Page 2, High GEAR

After Moral Majority says "Boo!"

D.C.,

U.S. House overrules D. C., sex law updating

kills local

On October 1, in what is widely seen as being an anti-gay vote, the U.S. House of Representatives gave the Moral Majority what the Moral Majority is now referring to as its "greatest victory on Capitol Hill."

By a vote of 281-119, the U.S. House voted to overturn D.C. Act 4-69, a measure passed by the City Council of Washington, D.C. to update the city's sexual behavior laws which date from the turn of the century.

D.C. 4-69 contained sections which decriminalized private sexual conduct between consenting adults.

With the measure overturned, penalties for sodomy in Washington, D.C. now revert to 10 years in jail or a $1000 fine--even if the acts are performed privately by a couple whose members are legally married to each other.

There is a maximum penalty of $300 or six months in jail for fornication, a penalty of $500 or one year in jail for adultery, and possible life imprisonment for statutory rape.

D.C. Act 4-69 also contained sections which allowed wives to press rape charges against their husbands, removed all references to the sex of victims from sexual assault laws, and lowered the penalty for rape from life imprisonment to 20 years.

The proposal to lower the penalty for rape had been recommended by women's groups who had argued that the less severe penalty would make it easier to convict accused rapists.

Blade, the House vote is also a "setback for Washington's politically influential gay community."

"Gay leaders," the article explains, "had played a significant role in drafting the legislation, and, with the cooperation of city officials, had quietly orchestrated lobbying effort to save the legislation after it came under attack from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority." Several years of work

The rejected legislation had been passed unanimously by the Washington, D.C. City Council on June 30, after having been in preparation for several years.

In 1974 Congress set up the District of Columbia Law Revision Commission to consider ways to overhaul the city's criminal code which was widely regarded as being antiquated.

The District gained authority to amend and repeal sections of its criminal code in 1975 and the congressional commission proposed a new basic criminal law code. The sexual behavior provisions in the legislation overturned by the House were formulated and passed by the City Council according to model legislation which the congressional commission had urged the city to follow.

The legislation received public hearings in all eight wards of the city. When sex law reforms were introduced as a separate package early this year, two days of hearings were held before the City Council' Judiciary Committee.

behavior statutes met with little opposition until an article appeared in the Washington Post which mentioned that the bill contained a measure to exempt sexual conduct between minors close together in age from the measure's statutory rape penalties. This measure was eliminated to avoid further controversy.

A news story which appeared on the front page of the October 2 issue. The measure to update the sexual of the Washington Post, beneath a a headlined which reads, "Lopsided House Vote Overturns District's Sexual Reform Law," points out that the House vote of 281-119 marks the first time that Congress has overturned a locally approved Washington, D.C. law that had "no apparent bearing on the so-called federal interest" which gives Congress the power to veto legislation in the nation's capital.

Action is needed by only one house of Congress to kill a bill passed by the Washington, D.C. city council.

Written by Washington Post staff writers Michael Isikoff and Eric Pianin, the story goes on to say that according to angry city leaders the House has dealt "one of the most serious set-backs yet to the independence of Washington's six year old home rule government."

According to a news story by Jim Marks and Steve Martz which ed on the front page of the October 9 issue of the Washington

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Public opposition to the bill increased in early July when Archibishop James Hickey (formerly of the Cleveland Diocese) addressed a letter to local Catholics lamenting the elimination of penalties for "adultery, fornication, sodomy."

Hickey, although sharply critical of the law change, did not advocate congressional intervention to overturn it, but his words were widely quoted by the Moral Majority to suggest that he would eagerly welcome such a move.

Enter the Moral Majority

The Moral Majority began a well financed campaign against the met sure early in September with Jerry Falwell holding a press conference

in Washington and telling the media that the measure was "a perverted act about perverted acts" and that Washington would be the "gay capital of the world" unless Congress acted within 20 days.

(Under the 1973 Home Rule Act all City Criminal Code measures are sent to Congress which has 30 in session days to reject the bill by the disapproval of either house).

At Falwell's prompting, resolutions to overturn the legislation were introduced in both Houses--in the House of Representatives by Representative Phillip M. Crane (R-III.) and in the Senate by Jeremiah Denton (R-Ala.), Jesse Helms (R-NC), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Members of Congress were told that votes on the issue, right down to procedural questions, would be recorded and used in the Moral Majority Report Cards to be issued for the 1982 Congressional elections.

The boast of the Moral Majority "achieving its greatest victory in Congress" appears in the October 19 issue of the Moral Majority Report in an article on page four by associate editor Deryl Edwards.

A list of those Congressmen who did not vote as the Moral Majority recommended appears at the bottom of the page underneath a headline which reads "Congressmen Who Voted For 'Sodomy"."

Only three Congressmen from Ohio are listed, Willis Gradison (Republican-District One, Cincinnati), Thomas Luken (DemocratDistrict Two, Cincinnati). John Seiberling (Democrat-District 14, Akron). Missing from the list is a fourth name, that of Congressman Louis Stokes, the only Member of Congress from the Cleveland area who also voted in favor of the mea-

sure as passed by the District of Columbia's city council.

Edwards says that more than 10,000 signatures by D.C. citizens opposed to the measure in a petition circulated by the Moral Majority.

According to a story by Michael Isikoff in the October 3 issue of the Washington Post, "the day that Falwell launched his crusade to kill the new law phone lines lit up in the offices of the House District Committee.

John Gnorski, minority staff director of the committee is quoted by Isikoff as saying, “It was unbelievable. We never saw anything like it before. We must have gotten calls from staff people in more than 200 offices. And it was obvious that most of these people didn't even understand why the Congress was even considering a local D.C. law.”

Isikoff says that the "lobbying against the sex law was undoubtedly heavy and fierce--Rep. Stanford Parris (R-Va.), for example received more than 700 calls and letters from constituents demanding that he vote against the bill."

"But that lobbying was only successful because most members have little knowledge of and pay scant attention to the affairs of a city that carries no political weight in their home districts."

Isikoff quotes Representative Michael Barnes (D-Md.) a member of the District Committee who was on the losing side of the vote as saying, "It's a no loss vote for a member because their constituents don't care. In this case there was fear by a lot of members that they would be seen to be voting in favor of sexual perversion. So what they did was take the easy way out, take the course of least resistance."

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