Virginia Senate Targets Lazy Boys, Sleeper Sofas, Hammocks and Other Threats Identified by Fairfax County's Somnolence Police

In which we discover that Virginia legislators threatened to allow Fairfax County Commissioners to impose Red-Chinese-style family size limitations through a zoning law modification.

Truthserum has warned you before, stay out of the kitchen when the legislators are cooking up statutory goulash, and for heaven's sake, decline any dyspepsia-inducing souffle put together for you by the socialist social engineers that masquerade as Democrats. The most recent evidence that Virginia's clown princes of cultural manipulation have been at work is a little-known, but poorly thought out recipe that went by the name of Senate Bill 925.

SB 925 started out its dangerous, short life, like many other risky propositions: as the product of the too-busy, nothing meaningful to do, mental machinations of a legislator, in this case Virginia state Senator Leslie Byrne. Byrne is serving her first term as a member of the Virginia Senate after having wreaked havoc on the other side of the Virginia General Assembly and in local politics in Northern Virginia for years.

Byrne's recipe for disaster was, initially, a proposal to amend the Virginia Code to allowthe County of Fairfax to amend its County Zoning Ordinance. Zoning ordinances are commonplace. Whether we would all agree that congregating rental housing, single family residences, businesses uses, or industrial complexes in distinct and separate geographical portions of a community, such planning is established law. The specific amendment that Byrne proposed the Commonwealth allow Fairfax County to make would have restricted to four the number of unrelated persons who could cohabit in a single family residence equipped with fewer than two bathrooms.

As with most really bad ideas, Byrne's started out small, and to many, even inoffensively. After all, by providing some definition for single-family residences, a county government is able to insure that landlords don't begin to subdivide such homes into miniature garden apartments or elfin condominiums.

Of course, SB 925's potential to grow up into a nasty bit of government overreach was never limited in Senator Byrne's mind, or to their shame, in the minds of the bill's other supporters, by such stultifying concepts as respect for liberty, for the rights of private property, or the pursuit of happiness.

In this point we should not too harshly judge Senator Byrne. Hailing, as she does, from Utah, her roots undoubtedly suffered from a juvenile lack of appropriate nourishment in liberty and independence. Had she been a Virginian from before birth, perhaps our liberty-loving soil, fertilized by the likes of George Washington, Patrick Henry, James Madison, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson, might have offered the sort of liberty-loving virtue enrichment that would have allowed her to become a mighty oak instead of a wacky weed.

I do not mean to pick on Byrne alone. She had co-conspirators. After SB 925 was presented to the Senate, it was referred to the Senate Committee on Local Government, and it is in the Local Government Committee that the recipe began to sour.

The Local Government Committee considered Byrne's proposal, but apparently found it a bit weak-kneed in the social engineering department. To fix that problem, the Committee reported out both the original proposal and an amendment in the nature of a substitute. That substitute is a marvel in the annals of government excess.

Under that proposal, the General Assembly would allow Fairfax County's Commissioners to make a single amendment to the County's Zoning Code. That permitted amendment would have the effect of prohibiting individuals living in single family residences in the County from sleeping in family rooms, living rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and other rooms of a single-family home except, of course, their bedrooms. This substitute language was, in fact, voted on and adopted by the Virginia Senate on January 25.

Just think of it. In the land where Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death," Virginia's solons actually contemplated allowing a county government to tell its residents that they were not permitted to sleep in their living rooms, family rooms, and dens. I suppose, although the British could not manage to give him death, it is clear that Henry would have met his match had he bumped heads with our Stalinists-on-the-James.

Fortunately for Virginians, the Senate, which had reeled like a drunk over to the precipice of social dictat, did a sudden about face and voted to reconsider the matter. Four days later, the Senate voted to strike the legislation from its calendar, effectively dooming it.

So why has Truthserum bothered to visit this story upon you? Some might say, no harm, no foul. Such individuals undoubtedly feel compelled to rise when they hear the strains of "God Save the Queen." And with those craven souls to whom liberty means little, Truthserum begs to differ.

Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty. And Truthserum hopes that each of us shares Thomas Jefferson's commitment of eternal vigilance against "every form of tyranny over the mind" and sleeping habits "of men." Moreover, we share an ethical duty arising from our knowledge that this incident occurred.

We are obliged to express our disapproval of this socialistic excess. We are obliged to upbraid those elected representatives who ever thought it was their business whether Uncle Wally fell asleep in the living room after driving fifteen hours to be with relatives during an important family occasion. We are duty bound to smack those legislators' noses, that protruded, camel-like, into our family rooms on Thanksgiving Day in the afternoon to see just who might be dozing during a football game.

Truthserum thinks it undeniable that George Washington, whose scattered sleeping habits have been made the stuff of legends (well at least of signage), would ask no less of us than that we maintain a broadly protected right of free people not to live in fear that our local sleep gestapo might catch us with our feet up on the couch while we sawed the proverbial boards.

Truthserum
thetruthserum@yahoo.com

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