Virginia to Become First Southern State Banning LGBT Discrimination

For the 26 years that it held control of the Virginia General Assembly, the Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV") sought to make life hell for LGBT Virginians.  When not pushing anti-gay policies such as the 2006 constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage, to curry favor with its masters at The Family Foundation, Virginia's most prominent hate group, the RVP sought to block any and all bills that might have protected LGBT citizens.  This intransigence and arrogance was in spite of the fact that large majorities of Virginians favored non-discrimination protections - just as they favor common sense gun control and other progressive measures blocked by the RVP.  In November, 2019, Virginian's finally said "enough" and handed control of the Virginia General Assembly to Democrats.  Now, Virginia is poised to be the first state in the South to enact sweeping LGBT non-discrimination and public accommodation protections. Shortly after last November's sea change election, Governor Northam told the husband and I during a private visit to the Executive Mansion that he wanted "bold" action on LGBT rights.  He and the Democrat controlled legislature are about to deliver.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post's coverage:  

RICHMOND — Sweeping LGBT rights legislation that bans discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations sailed out of the Virginia Senate and House on bipartisan votes Thursday.

Virginia would become the first Southern state to adopt such protections if the measures become law as expected. The bills also would for the first time apply Virginia’s civil rights protections to public accommodations such as restaurants and stores — not just for the LGBT community but also for racial minorities, women and religious groups.

The Senate and House bills have to cross over to the opposite chamber and win passage again before Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who requested the legislation, can sign them into law.

But those steps were seen as technicalities by advocates cheering what they regard as landmark human rights legislation.

“Its sends a message that the commonwealth is a safe and welcoming place for all people,” said Sen. Adam P. Ebbin (D-Alexandria), who was Virginia’s first openly gay legislator when he joined the House of Delegates in 2004.

Previously, Republican House leaders always killed those measures in committee.

Both chambers are under Democratic control this year for the first time in decades. The LGBT rights measures are part of a flood of Democratic priorities advancing this year, including bills to limit access to firearms, boost the minimum wage and loosen voting rules.

The legislation that advanced Thursday would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in employment, housing or public accommodations such as restaurants. It applies to public and private entities alike.

Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national group that invested in Virginia legislative campaigns last year, said there are 30 U.S. states where “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people can be fired from their jobs and discriminated against in housing. Today we take Virginia off that list.”

The public accommodations portion of the bill was especially notable because Virginia — the former capital of the Confederacy, which bitterly resisted racial desegregation — is one of just five states with no public accommodations law of any kind.

So the bills would not simply add LGBT people to an existing list of protected classes that cannot be denied service. Instead they would create an entirely new public accommodations provision, making it unlawful to deny services to individuals “on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, or status as a veteran.”

The Senate’s bill passed 30 to 9, with nine of the chamber’s 19 Republicans voting in favor. Nine were against, and one GOP senator was off the floor when voting took place.

In January, the Senate voted to ban conversion therapy on children, repeal the state’s now-defunct ban on same-sex marriage and establish statewide policies for the treatment of transgender students.

The chamber also voted to replace “husband and wife” with gender-neutral “parties to the marriage” language in divorce law and make it easier for transgender people to change how their sex is listed on their birth certificates.

It is a new day in Virginia.  It is also ironic that in Northam, whom a number of LGBT organizations stupidly called upon to resign, LGBT Virginians have found their strongest ally and advocate - something the husband and I have long known.

Gov. Northam at a 2019 Pride reception at the Executive Mansion.

Gun Control: Virginians Deserve Better Than the Virginia GOP

As regular readers know, (i) I am a former Republican activist who left the GOP when the party became a sectarian party of Christian extremists and tools of the gun lobby, and (ii) since my "conversion", if you will, I have aligned with Democrats in the hope that continual electoral defeats will force the GOP to jettison the Christofascists and NRA.  During the later phase, my husband and I have become personal friends with the current governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam who I have know since he first ran for the Virginia Senate over a decade ago. In the wake of the horrible mass shooting in Virginia Beach on May 31, 2019, Northam called a special session of the Virginia General Assembly to address the issue of Virginia's abysmally lax gun laws, no doubt hoping that Virginia would see movement towards common sense reforms such as occurred in Florida after the Parkland massacre.  Shockingly, Virginia Republicans refused to have any meaningful discuss and debate and voted to adjourn the special session without taking any action whatsoever. The arrogance of the Virginia GOP in this regard is stunning, but, in my view, nor surprising since the GOP long ago gave up on representing the interests of a majority of their constituents.  In response, Northam has an op-ed in the Washington Post which notes his experience both in the army and as a doctor and then proceeds to condemn the Republican inaction on a vital issue.  The take away is to register to vote in November, 2019, and to vote Republicans out of control of the General Assembly.  Here are op-ed highlights:

After decades of working in emergency rooms and intensive care units, I’ve learned how to keep my emotions in check and get the job done. We all have experiences that fundamentally shape who we are, that change the way we look at the world and what we work toward every day.

For me, those experiences have come through my work as an Army doctor, my 30 years as a pediatrician, my time as a children’s hospice director and my role as governor of a state that is losing more than 1,000 people a year to gun violence.

Early in my career, I served in the Army. I took care of wounded soldiers in Operation Desert Storm, and I saw what weapons of war do to human beings.

As a pediatrician I’ve taken care of toddlers — 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds — who picked up loaded weapons off the bedside table. And I’ve been the one who has had to sit with those toddlers in my arms, without breath in their bodies, and tell their parents that they won’t be going home.

One of my favorite patients was a girl named Katie, whom I started caring for when she was very young. She grew up to be an intelligent and accomplished young woman and married and had a child. One night, Katie’s husband pulled out a revolver and shot her dead in front of her 5-month-old baby. Her mother called me that night to tell me she was gone. That is still one of the most difficult calls I have ever had to take.

On May 31, around 4 in the afternoon, I was told there had been a mass shooting in Virginia Beach. The number of dead kept climbing as we drove to the emergency operations center. By the end of the night, 12 precious lives had been lost. All of those people had gotten up that morning and gone to work, expecting to leave that night and go home to their families. That didn’t happen. Their lives were taken senselessly.

A few days after the Virginia Beach tragedy, I spoke at the funeral of Markiya Dickson, a 9-year-old girl who was shot and killed while playing with her friends in a Richmond park. Her father stood at the pulpit with his daughter lying in a casket. He spoke about what a wonderful young girl she was, how her favorite color was pink and how everybody at school loved her. And then he said something I will never forget. He said, “We shouldn’t be here.”

As a father, I don’t want another father to have to bury his child. As a doctor, I don’t want another doctor to have to tell parents that their loved one will never come home. And as a governor, I don’t want another governor to get that call about a mass shooting or have to speak at a funeral for a precious 9-year-old girl killed by guns.

On Tuesday, I asked the General Assembly to do something about it. I asked lawmakers to address the emergency of gun violence in Virginia. I asked them to show their constituents and our country that despite our differences, we can come together to save lives.

Legislators came to Richmond Tuesday, but after just 90 minutes, Republican legislators voted to adjourn until November — without hearing any bills, without having any debates and without taking any action to address the crisis of gun violence.

That’s not what they were elected for.

They were not elected to punt or dismiss important issues. They were elected to weigh ideas and discuss differences. Regardless of whether folks agree on solutions, they were elected to take these votes. I expected better of them. I knew better than to think there would be an easy agreement, but I did expect our elected representatives to treat serious issues with respect, not contempt.

[T]his debate is not over. It is painfully clear that the issue of gun violence is not going away. And we will not stop working to find solutions to prevent these tragedies from taking more lives.

Sadly, Virginia Republicans give higher priority to gun manufacturer profits and the wants of gun lobby extremist than on the lives of every day Virginians who simply want to live their lives free from the seemingly ever growing threat of gun violence.  As noted above, the solution to this problem to vote out Republicans in November, 2019.

An Explosion is Coming

Throughout history the arrogant rule of a minority has usually ended badly for those thwarting the will of the people.  The French and Russian Revolutions are but two of the more extreme examples as is the fate of  Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife.  Here in America, one can hope that such violent eruptions never occur, but we are seeing a phenomenon where an increasing arrogant and out of touch Republican Party - thanks in part to gerrymandering and an Electoral College that has failed the intent of the Founding Fathers - is forcing an agenda on the country that is opposed by the majority of Americans. As a piece in New York Magazine notes:

Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.  

Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right.

Thus, the question becomes one of when will the majority say "enough" and fight back?  One would hope that the taking back of the nation from minority control would take place at the ballot box, but given the GOP's gerrymandering of districts and a constitution that grants 2 U.S. Senators to states with tiny populations populations  - Wyoming has a population of less than 600,000 while the cities of Hampton Roads have a population of 1.7 million; Montana has slightly over 1 million residents while New York City has over 8.5 million - electoral efforts for the majority to retake control my be difficult.  Has Mitch McConnell, who represents a state with a population of half of New York City and not vastly larger than that of Los Angeles, and Trump forgotten Ceausescu's fate (I suspect Trump has no idea who Ceausescu was although I suspect Melania does)?   A column in the Washington Post looks at what will hopefully be the coming explosion.  Here are highlights:

Eight years ago, when Congress was about to pass Obamacare, John A.Boehner, leader of a powerless Republican congressional minority, gave a passionate, prescient speech on the House floor. . . . “This is the People’s House, . . . .  you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.”

This was Boehner’s famous “hell no, you can’t” speech. But the Democrats could. They had the votes, and they passed Obamacare. Boehner was correct in his prediction, though. The Democrats were soon on their way to minority status in the House and would later lose the Senate and the presidency.

Now . . . . We see Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowing to ram through the Senate the confirmation of the decisive fifth hard-right justice on the Supreme Court, quite likely signaling the end of legal abortion in much of the United States and possibly same-sex marriage and other rights Americans embrace, in far greater number, than they ever did Obamacare.

One wants to cry out: Hell no, you can’t! But Republicans can. They have the votes. Democrats can and should fight, but the GOP controls the schedule, sets the rules and already eliminated the procedures that gave the minority a say in Supreme Court confirmations.

If anything, the fury should be far more intense on the Democratic side right now than it was for Boehner in 2010. The Affordable Care Act was the signature proposal of a president elected with a large popular mandate, it had the support of a plurality of the public, and it was passed by a party that had large majorities in both chambers of Congress and had attempted to solicit the participation of the minority.

Now we have a Supreme Court nomination — the second in as many years — from an unpopular president who lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The nominee will be forced through by also-unpopular Senate Republicans, who, like House Republicans, did not win a majority of the vote in 2016. 

For good measure, the new justice may well join the other four conservative justices in revoking same-sex marriage, which also has the support of two-thirds of Americans. And this comes after the Republicans essentially stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.Republicans have been defying gravity for some time. . . . they lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. 

Because of partisan gerrymandering and other factors, Democrats could win by eight percentage points and still not gain control of the House, one study found. And the two-senators-per-state system (which awards people in Republican Wyoming 70 times more voting power than people in Democratic California) gives a big advantage to rural, Republican states. 

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has protected Republican minority rule. It gave the wealthy freedom to spend unlimited dark money on elections, while crippling the finances of unions. It sustained gerrymandering and voter-suppression laws that reduce participation of minority voters. And, of course, it gave the presidency to George W. Bush.

Control of the judiciary, and the resulting protection of minority rule, has been the prize for Republicans who tolerated President Trump’s starting a trade war, losing allies while getting cozy with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, flirting with white supremacists, paying off a porn star and attacking the justice system while his former advisers are indicted and convicted.

The backlash is coming. It is the deserved consequence of minority-rule government protecting the rich over everybody else, corporations over workers, whites over nonwhites and despots over democracies. It will explode, God willing, at the ballot box and not in the streets. You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.

Sadly, part of me believes that ultimately, it will explode in the streets. If that happens, McConnell, Trump and others will deserve whatever very harsh consequences befall them.