of children attending Clark Elementary, located on Belmont Avenue, may now request that their children go to another City school this fall. The news, announced late yesterday, is due to preliminary SOL scores, which show that Clark has not made enough progress on the standards testing as mandated by the Federal No Child Left Behind Act. Robert Thompson, a school official whose task it is to get the ball rolling on school choice at Clark, says that nationwide about 15 to 20 percent of parents have typically opted for choice. But because Clark is in a “close-knit” neighborhood where many students live a short walk away from the school, Thompson says, “I’m hoping that we’ll have a small percentage” of children being sent to other schools. He adds, however, “we don’t know.”
—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports
The straight and narrow
H.B. 751 prompts gay rights outcry
Earlier this spring, Philadelphia made headlines with the city-sponsored television ads specifically designed to court gay tourists. “Get your history straight,” the tagline beckoned, “and your nightlife gay.”
Like Philly, Virginia’s tourism industry capitalizes on monuments to freedom, and its policy toward homosexuality is attracting national attention. But that’s where the comparison ends: While the City of Brotherly Love strives to live up to its name, a new State law that nullifies same-sex partnerships has gay rights groups saying “Virginia is for haters.”
Indeed, that’s the name of a website calling for a tourist boycott of the Commonwealth. The website, www.virginiaisforhaters.org, is just one of the many rips on Virginia that have surfaced nationwide since April, when the General Assembly passed H.B. 751 by a veto-proof two-thirds majority. Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Manassas), a conservative Catholic known for rolling back abortion rights, sponsored the measure.
The bill amends Virginia’s 1997 Affirmation of Marriage Act, which prevents the State from recognizing gay marriages performed in other states. Marshall says he sponsored H.B. 751 to further prohibit the recognition of civil unions or domestic partnerships granted elsewhere.
“Marriage is only between one man and one woman,” says Marshall. “Virginia will accept no counterfeits.”
Democratic Governor Mark Warner has said he opposes same-sex marriage, but he said that H.B. 751 is unconstitutional because its prohibition of “any civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex” could “void existing contracts” and “have a host of unintended consequences.” Gay rights groups like Equality Virginia and other groups like the American Civil Liberties Union say the bill could affect wills, leases, child custody arrangements, medical decisions, business agreements and joint bank accounts.
Warner’s attempts to amend the bill were rebuffed by the General Assembly. Republican Albemarle Delegate Rob Bell voted for the bill, while Charlottesville’s Democratic Delegate Mitch Van Yahres voted against it. State Senator Creigh Deeds voted for an early version of H.B. 751, but finally voted against it.
In a letter to Marshall, Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said H.B. 751 “provides a needed safeguard for the institution of marriage” and that the bill is “constitutionally defensible.”
Kilgore’s stance will likely be tested, as a lawsuit challenging the bill will almost certainly be filed by Equality Virginia or by more powerful national groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU.
“There are similar [anti-gay] efforts in other states, but ours is the furthest along,” says Claire Kaplan, a member of both UVA Pride, a campus gay-rights group, and Equality Virginia. “When one law like this passes, everybody watches it.”
The bill has certainly focused attention on Marshall and Virginia’s historic reluctance to embrace social change. CNN, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and gay conservatives like blogger Andrew Sullivan and columnist Jonathan Rauch, who called the bill “Virginia’s new Jim Crow,” are just some of the national media that have criticized the it. Marshall says protestors interrupted his son’s high school graduation party.
While Virginia basks in this ignoble glow, Kaplan says H.B. 751 may have a silver lining. Virginia has become a front line in the national gay rights battleground, which only gets more heated as the Bush Administration continues to push for a heterosexual marriage amendment to theNARROW continued from page 9
U.S. Constitution. Kaplan predicts the debate will enliven the State’s long-dormant gay rights movement. Last week, Equality Virginia held a rally at the Albemarle County Office building.
“It takes something really barbaric to get people mobilized, especially in Virginia, which isn’t known for its political activism,” says Kaplan. “That’s the hidden blessing in this.”—John Borgmeyer
Het offensive
Now that H.B. 751 has taken effect in the Commonwealth, the State tourism motto “Virginia is for Lovers” strikes us as too ambiguous. Lest visitors and new arrivals get the wrong idea about what kind of love is sanctioned in the Old Dominion, this week C-VILLE offers some new mottos that might be more apt:
Virginia is for lovers (some restrictions may apply).
Virginia is for procreative sex, between married
heterosexuals, in the missionary position,
with the lights off.
Virginia…this ain’t Massachusetts.
Virginia, where abstinence makes the heart
grow fonder.
Virginia…thanks for not being gay
A low-watt tale
Do revised FCC rules affect the local TV scene?
Only an engineer with a law degree could fully understand the machinations of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A bewildering degree of legalese accompanied a recent Federal appeals court decision to block the FCC’s relaxation of media ownership rules. And a visit to the FCC’s sprawling website to make sense of how this ruling might affect the local media market will likely call up azimuth charts and treatises on “electromagnetic interference conflicts.”
But it’s clear that among other implications, the court’s decision on Thursday, June 24, reversed the FCC’s 2003 move to allow companies in small media markets like Charlottesville to own more than one television station. So that means the decision tanked Atlanta-based Gray Television’s plan to create a “duopoly” by bringing both a CBS and an ABC affiliate to Charlottesville this August, right?
Wrong.
Unless the company makes a play to buy the local NBC station, Channel 29, WVIR, or The Daily Progress, it’s still good to go under the FCC regulations. This is because the nascent ABC affiliate, WVAW, Channel 16, is classified as a low-power television station, which does not fall under the media-ownership limit. With only 150 kilowatts of radiated juice, Channel 16’s signal will be far weaker than Channel 29’s big beam of 5,000 kilowatts.
“None of the rule changes had anything to do with low-power stations,” says Joseph Davis, a Manassas-based engineer who consults for Gray on FCC matters.
However, just because WVAW is light on the wattage doesn’t mean television sets in Charlottesville and Albemarle will sport fuzzy footage on Channel 16 this fall.
“It certainly covers the nucleus of the metropolitan area,” says Bill Varecha, general manager of both of Gray’s new local stations, of WVAW’s planned broadcast reach. With the maximum amount of power allowed for a low-power station, “in essence, it’s going to cover most of the area that the full-power does,” he says.
Furthermore, as Varecha says, about 65 percent of TV viewers in the Charlottesville metro area receive cable television, and don’t need to rely on catching signals from towers on Carter’s Mountain. Gray plans to slide WVAW into the slot on Adelphia’s local cable currently held by Gray’s ABC affiliate from Harrisonburg, WHSV.
So though Gray will not technically hold a duopoly in Charlottesville, they will run two of three network affiliates, assuming the new stations get up and running.
Jonathon Rintels is a Keswick resident who runs the Center for Creative Voices in Media, a group that opposes media consolidation. Rintels says he’s not complaining about Gray’s grab for local airtime because the company is actually creating new media as opposed to buying a chunk of the existing market.
“I think competition in a local context can only be good,” Rintels says.—Paul Fain
Oath of office
Now that Charlottesville has officially been designated the best city in the universe and all, it’s time to raise the bar.
Here are some suggestions for how Council could make Charlottesville even better over the next four years. The new Council will hold its first regular meeting on Tuesday, July 6.
1. Since there’s no water fountain on the Mall, pass out straws at the Central Place fountain.
2. Two words: Strip club!
3. Scrap the $6 million computer system. Instead, give an abacus to everyone in City Hall.
4. Make use of Kevin Lynch’s tenure with Babba Seth and Rob Schilling’s bandtime with Glory Express…Dude, Council jam session!
5. Put a moratorium on upscaleboutiques until each neighborhoodhas a grocery store within walking distance.
6. Monorail, monorail, monorail!
7. Just sell the whole City to Coran Capshaw and get it over with.
8. Serve beer and peanuts on the free trolley.
9. Limit City Manager Gary O’Connell to one PowerPoint presentation per month.
Hog ties
Afton couple rescues pigs, puts them in therapy
Lorelei Pulliam didn’t start out to be a pig rescuer. Her passion found her, literally.
Three years ago, a lone potbelly pig came out of the woods and attempted to join Pulliam’s herd of five horses, which she keeps on a farm about a mile away from her home in Afton. Pulliam and her husband, Ron, a child and family therapist, employ the horses at the Gallastar Equine Center, a therapeutic riding program for troubled and at-risk children.
Apparently the runaway pig found the horses’ companionship therapeutic as well. And after a long process of earning the pig’s trust, Pulliam, 45, had rescued her first porcine pal, which she named Ranger.
“He just showed up,” Pulliam says. “He escaped from a pretty yucky place.”
Pulliam tracked down the house farm from which Ranger hailed, and, finding several of Ranger’s relatives living in squalor, she bought the whole family. The Pulliams now have 28 pigs living on their property, many of them directly from similar neglected homes or from Mini-Pigs, Inc., a pig sanctuary in Culpeper.
The Pulliams regularly bring Ranger and his posse to join the therapy sessions for children. And last year, they placed 18 rescued pigs in homes around the area. Ranger, the don among the Pulliam’s pig pecking order, was recently featured on the Animal Planet TV show “Animal Miracles.”
“He knows he’s the king of all pigs,” Pulliam says of the formerly emaciated and now somewhat portly Ranger.
On a recent morning at the rural retreat, Pulliam calls out: “Pigs! Pig-pig-pig-pig. C’mon pigs!”
Four potbelly pigs, all a deep charcoal color and the size of chunky bulldogs, come bounding around a bend and up a hill with remarkable speed. Pulliam reaches down to stroke one pig’s belly. The pig, Babe, immediately rolls to its side while its coarse neck and back hair perk up like a mohawk in response to the massage. As Pulliam says, pigs love to be petted, but only if they know and trust the person touching them.
“They’re very aware that everyone wants to eat them,” Pulliam says. “You cannot train that out of them.”
The pigs Pulliam rescues are neglected or abandoned, often because small farm owners get overwhelmed with caring for the fast-multiplying animals.
A male pig is sexually active at two months and a female at four months. With a sow birthing an average of two litters of 10 piglets annually, an inexperienced pig owner can get in trouble quickly. As a result, the Pulliams spay and neuter their pigs when they arrive at the Afton compound. One time, however, a sow gave birth to seven piglets in the Pulliam’s bathroom, just days after being rescued.
When the Pulliams get a new pig, they begin training it for life as a pet. The “great tamer” of pigs is food, Pulliam says, as well as their love of being scratched. But though she has been successful at training pigs to dig their lives as pets, she says the intelligent and social animals, which are happiest running and rooting around a big yard with other pigs, are too high-maintenance for most potential owners.
“The first thing that we do is try to discourage people from getting a pig,” Pulliam says, adding that she only adopts out the animals in pairs or to owners who already have a pig.
Charlottesville Police Officer Nancy Eismann adopted a pig, Matilda, from the Pulliams to give some companionship to Homer, her stately 14-year-old pet pig. Though Matilda and Homer took some time to hash out a living agreement, Homer is now a happier pig, Eismann says.
Spending time with two farm pigs at the Pulliams’ place, both rescued from a starvation on a Lexington farm, makes clear the colossal challenge of living with Porky as a pet. Already 500 pounds each, Pulliam says the two pink pigs could grow to 1,200 pounds. Though potbelly pigs have been en vogue as pets—she says they were once the “new yuppie puppies”—mostly because they are smaller animals, Ron Pulliam says there’s “no guarantee” that a potbelly pig will stay a manageable size.
But pigs are big hits in child therapy sessions. Among other benefits, Pulliam says, Ranger helps children learn about stereotypes. She says children are initially “grossed-out” when Ranger joins them for lunch, but that the polite pig with “excellent manners” always overcomes the kids’ preconceptions.
“They’re the most sensitive of animals, locked in these funny bodies,” Pulliam says.—Paul Fain