"Jim Crow" - In today's Washington Post, author Jonathan Rauch, a Virginian, doesn't mince words in describing the Commonwealth's new Marriage Affirmation Act and its baldfaced attack on the rights of gay couples to contract a partnership between themselves. The comparison is apt, he says, since the ability to contract, an essential part of owning property, is a right guaranteed in the founding documents of the American republic, but one which was long denied to blacks:

It is by entering into contracts that we bind ourselves to each other. Without the right of contract, participation in economic and social life is impossible; thus is that right enshrined in Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution. Slaves could not enter into contracts because they were the property of others rather than themselves; nor could children, who were wards of their parents. To be barred from contract, the founders understood, is to lose ownership of oneself.

To abridge the right of contract for same-sex partners, then, is to deny not just gay coupledom, in the law's eyes, but gay personhood. It disenfranchises gay people as individuals. It makes us nonpersons, subcitizens. By stripping us of our bonds to each other, it strips us even of ownership of ourselves.

Like Drew, Rauch's argument is directed at the great mass of moderate conservatives "who distinguish between denying marriage to gay couples and denying civil rights to gay individuals." It remains to be seen whether Rauch's call for awareness and outrage will someday help the Virginia legislature "in recognizing its error."