If the embrace of ignorance and/or bigotry support the rejection of any proposed initiative in Virginia it is a safe bet that the Republican Party of Virginia will lead the charge in fighting the measure. Like its Christofascist/Tea Party base, the Virginia GOP increasingly lives in a fantasy world that is removed from objective reality. And that reality is that Virginia is changing rapidly both in terms of demographics and in rejecting old ways of thinking. Having traveled to Washington, D.C., and back last weekend, the pace of the urbanization of the corridor between Hampton Roads and Washington is stunning. And the reality is that political and religious views that play well out in the backwoods hollows of Southwest Virginia are increasingly DOA in the urban areas. Yet, due to gerrymandered districts the Virginia GOP believes that it can ignore this truth. A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at this growing blindness of the GOP. Here are highlights:
One law goes too far, according to a court of law. A proposed law doesn’t go far enough, according to a court of public opinion.
In the same week, a federal judge threw out the Virginia prohibition on same-sex marriage and the Virginia legislature refused to prohibit gifts for public officials, despite a scandal that could send a former governor and his wife to prison.
In throwing out the same-sex marriage ban, U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen used a turn of phrase that might have been invoked by a government-hostile, pistol-packing tea partier: “the exercise of the private choices of the individual citizen.”
Both issues speak to Republican dominance of the General Assembly . . . . Republican dominance has led to strict regulation of private lives in the form of a constitutional ban on civil marriage for gays. Republican dominance could again allow public officials to escape strict ethical oversight.
Wright Allen’s decision disrupts a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, signaling a limit to the populism on which contemporary Republicanism rests.
More than seven years later, public-opinion polls show a majority of Virginians favoring same-sex marriage — and at roughly the same percentage by which they approved the amendment struck down by Wright Allen.
This is another reminder that Virginia is changing — quickly. Non-natives make up roughly half of Virginia’s population of 8.1 million. They are largely concentrated in the diverse, prosperous urban-suburban crescent that extends from Washington to the seacoast. This is where votes and money are plentiful. This is where the Republican market is slipping away.
Redistricting — and the accompanying false sense of security — apparently is convincing Republicans otherwise.
In their made-to-order districts, they go through the motions of ethics reform, pushing largely toothless revisions to a state law behind which Bob McDonnell and wife Maureen, both facing federal corruption charges, allegedly concealed thousands of dollars in gifts and cash from Jonnie Williams Sr., the dietary supplement impresario.
Newspaper editorialists right, left and center have criticized the ethics overhaul as underwhelming. Watchdog organizations also are unimpressed. Both say that when it comes to restoring Virginians’ faith in government, post-Giftgate, the General Assembly is all talk and no action.
Times and Virginia's population are changing. The Virginia GOP is still lost in the past and, if anything, trying to go back even further in time. One can only hope that the next round of redistricting ends the GOP's safe districts and hastens the extinction of the Virginia GOP in its current form.
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