Bush stance backed on gay unions

From combined dispatches

RICHMOND — Virginia lawmakers yesterday took another step toward supporting President Bush’s call for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The House Rules Committee overwhelmingly passed a Senate resolution urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment banning homosexual “marriages” and civil unions.

The full House and Senate already have approved their own measures by wide margins. After approving each other’s resolutions, the two bodies will send them to Mr. Bush and leaders in Congress.

The Senate resolution’s sponsor said the act demonstrates Virginia’s willingness to approve a constitutional amendment, which needs ratification by 38 states after passing the U.S. House and Senate by two-thirds margins.

“The Supreme Court made it very clear to everybody in the last year there is no other protection against the courts,” said Sen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Fairfax County Republican. “We have the makings of judicial tyranny in this country.”

Mr. Bush urged approval of a constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriages on Tuesday, saying “activist judges and local officials” have required that the “voice of the people must be heard.”

Business interests as large as utilities and airlines and as small as a Roanoke taxicab company warned a Senate panel yesterday that a House proposal to end their sales-tax exemptions threatens thousands of Virginia jobs.

A House committee, meanwhile, was prepared either to kill or radically amend two Senate bills that would boost taxes by $3.8 billion by raising the sales tax from 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent, adding higher income-tax brackets for the wealthy and boosting cigarette and fuel taxes.

Delegate Phillip A. Hamilton, facing a Senate Finance Committee openly hostile to his bill, noted with candor disarming to committee members that key business interests had coalesced against his bill.

Mr. Hamilton, Newport News Republican, conceded that the $520 million he estimates his bill would add to the state treasury “is but a baby step” toward comprehensive state tax reform that shores up funding for core government services.

He also acknowledged that the revenue estimate was built on extrapolations from a Department of Taxation study that dates to 1992. Taxation officials said they would rank their confidence in the data at 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. The governor’s office yesterday estimated the bill’s yield “is $340,399,733, … not the $520 million.”

Mr. Hamilton’s bill would force enterprises such as railroads, airlines, overseas shippers, telephone companies, trucking lines, oil and gas drillers, taxi companies, laundries and even the Wallops Island space-launch complex to pay a 4.5 percent tax on purchases in Virginia of fuel, parts and materials.

Story Continues →