The GOP’s Suburban Nightmare

While there is much to be discouraged about if one holds progressive values, rejects the view that the poor are refuse to be disposed of, and believes in religious freedom for all, not just Christofascists, there may be some good news from the recent special elections in Georgia and South Carolina: the narrowness of the Republican victories and the GOP's dimming support in suburban areas, especially those near larger cities.  If the GOP decline in support in suburbia continues, along with the nation's changing demographics, it could mean the GOP's triumphal attitude may be short lived.  A long piece in Politico looks at what hopefully comes to mean the death knell for many Republican elected officials. Here are story highlights:

Surveying the Democratic wreckage after a disastrous 1952 campaign, Robert Taft, the typically taciturn Ohio Republican senator, made a bold prediction about the opposition. “The Democratic Party,” the onetime Senate majority leader asserted, “will never win another national election until it solves the problem of the suburbs.”

Taft wasn’t exactly right, but he wasn’t wrong either. The millions of voters fleeing overcrowded cities to seek the American dream would ultimately power Republicans to victory in six of the next nine presidential elections, and in the process, reshape the GOP’s postwar image as the party of the suburbs.

But that Republican Party is now gone, and suburbia is no longer its trusted wingman. Although Donald Trump managed to win the suburbs narrowly in 2016, 49 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent, a little over half of suburbia voted against him, according to exit polls. This marks the third presidential election in a row in which the GOP nominee failed to crack 50 percent of the suburban vote.

Once the Republican Party’s stronghold, suburban America threatens now to become its nemesis. A combination of demographic change and cultural dissonance is gradually eroding its ability to compete across much of suburbia, putting entire areas of the country out of the GOP’s reach. It’s a bigger crisis than the party acknowledges, a reckoning that threatens Trump’s reelection and the next generation of Republican office-seekers.

Karen Handel’s Georgia special-election victory Tuesday enabled the GOP to kick the can down the road, but not for long. The same Atlanta suburbs that once produced Republicans like Newt Gingrich voted for Clinton in November. They followed up a few months later by nearly sending a 30-year-old, first-time Democratic candidate to Congress. Republicans may be gloating now, but it’s an ominous sign for the 2018 midterm elections. . . 

Trump won the 2016 election, of course, boosted by the margins he ran up in smaller cities and rural areas. But he lost the populous close-in suburbs of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., home to the precincts that first heralded suburbia’s arrival as a political powerhouse. That wasn’t the real story, though. He was also defeated in other, later-blooming suburban giants, including Atlanta’s Cobb County and Southern California’s iconic Orange County, both onetime exporters of Sun Belt conservatism that occupy storied roles in the formation of the contemporary Republican Party.

There’s a reason Ronald Reagan once said Orange County was the place good Republicans go to die—before 2016, it had last voted Democratic for president more than 80 years ago.

He [Trump] also barely squeaked by in traditional GOP stalwarts like Richmond’s Chesterfield County—the most populous in the state outside Northern Virginia—and Johnson County, the wealthy Kansas-side suburb of Kansas City. In many of the rock-ribbed Republican suburbs where Trump won easily—places like Waukesha County outside Milwaukee, and Hamilton County, on the outskirts of Indianapolis—he trailed well behind Mitt Romney’s 2012 pace.

But the truth is that Trump arrived in what was already the twilight of the GOP’s suburban era.

In the decades following World War II, the suburbs formed the electoral backbone of the party, providing a reliable counterweight to big-city Democratic margins.  . . . For suburbia, the GOP functioned not just as a validator of its lifestyle but also as a guarantor. It was the party of growth, low taxes and law and order. Just as important, it served as a bulwark against racial integration. . . 

The Northeastern and Midwestern suburbs were the first to go wobbly on the GOP, turned off by the culture wars waged by an increasingly Southern and socially conservative party.

Other subtle but important changes began to loosen the GOP’s grip. As the suburbs aged, they began to experience more and more of the pathologies previously associated with the cities—among them increased crime, poverty and crumbling infrastructure. At the same time, America’s great cities began to return to relative health.

Perhaps the biggest change of all: The suburbs themselves grew far more diverse. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of racially diverse suburbs increased by 37 percent, growing at a faster clip than majority-white suburbs, according to one study. . . . . there are 106 counties—with a combined population of 66.5 million—that include the near-in suburbs of most major cities and display many big-city characteristics. In 2016, Trump lost 89 of them. That’s a dramatic departure from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 performance in those places—he won 92 of those 106 . . . .

What happened in between Reagan and Trump? These suburbs gradually came into political alignment with their neighboring cities, moving the longtime antagonists toward something like a metropolitan alliance. At roughly the same time, the GOP largely gave up on competing among minorities and in the most densely populated areas.

The new GOP iteration differs in at least one important way from the one that dominated the suburbs in the Reagan years: It is now a conservative party that rejects metropolitan values, rather than a metropolitan party that embraces conservative values.

New York state stopped being competitive around the same time the populous New York City suburbs began going blue. The days when the GOP could carry Maryland ended when Baltimore County left the fold. Colorado and Virginia are likely to be the next dominoes to fall. Colorado’s Arapahoe and Jefferson counties, home to roughly 1.3 million residents, voted Republican in eight consecutive presidential elections through 2004. But since then, they’ve voted Democratic in the past three. In November, Trump bottomed out at 39 percent of the Arapahoe vote.

Trump’s coalition relied on several factors that won’t be easy to replicate going forward, though. First among them: Trump’s opponent. No matter the place designation—urban, suburban or rural—Clinton ran behind Obama’s pace, according to exit polls. And in the suburbs, she was outperformed by Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore.

Trump’s victory was also rooted in the strongest rural performance by a presidential nominee in decades—he won 61 percent amid a huge turnout. That’s where the GOP’s math problem comes in. To win reelection, Trump will need another gangbusters rural showing and to improve or at least maintain his 2016 levels in the suburbs, where roughly half the vote was cast last year. There’s little margin for error: Amped-up turnout in just three big cities alone—Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia—could have flipped the 2016 election.

Three years is a long time, but it won’t be easy for Trump to win over his suburban detractors. Recent history suggests that once these big suburbs go blue, they don’t come back. . . . . The president need only gaze across the Potomac to get a close look at the problem. Northern Virginia’s suburban behemoth, Fairfax County, flipped in 2004—by 2016, Trump could manage only an anemic 29 percent there. In nearby Loudoun and Prince William counties, the tipping point came in 2008.

No Republican has won the presidency in the postwar era without winning the suburbs. Trump will put that to the test in 2020. And with that, the GOP’s suburban era may come full circle . . . 

Hopefully, the GOP decline in the suburbs will only accelerate.

Is Obenshain Making Up NonExistent Problems So That He Can Steal Election?

Mark Obenshain - A Cheat and Liar?

I often say that no one lies more than the "godly Christian" crowd.  And more or less the same rule applies to extremist Republican candidates who wrap themselves in candidate a clock of religiosity even as they do violence to the true Gospel message.  Mark Obenshain, the failed GOP candidate for Virginia Attorney General, seems to fit this norm.  Why do I say this?  Because Obenshain is trying to allege that there were security issues involving ballots in Fairfax County even though the Republican Electoral Board secretary for Fairfax County Brian Schoeneman has stated that no such security issues exist.  The Daily Press looks at Obenshain's apparent effort to fabricate "problems" so that he can try to invalidate votes.  It's disgusting, but welcome to today's GOP.  Here are article highlights:

State Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, is asking the special court overseeing the recount of the attorney general's race to hold off counting a large number of ballots from Fairfax County because measures to keep them secure after the election were not followed.

His request involves part of some 115 boxes of election material out of the 869 now in the custody of the clerk of the Fairfax County Circuit Court. He asked the court to set those ballots aside and not recount them for now until the court decides whether the ballots were secure. 

Fairfax County Electoral Board secretary Brian Schoeneman said all the ballots involved were held in the board's warehouse.

"The good news is that those ballots were still secure," he said. "Our warehouse has security and is monitored and it's my understanding that the ballots were locked in the precinct carts, so no one could have accessed them. We're still determining why this happened, but it's most likely election officer error."

He said the problem was that two precincts did not follow the proper procedure. Instead of making sure their ballots were taken to the courthouse, election officials locked the ballots in their precinct carts and returned them to the Electoral Board's secure warehouse.

The voter registrar's staff discovered them and took them to the courthouse.  The two precincts, Virginia Run and Tysons, reported a total of 1,072 votes for Obenshain and 1,071 for Herring, according to the State Board of Election's official results.

Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, said the motion follows a pattern in other requests by Obenshain's campaign to the recount court, such as access to electronic poll books.

"My guess is they are looking for any and every mistake," he said. The narrow margin of Herring's victory makes every ballot seem worth fighting over, Kidd said. That's especially so in Fairfax County, the state's largest locality, which gave both Herring and Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe the votes they needed to win.

Let's be clear about one thing.  Obenshain ran a slick but totally dishonest campaign and lied non-stop about his extremism, pretending to be a moderate.  Now, the lying campaign having failed, he is lying again  in an attempt to steal the election from Mark Herring.  Do we really want someone so dishonest and amoral as Obenshain in the office of Attorney General?  I think not.   In my opinion, tawdry whore make many of the "godly folk" and individuals like Obenshain look like pillars of virtue.

 

Mark Herring Declares Victory - GOP Demand for Recount Likely

While the Virginia State Board of Elections has not yet updated its website, Mark Herring has declared victory in Virginia's attorney general contest, apparently having won despite the Virginia GOP's voter suppression efforts and Ken Cuccinelli's 11th hour change in how provisional ballots would be counted in Fairfax County.  Once official, Herring's victory will confirm a complete blow out across the board with all three of the Extremist candidates nominated by The Family Foundation and its Tea Party allies going down to total defeat.  The result is a good one for Virginia and those who value sanity and our constitutional form of government.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post and the Virginian Pilot, beginning with the Post:

State Sen. Mark R. Herring padded his still-narrow lead over state Sen. Mark D. Obenshain on Tuesday night in the race for Virginia attorney general, giving the Democrat an apparent 163-vote advantage before the results of the contest are certified.

The Fairfax County Electoral Board finished reviewing provisional ballots – mostly cast by people who did not have ID or went to the wrong polling place – and added 160 votes to Herring’s (Loudoun) total and 103 votes to the Republican’s. Herring already led on the State Board of Elections Web site by 106 votes.

The additional 57-vote margin from Fairfax was expected to give Herring a statewide lead of 163 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast – barring any last-minute changes from other localities, which had until 11:59 pm Tuesday to submit their numbers to the state election board.

A recount appears all but certain after the statewide results are certified Nov. 25, and the Obenshain campaign made clear that it considers the race far from over.

 Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot:

Democrat Mark Herring declared victory in the attorney general’s race Tuesday night after a canvass of Fairfax County provisional ballots left him with an unofficial 163-vote lead over Republican Mark Obenshain out of 2.2 million cast last week.

“Over the course of the past week, a thorough and extensive process has ensured that every vote has been tallied and accounted for,” said Herring, a Loudoun County state senator. “The margin was close, but it is clear that Virginians have chosen me to serve as the next attorney general.”

Late Tuesday, he [Obenshain] stopped short of calling for a recount allowed by law in a race as close as this one, saying only that further announcements would come “in the days ahead.”

Defeated candidates have 10 days from when a vote is certified – Nov. 25 this year – to request a court-supervised recount they pay for unless the vote difference is less than 0.5 percent of the total votes cast. The public pays the tab in that case. Herring was ahead of Obenshain by a one-hundredth of a percentage point as of midday Tuesday.

A Herring victory this year would give Democrats, who won the races for governor and lieutenant governor last week, a sweep of statewide offices. That hasn’t occurred since 1989.

We can expect lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Christofascists and their political prostitutes in the Virginia GOP who simply cannot comprehend that the majority of Virginia voters do not want the poisonous agenda that The Family Foundation controlled Virginia GOP seek to inflict on all citizens.   Even an across the board loss will not jolt these people out of the alternate reality in which they live.

With Obenshain Lagging, Cuccinelli Changes Rules for Counting Provisional Ballots

Working to Steal an Elections?

Through out his time as Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli has consistently shown that he believes he is above the law and has sought to ignore rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Now, Cuccinelli may be taking this arrogance - and I would argue lawlessness - to new heights as he directs the Virginia State Board of Elections to change the rules for counting provisional ballots in a fairly transparent attempt to save GOP extremist from joining Cuccinelli and "Bishop" Jackson" in the loser column.  Had Cuccinelli resigned from office to run for Governor like his predecessors over the past 30+ years, this obvious conflict of interest would not exist.  (Rachel Maddow had a great overview of this situation on her show this evening).  Here are highlights from Election Law Blog:

While most of the provisional ballots across the state have already been counted, that’s not true in Fairfax County, where Democrats expect they would pick up further gains for Herring. So this development reported by WTOP was a big surprise:

A last-minute change means Fairfax County voters who cast provisional ballots may face troubles getting them counted.

Nearly 500 voters cast provisional ballots in the county, many more across Virginia, in Tuesday’s election. But the promise from Democratic and Republican parties to make sure their ballots got counted is now no good.

The state Electoral Board decided Friday to change the rules that had been followed in Fairfax County and ban legal representatives from stepping in to help get the ballot counted, unless the voter him or herself is there.

County Electoral Board Secretary Brian Shoeneman says he and board chairman Seth Stark disagree with the ruling, but they have to comply.

“The office of the Attorney General advised us that this was the correct reading of the statute,” State Board of Elections Secretary Don Palmer says.

[I]it seems that the rule goes against both Fairfax County practice (which allowed legal representatives to argue for the counting of ballots rather than the voter in person), as well as Virginia’s Board of Elections posted rules (see page 21 of this pdf: among people who may attend decisions on counting provisional ballots: “Legal counsel and representatives of the person who cast the provisional ballot.”)

There are a lot of factual and legal things unclear (to me at least) at this point.  (1) Is the new VA rule a change in practice? (2) Was it necessary to assure uniformity so as to prevent a Bush v. Gore type inequality in vote counting problem? (3) Did the rule timing mean that it did not assure uniformity even if that was its intent? (4) If a court reviews this question, which trumps: assuring uniformity or following written, past practice put in place before the current decision? (This is an issue I wrote about in The Democracy Canon in the last part of the article.) (5) Will any of this make a difference to the election outcome?  Presumably, if there are provisional ballots not counted in Fairfax because of the lack of the voter’s presence in person, then a court could later order those ballots counted—but there’s a lot riding on being out in front at the time of certification on Tuesday. (6) Was the rule pronounced Friday for sound election administration reasons, or to give the Republican the edge (as Democrats have already suggested)?

The sooner Ken Cuccinelli permanently leaves the Virginia political scene, the better it will be for  the residents of the Commonwealth who value honesty, integrity and democracy.  

Fairfax Chamber of Commerce Backs Democrat Statewide Ticket

As the last post underscores, Ken Cuccinelli and his Christofacsist climate denying running mates are a threat to Hampton Roads' economy and long term future.  Today, the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce endorsed Democrats Terry McAuliffe, Ralph Northam and Mark Herring.  For non-Virginians, Fairfax County has the largest economy of any city or county in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Combined with the neighboring Arlington and Alexandria, it has nearly one third of Virginia's population and is a main economic powerhouse for the Virginia.  That the Fairfax Chamber endorsed the entire Democrat ticket speaks volumes about how the GOP slate will be bad for business and seek to drag Virginia backward in time to when racism and homophobia were state sanctioned policy and women were subordinate citizens.  Here are highlights from the Richmond Times Dispatch:

The political arm of the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce has endorsed the Democratic ticket for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

The coveted endorsement of NOVABizPAC -- which backed Republican Bob McDonnell in 2009, is a key pickup for Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Today's announcement follows a contentious, chamber-sponsored televised debate between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli Wednesday that saw each portray the other as unfit for the Executive Mansion.

A news release issued by NOVABizPAC said McAuliffe won the endorsement "based on his pro-business policy positions and proposals."

"Mr. McAuliffe was a major supporter of Governor McDonnell’s landmark transportation funding legislation and a consistent supporter of rail to Dulles," airport, Jim Corcoran, Fairfax chamber president and a trustee of NOVABizPAC, said in the release.

 

The organization also endorsed Sen. Ralph S. Northam, D-Norfolk, for lieutenant governor over GOP rival E.W. Jackson, and Sen. Mark Herring, D-Loudoun, for attorney general over Republican Sen. Mark Obenshain of Harrisonburg.

In other endorsements, NOVABizPAC favored Northam based on his support for the Fairfax Chamber's legislative priorities and for his "record and experience in the Virginia Senate."

The group endorsed Herring for "serving the Northern Virginia business community well in the state Senate," and highlighted Herring's "commitment to Virginia's right to work laws, Governor McDonnell's landmark transportation funding plan and economic development initiatives."

Virginia does not need to return to the 1950's - or preferably the 1850's in the eyes of the many white supremacists now in the Virginia GOP base - and the Fairfax Chamber recognized this reality.

 

Is Virginia a Microcosm of the 2012 Election?

Things are changing in Virginia albeit at a snails pace in many ways - especially in the area of gay rights.  Sadly, the backwards and ignorant rural areas of the state and Kool-Aid drinking Christianist orchestrated by the the theocrats at The Family Foundation still control the puppet strings of the Republican Party of Virginia.  The result has been legislative action by the General Assembly that looks like a Christian version of the Talban's agenda.  The shifts in population will hopefully change this dynamic over time as the urban areas grow and can simply out vote the reactionary elements in the rural areas of the state.  A piece in Politico looks at how this may play out in the 2012 presidential contest.  Here are highlights:

The University of Virginia's Center for Politics has published a good primer on the electoral geography of Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina, and neatly crystallizes the sense among national operatives that the state has become a bellwether for the country as a whole:

Of the state's 13% growth in population between 2000 and 2010, a large portion occurred in Northern Virginia, the diverse suburbs and exurbs of Washington, D.C. Examples of rapid growth abound: Prince William County grew 40% while Loudoun County led the state with a growth rate of 84%, making them the third and fifth-most populous entities* in the state, respectively. Fairfax County crossed the 1 million resident threshold …

But Northern Virginia is just one part of the story. The other two important population centers are Greater Richmond, mainly composed of the state’s capital and the counties of Henrico and Chesterfield; and Hampton Roads, dominated by five of the seven biggest independent cities in the state: Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Newport News and Hampton. Together, these three regions form what is known as the “Urban Crescent.” Making up more than two-thirds of the state’s population, the Urban Crescent holds the key to victory in the Commonwealth, particularly for Democrats. As Barack Obama showed in 2008, a candidate who wins all three can make the rest of the state’s vote irrelevant.

More and more, Virginia looks and feels like a microcosm of the country as a whole in federal elections. While Democrats look to turn out their supporters in urban areas, Republicans look to run up the vote totals in rural regions. The two parties then battle for the suburbs and exurbs.

[T]here are also themes specific to the 2012 race that could manifest themselves acutely there. Any number of national dynamics have particular application to Virginia: white suburban disappointment with Obama, upscale female voters' concerns about the Republican Party, Latino voters' concerns about Mitt Romney, slackening enthusiasm for the president among the young voters and black voters who helped him win in 2008, suspicion of Romney among voters tied to the manufacturing sector and more.

Breakaway Episcopal Churches Lose Court Case

In welcome news seven anti-gay Episcopal parishes that broke away from the national church after the installation of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire - yet tried to retain the national church property they had been utilizing - have lost their court battle to retain the basically stolen property. Part of their legal strategy had been to rely on a civil war era statute still on the books that had been enacted to allow break away pro-slavery southern baptist churches to break from the national church and keep the anti-slavery national church's property. One would think that reliance on such a morally flawed statute should have seen the gay haters a message. Here are highlights from the Washington Blade on the victory for the Episcopal Church USA:

A Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge issued a ruling on Jan. 10 against seven conservative Episcopal congregations in Northern Virginia that broke away from the church in 2006 in protest of the church’s earlier decision to accept same-sex relationships.

The ruling could force the breakaway congregations to turn over to the Episcopal Church buildings and property in Virginia worth more than $40 million that the conservative faction seized after congregations voted to separate from the church over the gay relationship dispute.

The dispute between the conservative and more progressive congregations within the U.S. Episcopal Church came to a head in 2003 when church leaders approved the ordination of a gay Episcopal priest, V. Gene Robinson, as the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, making Robinson the denomination’s first out gay bishop.

Nicholas Benton, editor and publisher of the Falls Church, Va., News Press, said the court ruling would have an enormous positive impact on the LGBT-supportive Episcopal leaders and worshipers who lost possession of their church buildings, including an historic Episcopal Church building in the City of Falls Church.

Fairfax County, Virginia's First Gay Bar

In many ways, Northern Virginia is the most liberal area of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Admittedly, "liberal" is a relative term - especially when parts of that "liberal" region elect Neanderthals and cretins like Del. Bob Marshall to the General Assembly and Eugene Delgaudio to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, respectively. Now, as the Washington Post reports, Fairfax County boasts its own gay bar - previously, a trip into the District of Columbia afforded the only gay bar venues to residents in the Virginia suburbs. No doubt, Marshall and Delguadio publicly are not happy campers in terms of having a gay venue close to home, yet I suspect both have secret gay sex fantasies given the way they fit the tormented closet case profile. Here are some highlights from the Post's article:
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Austin Jennings is the manager of So Addictive Lounge, a Herndon bar and grill, where he's learned that it's a lot of work, this business of going fully gay. There are gay and lesbian bartenders to hire, and more drag queens to book, and fruit-flavored Michelob Ultras to add to the beer list, and an entire menu to be made over, with salads replacing all that deep-fried food, Jennings said, "because gay people are conscious of what they eat." And he has repainted, too. "Gay people have an eye for detail and decorating. It's a stereotype, but it's true."
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So Addictive, which started out as a coffeehouse (thus the name), launched a weekly gay night last summer - a Wednesday gathering that initially consisted of four people, including Jennings and his boyfriend, drinking beer, watching "Modern Family" at the bar and wondering where everybody else was.
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Now, the Wednesday night drag shows - featuring a wild mix of makeup, wigs, spangles and Lady Gaga impersonations - fill the place. Their success has persuaded Jennings and So Addictive's owner to swap out the bar's weekly hip-hop and Latin nights and turn their place into the only almost full-time gay bar in Fairfax County, home to more than 1 million people. The new format took effect on New Year's Eve; the only straight holdover on the schedule, for now, is heavy-metal Monday.
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The arrival of a gay bar in the heart of a quintessentially suburban community nearly 25 miles outside of Washington is a milestone for the gay community. It's also a broader test to see whether a business that caters to gay men and lesbians can succeed and gain mainstream acceptance in a town that was once featured in a book on the 100 "Best Places to Raise Your Family" in the United States.
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Sarah Gustafson, president of the gay rights organization Equality Fairfax, recently e-mailed the 900 people on her list to announce the "fantastic news" that "yes, Virginia, there is a gay bar in Fairfax County." "There's a tremendous amount of gay, lesbian and transsexual people who live in the county, so it's really great that a bar's coming to us," Gustafson said. "People might not realize there's a significant gay and lesbian population in the suburbs; everybody assumes we live downtown. But we are everywhere. We are your neighbors, and having a neighborhood bar finally puts a permanent face on that."
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Along with Freddie's Beach Bar in Crystal City, So Addictive will be one of just two full-time gay bars in the northern half of a state that activists say is not exactly the most hospitable place for gays.
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Jimmy Cirrito, the owner of Jimmy's Old Town Tavern, said he welcomed the gayification of So Addictive, which is across the street from his bar. "If somebody's against having a gay bar, then they're against America," he said. "It's freedom. We're all God's people. We do what we want."
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I like the unique business opportunity," Yen said. If there are 7,000 gays in Herndon and Reston, and 25,000 in Fairfax County (both numbers were guesses because there's no reliable data, according to Gustafson), not to mention underserved gay people in Loudoun and Prince William counties, that seems to offer "great possibilities," Yen said.
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I hope So Addictive is a big success and, who knows, maybe the boyfriend and I will visit it someday soon.

A Call to Action in Virginia - and to Virginia College Alumni

In the wake of Uber-Christianist Virginia Attorney General Ken "Cooch" Cuccinelli's directive to all Virginia public colleges and universities to rescind their non-discrimination policies insofar as they include "sexual orientation" as a protected class, Equality Virginia is asking Virginia residents to voice their displeasure with Governor Bob McDonnell and others to protest the draconian anti-gay agenda being set by the Republican administration. Also, and perhaps most importantly, Equality Virginia is asking that if you are a graduate of a Virginia public college or university, you let your alma mater know that you will be closing your checkbook in terms of contributions if the college or university knuckles under to Cooch's demands. Many of Virginia's top schools - e.g., the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and Virginia Tech - rely heavily on out of state alumni contributions to meet funding needs. Obviously, if these institutions face a significant financial hit if they give into to what is in the last analysis religious based discrimination by the Attorney General, they will be much more vocal in their protestations against Cuccinelli and Bob McDonnell. As a UVA alumni myself, I am letting UVA know my views. I encourage others to do like wise. Here are some highlights from Equality Virginia's call to action:

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Equality Virginia members and allies are urged to take the following actions NOW in response to this threat to the basic human rights of members of Virginia’s college and university communities:
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1) Contact the Governor and let him know that you support policies that protect GLBT Virginians from discrimination and that you expect him to provide leadership in ensuring that Virginia is truly a “Commonwealth of Opportunity” for all Virginians, including GLBT Virginians.
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2) If you are an alum, student, faculty or staff member of a Virginia college or university, contact your institution’s president and let him or her know that you want your college or university to stand with its GLBT students, faculty, staff and alumni and reject the advice of the Attorney General.
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3) Sign EV’s online petition in favor of changing the law to provide nondiscrimination protection for all. Or download the hard copy petition and collect as many signatures as you can!
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4) Spread the word on FaceBook, Twitter and other social media sites about the need to take action NOW.
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5) Help EV make a statement about the breadth and depth of support for our work by ensuring that this year’s [Commonwealth Dinner] dinner is sold out. Buy your tickets now.
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6) Write a resolution for your student group or faculty senate in response to Cuccinelli's letter.
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The bottom line is that we need to make Cooch and Taliban Bob's lives a living Hell and make it clear that such religious based bigotry is going to cost Virginia dearly. It is also important to recognize that Virginia's colleges and universities are not the only targets on Cuccinelli's list. As the editor of the Falls Church News-Press has made clear in a public statement, Virginia's municipalities that have adopted non-discrimination protections for LGBT citizens/employees are likely next. Here are some highlights:
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Because of its use of language protecting lesbians and gays from discrimination, the City of Falls Church is "in Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's cross hairs," Falls Church News-Press editor Nicholas F. Benton told the F.C. City Council in a public statement at the Council's business meeting tonight.

Benton urged the Council to take action to condemn the "unprovoked, inflamatory act of bigotry" by Cuccinelli in the form of a letter to Virginia's state colleges and universities last week advising them to remove any policy language protecting the rights of lesbians and gays.
Benton's comments were later echoed by F.C. Councilman Lawrence Webb. Following that, Mayor Robin Gardner urged that a statement on the subject be drafted for a vote at the next Council meeting.

The following is the text of Benton's statement to the Council, which he said he will also present to the board of directors of the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce at its business meeting tomorrow morning:

"The unprovoked, inflammatory act of bigotry by the new Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli last week, in the form of a letter advising Virginia colleges and universities to remove language protecting lesbians and gays from discrimination, takes away existing protections from an embattled minority, and represents a profound threat to the Commonwealth in a number of important ways.
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"First, it represents an effort to remove protections that currently exist for a minority that is well-known for its susceptibility to discrimination, hate and violent attacks, from elementary school playgrounds through adulthood.
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"Second, it represents a major blow to Virginia's economic development efforts, including it is effort to secure the relocation of major corporations like Northrup-Grumman and other large business entities, because of the chilling effect Cuccinelli's action will have on the desire and willingness of those businesses and their employees to locate to the state.
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"Fourth, it fuels a climate of intimidation and hate against minorities of all types in the state in a time when mouthpieces of the far right are causing such negative trends to grow, empowering bigots with a sense of entitlement to act out their hatred with impunity.

"I urge every fair-minded citizen, every civil libertarian, every elected official of any party, and every proponent of economic growth in Virginia, every advocate of civility, to go on record in strong opposition to the Attorney General's incendiary action and to affirm that every Virginian enjoys equal protection under the law.
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Again, I encourage readers from both within and outside of Virginia to join in actions to pressure Virginia's government and courts to end religious based discrimination in the Commonwealth.

The Other Fundamentalist Threat

We talk a great deal about the threat to religious freedom in this country posed by the Christian fundamentalist set which seeks to force all citizens to live by their fear and hated based version of Christianity. Although fewer in numbers in the USA, another potential religious threat is posed by Islamic fundamentalists who are equally extreme. One need only look to the UK to see this form of fundamentalism run out of control as evidenced by recent pronouncements by extremists who want to see Britain ruled by Sharia law. As the Daily Mail reports, some of the Islamic clerics in Britain are actually calling for gays to be stoned to death. This form of hate and intolerance needs to be stamped out and in my view mosques and schools that teach such a vile message should be closed. Here are some highlights from the Daily Mail:

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All homosexuals should face stoning to death, a Muslim preacher of hate declared yesterday. Anjem Choudary, the firebrand cleric who wants to see Britain ruled by Sharia law, said such a regime was the only way to fix the country's ills. Under it, adulterers and homosexuals would be killed by stoning. Asked if that would include anybody - even a Cabinet minister such as Business Secretary Lord Mandelson - Choudary responded with an astonishing diatribe.

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His incendiary remarks immediately prompted calls for him to be investigated by police. Tory MP Patrick Mercer said: 'These statements show the depravity of this man's beliefs. They must incite hatred and encourage terrorism, and I would encourage the Metropolitan Police to investigate them as rigorously as possible.'

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The preacher threatened that ordinary Muslims living here would rise up and retaliate for the 'evil' acts of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In my view, the British have been far too accommodating to hate merchants like Choudary and the USA should learn by Britain's mistakes. The right to freedom of religion stops where it begins to threaten the religious freedom of others and/or sets the stage for violence and civil disorder. I say all this because here in Virginia an controversy is raging in Northern Virginia where an Islamic school is seeking to enlarge its student population and expand. Many neighbors of the school in Fairfax County are not happy and are seeking to block zoning approval for the expansion. One irony is that the Traditional Values Coalition - which has been identified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center - has been involved in the fight and has complained of the school's purpose of "training children to hate." Talk about a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I have mixed emotions on this controversy. Yes, all should be entitled to freedom of religion, but not if the religious message is hate driven and threatens civil society. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post:

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A controversial private school for Muslim children is seeking to expand a campus in Fairfax County, a proposal that has made reluctant partners of neighbors concerned with the impact on traffic and water quality and critics who oppose what they say is the school's radical agenda.

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But at a public hearing last week, mundane neighborhood concerns were overshadowed by a longstanding dispute over the school's teachings and the perception that it promotes intolerance of other cultures.

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The school, which serves pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students, is funded by the Saudi Arabia Embassy. Students learn Arabic and religion along with general subjects including math, English and social studies. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the school has been the subject of intense scrutiny, in part because of unfounded anti-Arab suspicions but also because of course material that troubled some elected leaders.

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In 2007, a congressionally appointed panel found that some of the school's textbooks included language intolerant of other religions as well as passages that could be construed as advocating violence. A Washington Post review found inflammatory references as recently as 2006.

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"The Islamic Saudi Academy's purpose is to train young and innocent Muslim children to hate and wage war into the future against our children," James Lafferty, a spokesman for the Traditional Values Coalition, a church lobbying group, said during the hearing. His remarks prompted heckles and boos from teachers, parents and other supporters of the school.

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The Planning Commission and the county Board of Supervisors are expected to decide on the request later this year. Residents opposed to the school's plan attended the hearing with petitions, statistics and impassioned speeches about their vanishing tranquillity.

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It does trouble me greatly that the school is funded by the Saudi embassy. The Saudi's are anything but receptive to others and other faiths and outlooks in their own country, yet they want to enjoy rights and freedoms denied to foreigners in their own country. Being gay can still lead to prison or death in Saudi Arabia.

Are Republican Voters Vanishing ?

David Frum, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who is hardly a liberal by any means and who at times is down right reactionary, has an interesting column in the New York Times Magazine which looks at an apparent trend that ties failed Republican polices with the shift in party allegiance from Republican to Democrat. To me the column is especially interesting because some of the regions Frum looks at are in Virginia, a state that is rapidly changing in terms of political party alliances. Fairfax County for instance is now a bastion for the Democrat Party whereas once it was solidly Republican. I truly believe that there is a significant chance that Virginia will go for Obama this year if he can carry the urban areas and Fairfax County and Arlington County

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Frum's basic premise is that the GOP policies over the last decade or so have ignored the needs of the middle class and instead catered to either the ultra-wealthy in terms of economic policies and conservative Uber-Christians on social policy. It is social policy, not economics that has held members of the latter group to the GOP even though they typically are not as well educated and often earn lower incomes in the GOP column. Everyone else is or is susceptible to trending to the Democrats. As an aside, I looked at this later issue in a post back in May of this year (See: Biblical Literalism or Low IQ: Which Came First?) which referenced a study that seemed to demonstrate that Christians have lower IQ's in direct correlation with the level to which they accept of Biblical literalism (NOTE: Per the study, Sarah Palin's religious background puts her in the low IQ category). Interestingly enough, Frum sees gay marriage as a GOP distraction from more important issues. I believe that Frum's analysis is correct. Hopefully, the GOP will ignore his advice and hasten their own political demise. Here are some selected highlights from Frum's article:

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As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim. My fellow conservatives and Republicans have tended not to worry very much about the widening of income inequalities. . . . . As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us.

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As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000, something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The mood of the country has soured.

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STEP ACROSS THE COUNTY line between Washington and suburban Fairfax County, Va., and you see the forfeiting process at work. A third of a century ago, Fairfax had only recently evolved from farm country to bedroom community. Some rich families clustered in the village of McLean, where Robert Kennedy had his Hickory Hill estate. Otherwise, Fairfax housed middle-class families looking for inexpensive housing and excellent schools. These middle-class families voted Republican, leading the Old Dominion’s political transition away from its reactionary segregationist past to a modern business-oriented conservatism.

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Today Fairfax boasts an economy bigger than Vietnam’s. Fairfax households earn among the highest average incomes of any American county, more than $100,000, but that high average conceals wide variations between the highly educated and new arrivals speaking in 40 different tongues. With wealth comes diversity — and what is inequality but diversity in monetary form?

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As Fairfax has evolved toward greater inequality, it has steadily shifted into the Democratic column. The Democrats Tim Kaine and Jim Webb won almost 60 percent of Fairfax’s votes in, respectively, the 2005 governor’s race and the 2006 U.S. Senate election. Democrats dominate Fairfax’s local government. In 2004, Fairfax voted for John Kerry over George Bush, 53 percent to 45 — the first Democratic presidential victory in the county since the Johnson landslide of 1964.

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Till now, conservative strength in the vast American middle more than compensated for any losses at the top and for the immigration-driven expansion of the bottom. Indeed, the Democratic tilt of the very richest Americans could be exploited as a powerful conservative recruiting tool. Resentment of “elites” is a major theme of conservative talk radio.

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For most of the Bush administration, G.D.P. grew strongly, the stock market boomed, new jobs were created. But the ordinary person experienced little benefit. The median household income, which rose in the ’90s, had only just caught up to its 2000 level when the expansion ended in 2007. . . . Out of their flat-lining incomes, middle-class Americans have had to pay more for food, fuel, tuition and out-of-pocket health-care costs. In the past few months, they have suffered sharp tumbles in the value of their most important asset, their homes. Their mood has turned bleak. Almost 70 percent disapprove of the policies of George W. Bush.

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TO WITNESS THE SLOW-MOTION withering of the G.O.P., drive a little farther west into the Washington metropolitan area, to Prince William County. Here is exurban America in all its fresh paint: vast tracts of inexpensive homes, schools built to the latest design, roads still black in their virgin asphalt. . . . [I]n the past couple of cycles, the once-tight Republican hold upon the county has loosened. Prince William voted (very narrowly) for Gov. Tim Kaine in 2005 and then (slightly less narrowly) for Senator Jim Webb in 2006. A big vote for the 2008 Democratic senatorial candidate Mark Warner seems almost certain, and a victory for Barack Obama seems very possible.

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IN SHORT, the trend to inequality is real, it is large and it is transforming American society and the American electoral map. Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and the irrelevant. Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle.

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What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs. If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years, middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation. But it remains unfortunately true that the Republican Party as a whole regards health care as “not our issue” — and certainly less exciting than another round of tax reductions.

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Meanwhile, the argument over same-sex marriage has become worse than a distraction from the challenge of developing policies to ensure that as many children as possible grow up with both a father and a mother in the home.

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At the same time, conservatives need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the trend toward the Democrats among America’s affluent and well educated. Leaving aside the District of Columbia, 7 of America’s 10 best-educated states are strongly “blue” in national politics, and the others (Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia) have been trending blue. Of the 10 least-educated, only one (Nevada) is not reliably Republican.

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Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too. We must develop a positive agenda that integrates the right kind of egalitarianism with our conservative principles of liberty. If we neglect this task and this opportunity, we won’t lose just the northern Virginia suburbs. We will lose America.