The Battle of Manassas

They’re the “family values” crowd. But if your sister has breast cancer and needs chemo, don’t think that you can take in your niece and nephew and have them live with you while she recovers. Better to send them off to an orphanage, I guess. They’re the “family values” crowd, but don’t think that when your favorite Great Aunt gets too old to live alone, you can bring her into your home and let her impart her wisdom and values to your children. There are nursing homes out there and someone makes a profit running them. They’re the “family values” crowd, but don’t think that you and your two favorite cousins can pool your resources and buy a house together. Better if you each rent a one-bedroom apartment, live alone and isolated, and don’t invest in the American dream of owning a home.

At least in Manassas, Virginia.

As the Washington Post explained earlier this week, it’s apparently more important for Manassas, Virginia to hate on illegal immigrants than it is to promote the “family values” that the conservatives are always shoving down our throats. Actually, since the law they’ve passed in Manassas does nothing to target illegal immigrants but is clearly aimed at immigrants, maybe we could just drop the pretense and admit that, in Manassas, Virginia, it’s more important to hate on anybody who isn’t a white suburbanite than it is to promote the “family values” that apparently are only “valuable” when being used by the MSM and the Republican Party to dupe the rubes at election time.

Manassas, as the WaPo explains, adopted an ordinance on Dec. 5th that ”changed a definition of ‘family’ in the zoning code so that, essentially, households are restricted to immediate relatives, even when the total is below the occupancy limit. With a few exceptions, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and other extended relatives do not count as family in Manassas anymore. For instance, six cousins living in a six-bedroom house would be illegal, even though the number does not exceed the occupancy limit.” Although, like the school board in Dover, city officials are now denying that the ordinance was passed for the obvious reason, last month the Vice Mayor admitted that it was aimed at what he was pleased to term “the larger problem in Manassas of illegal immigration,” which he blamed for problems such as “parking and strained school budgets.”

Dear Mr. Vice Mayor: Bite me. An illegal immigrant doesn’t take up any more parking spaces than a legal immigrant. (And likely less space than the fucking Escalades that the white suburbanites in Manassas appear to favor.) Children of illegal immigrants don’t take up two desks due to the fact that their parents are illegal immigrants; Manassas’ schools are strained because overpopulation, execrable public transportation, and the housing situation around Washington, D.C. have sent people way the hell out to bumfuck Manassas. Which used to be almost completely lily white, but now finds itself with a population that is -- horrors -- 15 % Latino and 13% black! You know that blue that’s been creeping south and west from Arlington over the last few elections? Hmmmm.

Anyway, the citizens of Manassas ought to be outraged over this waste of taxpayer money. Manassas will waste money defending this racist, anti-family ordinance, money that could have gone to build schools, provide public transportation (voila! less need for parking!), or build affordable housing. And then, they will lose anyway. No matter what they say, they’ve clearly violated the very line that the Supreme Court laid down almost thirty years ago in Moore v. City of East Cleveland, Ohio, 431 U.S. 494 (1977).

Morons.