Joe Stanley

For when George Allen isn’t conservative enough for you, there’s always Bob Marshall.

Waldo Jaquith, developer of Richmond Sunlight and (the quite awesome+exciting+still in beta) Virginia Decoded, writes a pretty damning attack on Delegate Marshall’s current “personhood” bill in the General Assembly (which just passed the House 64-34).

I wish I could find the link, but a few years ago I found a set of visuals produced from all the words/commands in the U.S. legal code, an operating system, and all books at Project Gutenberg. The compilation of books resembled static, whereas the legal code and the operating system were nearly identical. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because the legal code is essentially the OS for our society.

For the programmers in the room, setting obvious moral arguments aside, Delegate Marshall’s legislation is trying to do the equivalent of marking all instances of the the $person variable as interchangeable with $fetus as well.

It’s lazy, over-reaching, and simply bad code.