The Republican Party of Virginia, if given its way, would turn the clock back to circa 1950. A time in Virginia that was anything but the "good old days" for anyone other than white heterosexual males. But then again. today's GOP main obsession is about maintaining the privilege of angry white far right Christians, preferably the ones who are male. How else to explain the Virginia GOP's unrelenting war on women, efforts to disenfranchise blacks, and maintain gays as an inferior class under the civil laws now that efforts to revive the state's sodomy law have permanently failed. Enter Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, who rather than pining for the days of gross inequality seeks to smash once and for all the state sponsored bigotry against LGBT Virginians. A piece in BuzzFeed looks at Herring's quest. Here are excerpts:
As the sun set in Richmond on Monday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring was talking about all the times the person who has sat in his seat has been on the wrong side of history.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond will consider on Tuesday whether Virginia’s constitutional ban on same-sex couples’ marriages violates the U.S. Constitution. And, unlike those former attorneys general, Herring believes that in choosing not to defend the law — and, in fact, arguing that the ban is unconstitutional — that he is on the right side of history.
“I looked at the brief that [former Virginia Attorney General Ken] Cuccinelli’s office had filed” in the challenge to V
irginia’s marriage ban passed in 2006, Herring, a Democrat, said. “I had read large pieces of some of the briefs that were filed in some of the cases that Virginia was on the wrong side of decades ago, like the Brown v. Board Education cases. Prince Edward County in Virginia was one of those [school districts in the case], where the attorney general of Virginia argued the wrong position. And, same with Loving v. Virginia, same with the [Virginia Military Institute] case,” where VMI’s single-sex admissions policy was declared unconstitutional.
Sitting in his office overlooking the state capitol on Monday evening, Herring talked with BuzzFeed about how he made the decision not to defend the law in this case — Bostic v. Schaefer — and what difference he thinks it makes that he has done so.
After naming Stuart Raphael his solicitor general, the top appellate lawyer in the office, Herring said he put Raphael — who left his job as a partner at Hunton & Williams for the role — in charge of the review.
“I tasked him with the job of leading a team to do that legal analysis and coming back to me with that research so that we could work together to come to a legal conclusion — and you know what I concluded: It’s unconstitutional, violates due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment,” Herring said, adding, when asked, that Raphael had reached the same conclusion in his analysis.
And though he said “there was immediate criticism from some predictable circles,” he said the bigger response came from those who supported his decision. “Some of the most moving conversations I’ve had, a lot of times, in the days following that, were from parents who came up to me — people I didn’t know — who came up to me and said, first, that they wanted to thank me for what I’d done and, second, they told me that the day I made the announcement, that they got a call from their son or their daughter, in tears, because of what it meant to them to have their state’s attorney general stand up, do what’s right, and to fight for them and their rights.”
I come back to the Windsor case [striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act], and what Justice [Anthony] Kennedy said, writing for the majority, which is that laws that treat same-sex couples as second-class citizens violate due process and equal protection.”
“In my opinion,” Herring said of Tuesday’s [4th Circuit Court of Appeals] panel, “if they’re thinking carefully about the most recent precedent, they’ll see the direction that I think the Supreme Court is headed — regardless of who the panel is.”
[O]n Tuesday, Herring and Raphael will be sitting in the courthouse just down the block from Herring’s office, and Raphael will be arguing that the appeals court should strike down the ban that voters of the state put in place less than eight years ago. “I think it’s going to be an interesting day,” Herring said. “I think it’s going to be a good day for Virginia.”
Since the onset of the Civil War, more often than not Virginia has been on the wrong side of history. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial and religious based bigotry and discrimination have been the norm, not the exception. It is far past time that Virginia return to the ideals of its enlightened founders and kick the poison disseminated by hate spewing preachers out of the civil laws.
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