Covid-19’s New Surge Across Rural America

Crowd not social distancing in Alamance County, North Carolina, on Saturday.

Back in early April Alabama governor Kay Ivey said the following: “Y’all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California,” she said, suggesting that the fate of hard-hit parts of the country would not be shared by Alabama.  Now, Alabama's Capital, Montgomery, has so many covid-19 cases that the infected are being sent to Birmingham since Montgomery lacks sufficient hospital capacity.  Ivey represents the mind-set of far too many residents of rural areas and red states that almost seemed to take glee as the pandemic hit New York City and other large urban areas especially hard,  Now, the pandemic is moving into the very same rural areas and red states, many of which are woefully unprepared and lack hospitals and medical personnel to deal with the crisis.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the situation, noting that the pandemic "has taken hold in counties where residents flout social distancing guidelines or believe the pandemic to be exaggerated, the virus’s lethality a myth spread by President Trump’s political foes and a liberal media."  Here are article highlights:

The novel coronavirus arrived in an Indiana farm town mid-planting season and took root faster than the fields of seed corn, infecting hundreds and killing dozens. It tore though a pork processing plant and spread outward in a desolate stretch of the Oklahoma Panhandle. And in Colorado’s sparsely populated eastern plains, the virus erupted in a nursing home and a pair of factories, burning through the crowded quarters of immigrant workers and a vulnerable elderly population.

As the death toll nears 100,000, the disease caused by the virus has made a fundamental shift in who it touches and where it reaches in America, according to a Washington Post analysis of case data and interviews with public health professionals in several states. The pandemic that first struck in major metropolises is now increasingly finding its front line in the country’s rural areas; counties with acres of farmland, cramped meatpacking plants, out-of-the-way prisons and few hospital beds.

In these areas, where 60 million Americans live, populations are poorer, older and more prone to health problems such as diabetes and obesity than those of urban areas. They include immigrants and the undocumented — the “essential” workers who have kept the country’s sprawling food industry running, but who rarely have the luxury of taking time off for illness.

Rural counties now have some of the highest rates of covid-19 cases and deaths in the country, topping even the hardest-hit New York City boroughs and signaling a new phase of the pandemic — one of halting, scattered outbreaks that could devastate still more of America’s most vulnerable towns as states lift stay-at-home orders.

In many of those places, where the health-care system is already stretched thin, even a minor surge in patients is enough to overwhelm.

Where and when hot spots arise in America’s most isolated counties is, in part, a matter of chance. But crowded spaces, and populations with poor access to health care, quickly facilitate the spread.

Of the 25 rural counties with the highest per capita case rates, 20 have a meatpacking plant or prison where the virus took hold and spread with abandon, then leaped into the community when workers took it home.

It has taken hold in counties where residents flout social distancing guidelines or believe the pandemic to be exaggerated, the virus’s lethality a myth spread by President Trump’s political foes and a liberal media.

“We’ve got a little bit of everything: folks who feel their rights have been taken away because they’ve been asked to stay home and they lost jobs and they’re really hurting, and we have folks who are very concerned and frightened and won’t leave their house,” said Rebecca Burns, a health officer for the agency that covers Hillsdale County, Mich., which last month topped the state for the highest death toll among rural counties, after a nursing home outbreak. . . . . We have to continue to watch,” Burns added, during a week when members of a conservative militia stood outside a Hillsdale County barbershop, brandishing guns to “protect” its reopening, in defiance of the governor’s orders. “Anyone who thinks this is one and done is probably wrong,” she said.

Lim also fears the outbreak is facilitated by people in the conservative farming community not following preventive measures.  “If you go to the local Walmart, I would say 10 percent of people are wearing masks, and the restaurants … that are open are packed,” Lim said. “I’m a registered Republican, by the way,” he added. “But [people] don’t seem to know the science behind it. Even though they see the news, they just think it’s all overblown.”

To epidemiologists and physicians, this checkerboard spread was all very predictable. It was never a question of whether the virus would hit rural America, but when.

Early on, two warning signals blared from opposite sides of the country.

In Blaine County, Idaho, population 2,200, an outbreak spurred by the annual influx of wealthy tourists seeking ski slopes turned the resort region into one of the first rural hot spots. The infection rate soared and was, at one point in late March, the highest in the nation.

That same month, more than 2,000 miles away, the virus began its siege on southwest Georgia. Most believe it was introduced at a well-attended Dougherty County funeral, an event that soon led to many more funerals. From Albany, the county seat and a regional hub, infections radiated to neighboring locales with ferocious intensity.

Health officials have estimated that urban areas have more than twice the number of physicians per capita as rural areas and more than 8.5 times the number of specialists.

And in many more regions, there are no hospitals for hundreds of miles, the result of closures amid crushing financial pressures. Since 2010, 130 rural hospitals have shut their doors, according to an ongoing study from the University of North Carolina.

Jobs Growth Favors Democratic Counties

Each month when I read Virginia Business magazine, there is a common thread: cities and counties in the so-called urban crescent of Virginia are largely thriving while rural areas and Southwest Virginia are struggle.  With the expansion of Medicaid under Gov. Ralph Northam, many of these rural areas are less likely to lose their local hospitals, but this will not change the reality that younger Virginians are fleeing rural Virginia for the cities and their suburbs leaving those rural areas with an aging and declining population.  Meanwhile, due to the "God, guns and gays" fixation of the populace, most new businesses prefer to avoid the areas and, instead, locate in the more progressive urban regions of Virginia.  The result is that the downward spiral in rural Virginia - and rural America -  continues.  A piece at PBS News Hour looks at the reality that job grow even in a supposedly strong economy is mostly focused on progressive, Democrat voting areas.  Trump has not delivered to his rural supporters who continue to allow themselves to be swayed by Trump's racism and pandering to gun and religious extremists.  Here are excerpts:

On average for the year-ended this May, 58.5 percent of the job gains were in counties that backed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to an Associated Press analysis of monthly government jobs data by county.

Despite an otherwise robust national economy, the analysis shows that a striking number of Trump counties are losing jobs. The AP found that 35.4 percent of Trump counties have shed jobs in the past year, compared with just 19.2 percent of Clinton counties.

As more money pools in such corporate hubs as Houston, San Francisco or Seattle, prosperity spills over less and less to smaller towns and cities in America’s interior. That would seem to undercut what Trump sees as a central accomplishment of his administration — job creation for middle class and blue-collar workers in towns far removed from glitzy urban centers.

Job growth in Trump’s economy is still concentrated in the same general places as it was toward the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — when roughly 58.7 percent of the average annual job gains were in Democratic counties.

Yet the lack of transformative job growth in Trump areas hasn’t seemed to erode his support among Republicans, while hiring in Democratic areas have done little to improve his standing with those voters. For Trump’s core supporters, cultural issues such as gun rights, immigration and loyalty to the president have become dominant priorities.

But other issues preoccupy the minds of the party faithful in Trump strongholds such as Beaver County, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh.

Chip Kohser, the county Republican chairman and the bristle-bearded founder of a farm share company, said his party members are rallying around their staunch opposition to gun control. “Our No. 1 motivating factor,” he said, “is Second Amendment issues.”

Since May 2017, Beaver County has lost 191 jobs. With the warmer summer weather, hiring is now on an upswing. But employers have fewer job applicants available as the labor force has shrunk by roughly 1,000 workers in the past 12 months, the result of decades of population loss that hit former steel towns such as Aliquippa, Beaver Falls and Midland.

The tax cuts haven’t stopped the outflow of people. Chatting over eggs, bacon and home fries, Kohser estimated that the tax cuts have added perhaps $1,200 to his annual household income and roughly the same to many others in the area — not likely enough on its own to rejuvenate the local economy.

Many of those forgotten men and women might cheer the president for slapping tariffs on imported goods to defend U.S. factory jobs or his vow to build a wall on the Mexican border to block illegal immigration. But for struggling communities waiting for jobs to be restored, Trump’s tax cuts — which were skewed toward corporations and wealthy individuals — have yet to deliver.

During the past year, the healthiest job gains have been in counties containing such vibrant cities as Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Seattle, all of them places that have favored Democrats.

Texas, which Trump won handily, reflects the geographic split in the economy. Within that state, Clinton — not Trump — won the counties that have accounted for bulk of that state’s job growth.

When the Pew Research Center asked voters in June to identify the nation’s most pressing issue, more of them chose immigration, race, political gridlock or Trump himself than the economy. The proportion of people who said the economy was their top priority fell to its lowest level in more than eight years.

Sixty percent of Americans told Pew that they see their midterm vote as an act of either supporting the president (26 percent) or opposing him (34 percent).

[C]onservatives and liberals have become more sharply split on such issues as confidence in the government and social institutions, religious participation and stances on marriage, sex and abortion.

In Pennsylvania, many Democrats see the choices made by Trump as putting democracy itself at risk. Their fears stem in part from his administration’s initial policy of separating refugee children from their parents and his seemingly deferential relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose nation interfered in the 2016 election, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

“What I’m hearing daily is fear amongst people as to whether their democracy is slipping away from them,” said Nancy Mills, the Pennsylvania Democratic chairwoman. “I’m really hearing that more than anything else.”

[T]he economic growth he [Trump] promised would revitalize Beaver County may depend on its ability to attract immigrants as it did a century ago when the steel mills brought Germans, Italians and Eastern Europeans workers to the area.

Beaver County never fully recovered from the steel mill closures in the 1980s that caused the unemployment rate to spike at nearly 30 percent.

Many young workers with college degrees migrated east for Pittsburgh’s technology and medical care jobs. The result of this population flight is that Beaver County is rapidly aging, with a median age of 44.8 years old, compared with 37.7 nationwide and 32.9 in Pittsburgh.

Republican Rep. Keith Rothfus . . . said there was a clear path for generating job growth: Immigrants.  You look at areas of the country that are really thriving — there’s a significant immigrant population,” he said. “We need to do a better job of attracting immigrants here. This place was built on immigrants.”

But Rothfus has also been outspoken on the importance of tighter border security.  . . . As of now, Beaver County is still waiting on the job surge.

Rothus, like most Republicans and their supporters would rather pander to white nationals and bigots than speak the truth that GOP policies are harming their base economically.  Meanwhile, the bigotry of the GOP base makes their strongholds unattractive to the very businesses that they need to attract.  Nothing Trump says or does will change this reality. His supporters need to look in the mirror if they want to see the real cause of their problems.

Trump and the Tyranny of the Minority

The presidential election of 2016 - and likely the 2018 midterm elections as well - has helped to underscore a systemic flaw in the current constitutional system in America.  Due to demographic changes that have seen surging growth in population in large, generally liberal urban areas and declining populations in rural areas, a minority of the population now controls the federal government. As the population growth disparity continue, the problem will only intensify.  Something similar exists in many of the states.  Here in Virginia it will be hopefully be proven again in November that Republicans can no longer win in statewide races where the population of the so-called urban crescent can out vote the reactionary and backward rural areas of the state.  Yet, despite this, thanks to gerrymandering and arcanely drawn districts, Republicans control the House of Delegates and thwart progressive and science based legislation.  The result is that the will of the majority is thwarted by a minority of voters that are increasingly out of touch with objective reality or who seek to take the nation back to the 1950's. A column in the New York Times looks at the growing problem.  Here are highlights:

Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts.

I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.

I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.

A combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms — which polls show is probable — they may not take back the House of Representatives.

And because of the quirks of the 2018 Senate map, Democrats are extremely unlikely to reclaim that chamber, even if most voters would prefer Democratic control. Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. . . . “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.” The distortion carries over to the Electoral College, where each state’s number of electors is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. This would matter less if the United States weren’t so geographically polarized. But America is now two countries, eyeing each other across a chasm of distrust and contempt. One is urban, diverse and outward-looking. This is the America that’s growing. The other is white, provincial and culturally revanchist. This is the America that’s in charge. I recently had the chance to ask Gov. Jerry Brown of California what might happen if we have more elections like 2016, where a majority of voters and a supermajority of Californians are thwarted. Polls already show a third of Californians favor secession. Could that fringe movement become mainstream? Brown said it was “not beyond the realm of possibility” that the country could eventually break apart, even if he doesn’t think it’s likely.

Conservatives are often unmoved by complaints that our system is undemocratic, arguing that America was intended not as a democracy but a republic. But if this was true at the founding, it’s probably not how most Americans understand their country today, when “undemocratic” is considered a political epithet.

Certainly, we need checks on the tyranny of the majority. But what we have now is the tyranny of the minority.

There are ways out.  The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — a plan in which states agree to award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner — could circumvent the Electoral College if enough states enacted it.

Don Beyer, a Democratic representative from Virginia, has introduced the Fair Representation Act, which would change the way the House is elected, replacing single-member districts with larger districts represented by several people. They’d be chosen by a system of ranked voting that would allow third parties to compete without becoming spoilers, while giving political minorities a say in the process.

[A]bsent reform, our system could eventually face a legitimacy crisis. Levinson, perhaps the most prominent among progressive critics of the Constitution, argues that the crisis is already here: “At some point we need to discuss the extent to which the entire constitutional system is full of these anti-majoritarian aspects.”

Trump’s election has revealed many dark truths about this country. One of them is: We’re a lot less democratic than we might think.

What Trumpcare Could Mean for Rural America - Is Southwest Virginia Listening?

Having been involved in Virginia politics for decades one thing that has always been striking is how rural areas of the state - especially Southwest Virginia - regularly votes against their own economic interests.  Appeals to Christian extremism and racism time and time again cause the rural areas to support Republicans who are great at promoting dog whistle racism and swearing fealty to the Christofascists at The Family Foundation but who do nothing to help the failing economy in these areas.  Making matters worse, the downward spiral in reactionary social norms make the areas less and less attractive for modern, progressive businesses to consider locating to the regions.  Now, with Republicans set to either repeal the Affordable Health Care Act or sabotage it further, rural America is on the verge of reaping what it has sown.  A piece at Vox looks at Tennessee as a case study of what may be coming to these Trump/GOP supporting areas of the country.  It isn't pretty and it is self-inflicted.  Here are excerpts:

Tennessee is a preview of what an Obamacare collapse could look under President Trump, where the law technically remains standing but people don’t have access to the programs.

The areas most at risk for this type of collapse are those that voted for Trump: places that are lower-income and rural, which aren’t attractive markets to health insurance companies.

These are places that have struggled to attract robust insurance competition both before and after the health care law’s implementation. “In general, rural areas have always been the places where it’s hard to attract a competitive insurance market,” says Aditi Sen, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied the health law marketplaces. “The incentives to enter just aren’t that strong.”

The Obama administration worked hard to recruit health insurers to sell to those areas. The Trump administration, however, seems to want to stand aside and let Obamacare run on autopilot, so it can explode or survive on its own.

In eastern Tennessee, that could have the practical effect of leaving 40,000 current Obamacare enrollees without coverage.

The stretch of eastern Tennessee where no insurers want to sell coverage includes 6,700 square miles of rolling Appalachian hills and rural roadside towns. It has 16 counties and 1.1 million residents.

Rural areas have long struggled to attract robust health insurance markets. The scarcity of doctors and hospitals makes it hard to build a network. Smaller populations mean there are fewer customers for insurers to sell to than they might find in more urban places.

The whole theory of Obamacare relied on both healthy and sick people signing up for marketplace coverage. The healthy people are crucial to balance out the bills of the sicker enrollees.

The Tennessee marketplace ran into trouble because it gave healthy consumers lots of ways to avoid joining the marketplace — a perfect storm of state and federal policy decisions that undermined the business case for insurers to sell Obamacare policies in the region. . . . It’s a self-inflicted wound.”

Tennessee layered on other policies that made it easier for healthy people to opt out of Obamacare. It appears to be the only state in the country that still allows some insurers to reject or charger higher prices to sick customers. This practice, called underwriting, was generally banned by the Affordable Care Act. A loophole in Tennessee law allows membership-only Farm Bureau plans to continue offering these products.

Georgetown University’s Sabrina Corlette has researched the Farm Bureau plans and estimates about 55,000 Tennesseans are currently purchasing non-ACA-compliant plans through the insurer.

The Farm Bureau plans, the weak individual mandate, the “if you like your plan you can keep it” promise — none of these policies on their own could take down the Affordable Care Act marketplace. But taken together, over the course of three years, they made it significantly easier for healthy people to decide not to enroll in the marketplaces. More than anyone, that hurts sick people.

Congressional Republicans led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) dubbed it the “Obamacare slush fund,” and in 2014 they inserted a provision into the 2015 federal budget requiring this program to be revenue-neutral.

Because health insurers experienced significantly more losses than payments, the program was only able to pay out 12.6 percent of the bills it owed. Small insurers like Community Health Alliance, a nonprofit planned that launched with a loan from the federal government, couldn’t survive that hit.

“They sort of knocked the breath out of us by taking away the risk corridor,” says Jerry Burgess, who served as chief executive of that plan. Community Health Alliance quit the marketplaces and went out of business in 2015 after the federal government did not pay millions in risk corridor payments that the insurer had expected.

The future of Obamacare under the Trump administration is less certain. Some places, like Florida and California, will be fine. They have big populations and urban markets that are attractive to health insurers.

Other places like Tennessee, more rural and low-income, may struggle. President Trump has given little reassurance to health plans that might be on the fence about entering Tennessee or other markets. His administration has waffled on whether it will continue funding key Obamacare payments. He has said he expects the marketplaces to “explode” on their own.

 That's right.  Republicans have worked to sabotage the law and withheld needed funding only to then claim the program is failing.  For rural hospitals, large numbers of uninsured individuals is financially catastrophic.  Required to stabilize people, they must treat them without payment.  In turn, they charge more for those who do have coverage and drive costs up further and make insurers more likely to want to leave the local market.  The death spiral only accelerates until hospitals go bankrupt and close, taking with them some of the best jobs in the area and depriving residents of ready access to hospital facilities.  It's as if rural areas have opted for a slow form of suicide. 

Early Virginia Election Returns: Backward Areas Going for Trump

Many jurisdictions are not yet reporting, but among those that have reported there is a clear trend: backward, economic basket case, and racist (and anti-transgender in the case of Gloucester County) areas are going for Donald Trump.  In contrast, so far, every city and urban area - other than Lynchburg, Waynesboro and Chesapeake - with more educated and more racially diverse voters  are going for Clinton.  Hopefully, the so-called urban crescent will blow away the rural, KKK loving regions of the state. The irony, of course, is that the areas that are supporting Trump are economic basket cases largely because they are so bigoted and reactionary that most progressive businesses avoid them like the plague.   It is 2016, yet the Trump supporting regions of Virginia long for the 1950's and would probably support overturning not just the 2015 Obergefell  ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, but also Loving v. Virginia.   I sincerely hope that Hillary Clinton is victorious tonight and that these Trump supporting regions will have only accomplished making themselves even more attractive to progressive businesses.  Hate and bigotry and the celebratory embrace of ignorance need to carry a sever economic price. 

I will give updates as more results are turned in and posted by the Virginia Board of Elections.

The Virginia GOP: Opposing Medicaid Without Good Reason

Next month the entire Virginia General Assembly is up for reelection - or preferably, replacement in the case of many of its Republican members.  In the noise machine that is the run up to the 2016 presidential election, including the ongoing GOP clown car circus, many Virginians seem oblivious to the election on November 3, 2015, and may fail to vote - something that favors the Republicans whose base, while crazy, tends to always go to the polls.  Among the issue to be addressed in the 2016 session of the General Assembly is the issue of Medicaid expansion, something opposed by Republicans largely because it is part of the Affordable Health Care Act championed by Barack Obama.  These individuals - who pretend to be the party of faith - happily throw 400,000 some Virginians in the gutter rather than had Obama a success.  The Virginian Pilot blasts these modern day Pharisees in a main editorial today.  Here are highlights:

REPUBLICAN state lawmakers' refusal to accept billions in Virginians' federal taxes to subsidize insurance for some 400,000 uninsured people has repeatedly been exposed as the partisan political ploy that it is.

The expansion of Virginia's managed-care Medicaid program, the most efficient of two divisions of Medicaid in Virginia, is a prime objective of Democratic President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

The 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of that federal law, however, left to the respective states a decision whether to accept the return of federal tax revenue for Medicaid expansion. In Virginia, where Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, GOP delegates and senators dug in their heels and refused.

The effects of that fiscally irresponsible position extend far beyond the health care of lower-income, uninsured Virginians.

Republicans have chosen to bleed hospitals in their own districts of necessary revenue, diminishing access to quality health care while undermining local and statewide economic development efforts. All so they can politically oppose a lame duck president over a law twice declared constitutional and which the GOP doesn't have the votes in Washington to overturn.

State data show one-third of Virginia's acute-care hospitals lost money operating in 2013, as the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association pointed out in a statewide public-awareness campaign. Roughly half of rural Virginia's acute-care hospitals lost money that year.

Those figures are unsustainable, and they portend a looming crisis for health care - and for the economy - in Virginia. That crisis could be averted simply by expanding Medicaid and returning Virginians' federal tax dollars to the commonwealth.

The health care industry is the top employer in the vast majority of Virginia's rural counties, providing critical jobs and tax revenue.  It's worth noting many of those areas are represented by Republican legislators, who seem intent on punishing their constituents in order to score a political victory. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who has focused heavily on economic development, campaigned in 2013 on a pledge to increase health insurance coverage.

Under the law, federal funds would cover 100 percent of costs for expanding Medicaid coverage through 2016, and then gradually phase down to a floor of 90 percent in 2020.
There is no business case for refusing the return of billions in tax dollars already paid by residents to improve health care for Virginia's working poor, shore up Virginia hospitals' ailing financial conditions and strengthen an industry critical to Virginia's economy.

Houston City Council Passes LGBT-Inclusive Nondiscrimination Ordinance in 11-6 Vote

Despite the efforts of anti-gay hate merchants and Bible thumping pastors - including black pastors too stupid to see that they are being manipulated by former segregationists - the Houston Chronicle is reporting that Houston's City Council enacted a sweeping non-discrimination ordinance that will protect LGBT Houstonians.  As noted before, Texas' extreme anti-gay laws is making it for progressive cities, universities and businesses to attract the best and the brightest employees.  Houston's new ordinance is but one effort to counter the toxic Texas laws that reduce the state's competitiveness. 

Both Virginia's and Texas' cities are being harmed by the backwardness and bigotry being maintained by the states' respective Republican Parties.   Fortunately, with each passing election cycle the day comes closer of when the cities' populations will be able to out vote the knuckle dragging, spittle flecked voters in the rural areas.  That day cannot come soon enough.

Growing Democratic Trending in Virginia

One thing that the 2013 Virginia elections highlighted was the growing ability of Virginia's urban areas to out vote the reactionary, bigoted parts of the state.  As the map above indicates, all of the larger cities in Virginia are now trending strongly for Democrats - Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County are likewise trending Democrat.  And with most population growth being confined to the urban areas, the long term prospects for the Virginia GOP in statewide races is not promising.  The Virginia GOP's continued prostitution of itself to white supremacists and religious extremists will likely accelerate the trend.  Blue Virginia notes as follows:

Take a look at the vote trend between 2001 and 2013 from Daily Kos. There's a lot of red there, but it's in the most rural, slow-growth parts of the state. All of the major population areas, from Northern Virginia to Richmond to Tidewater, are trending blue. The population growth in the state is heavily concentrated in this urban crescent. Favorable demographic trends and the alienation of moderate suburban voters by the hard-right have combined to turn Virginia into a blue state ... at least statewide in higher turnout elections. 

Will the Virginia GOP get the message?  Probably not since it is increasingly controlled by The Family Foundation and Tea Party lunatics, groups that do not like to accept objective reality.

Why Gay Marriage is Inevitable in Virginia

Young friends at their wedding

Over the last decade, the demographics of the population of Virginia have changed in many ways: urban growth, increases in Hispanic and minority voters, and an influx of college educated individuals.  None of these trends have been positive for the Republican Party of Virginia which has continued to prostitute itself to the most extreme and hate filled elements of the Virginia populace. Although a few remain who seek to change the Virginia GOP from within, for the most part, the party base is increasingly confined to those motivated by greed, racism and religious extremism (the 2009 GOP victory was not representative of this new Virginia and was largely the result, in my view, of a truly terrible Democrat ticket). Meanwhile, most of Virginia is moving forward.  A piece in PolicyMic argues that these sweeping demographic changes make gay marriage inevitable in Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

The same Virginians who voted 57% in favor of ratifying a constitutional amendment defining marriage as “between one man and one woman” in 2006 now believe it should be legal for gay couples to get married. According to Virginia’s statewide election survey results released earlier this month, 56% of likely voters oppose the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. 

With Proposition 8 lawyers Theodore B. Olson and David Boies on the case to challenge Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage, the legal battle is sure to be an interesting one. But what has changed in the last seven years to cause majority opinion to switch sides so dramatically?

Perhaps it has something to do with public opinion about those who want to keep the law as is. Republican Ken Cuccinelli, sitting attorney general and Virginia governor hopeful not only opposes marriage equality, but he has been fighting a losing battle to reinstate Virginia’s anti-sodomy or, “Crimes Against Nature” law. Robin Marty at Rolling Stone claims, “Cucinelli's extreme stance on social issues makes him unelectable.” 

Social issues are becoming a deep concern for the changing demographics of Virginia voters. The Center for American Progress Action Fund saw a shift in Virginia, specifically Northern Virginia, shortly after the 2008 presidential election. These suburbs of the Washington, D.C. metro area have grown by 16% since 2000, thanks to an influx of minorities and white college graduates. The report by Ruy Teixeira found that the area “casts a third of Virginia’s ballots, and it is also the area where Democrats have made their greatest gains.” The New York Times saw the same trend in August of this year when they reported a “rapid growth among college-educated suburban moderates [in Virginia] who have proven receptive to Democratic stances on social issues.” As younger voters move into the state, they bring with them their more socially liberal mindsets. 

For those fighting to lift the ban in Virginia, no narrative speaks to the issue of marriage equality more than the one Boies drew between the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 (which declared that “laws restricting interracial marriage violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and reversed previous court rulings”) and Virginia’s present struggle for another kind of equality. "Virginia gave us the first marriage equality case – and the one that most clearly established that the right to marry the person you love is a fundamental right of all Americans. It's fitting, then, that Virginia be the battleground for another great test of that principle," said Boies.

If the majority of Virginians get their way, we will see not only an end to the states ban on same-sex marriage, but also a greater step toward national marriage equality. 

 Hopefully, these changed demographics will doom the Virginia GOP's 2013 statewide slate to defeat as well.

Teen Pregnancy Rate Highest in Rural (Conservative) Areas

Just as the evangelical Christians who blather the most about the "sanctity of marriage" have the highest divorce rates of any religious grouping in the country, so too rural - translate Republican - areas have the highest teen pregnancy rates.  Obviously, the children of the Bible beaters are not heeding their parents' supposed beliefs on chastity until marriage and the abstinence only sex education course so favored by the Christofascists.  And then there's the lack of availability of contraception and women's health clinics in these areas where they Christofascists seek to drive away programs that would provide meaningful means to reduce unwanted pregnancies.  The Des Moines Register has coverage on the findings of a new study.  Here are excerpts:

Nationally, the birth rate for U.S. teens has plunged to record low levels, but a new analysis shows that a disproportionate share of teen births are in rural communities.  In 2010, the birth rate for girls ages 15 to 19 in rural counties was 43 per 1,000, nearly one-third higher than the rate for metropolitan counties (33 per 1,000), says a report released Thursday.

"The prevailing stereotype is that teen parenthood is primarily an urban and suburban phenomenon," says Bill Albert, chief program officer for the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit. In fact, "the landscape of teen childbearing is more open spaces and fresh air than gridlock and high-rises," he says.

The results indicate that "the rates are far, far higher in rural areas compared to other parts of the country," he says. That suggests a greater need for efforts directed at helping rural teens avoid too-early pregnancy and parenthood.  Among findings from the analysis:

- Between 1990 and 2010, the birth rate among teens in rural counties declined by 32%, far less than in major urban centers (49%) and suburbs (40%).

- Rural counties account for one in five teen births; only 16% of teen girls live in rural counties.

- The teen birth rate is higher in rural counties than major urban centers for all ethnic and racial groups

What's behind the high rural teen birth rate? One factor is that even with all of the improvements in birth control methods, availability "lags far behind availability for teens living in urban and metro areas,"

Once again the lesson is clear:  if the Christofascists were serious about reducing teen pregnancies and abortions, they would support comprehensive sex ed programs and making contraception widely available.  Instead, they whine about the unborn while perpetuating the problem and typically not giving a damn about children once they are actually born.   Pretending in one's delusional mind that teens aren't having sex simply doesn't make it so.

The Plight of LGBT Teens in Rural Areas

Some years back I traveled to Martinsville, Virginia (in Southwest Virginia) for the work I was doing in Moore v. Virginia Museum of Natural History and quickly came to think that being gay and living in that area would make the idea of razor blades to one's wrists looks rather attractive.  Martinsville is not only backwards in just about every way imaginable but it is also more than an hour's drive from anyplace that would be considered remotely gay friendly.  Sadly, Martinsville is too representative of much of rural America where ignorance and bigotry are proudly embraced, especially from the overly abundant Baptist church pulpits.  A new study by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) looks at the plight of LGBT youth living in such areas.  The report can be accessed here.  Here are some of the findings:

Nearly all LGBT students in rural areas have heard homophobic, racist, sexist, and negative gender expression-based remarks. Furthermore, students in rural areas more frequently experienced derogatory comments than students in suburban and urban schools. For example:

 • 97% of rural LGBT students heard “gay” used in a negative way (e.g., “that’s so gay”) sometimes, often, or frequently in school. 94% heard other homophobic language (“dyke” or “faggot”) sometimes, often, or frequently.

 • 86% heard comments from students about someone not acting “masculine” enough sometimes, often, or frequently, and 69% heard such comments about students not acting “feminine” enough sometimes, often, or frequently.

 • A quarter or more of students also had heard school staff make homophobic remarks (25%), sexist remarks (30%), or negative remarks about someone’s gender expression (35%) sometimes, often, or frequently.

 • Rural students were more likely than suburban or urban students to hear most types of biased language, including homophobic remarks and negative comments about gender expression. Rural LGBT students reported that school staff members and students rarely intervened when biased comments were heard.

 • Only 13% of rural LGBT students said staff members intervened most or all of the time when homophobic comments were made, and only 11% said that staff members intervened most or all of the time when negative comments were made about gender expression.

 • Only 6% of students said that other students intervened most of the time or always when they heard homophobic remarks, and 5% said that about comments regarding gender expression.

 • Students in rural schools reported lower student and school staff intervention in homophobic remarks than suburban students.

A majority of rural LGBT students had been verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender expression, and substantial numbers had experienced more severe physical harassment and physical assault because of these characteristics. Furthermore, although LGBT students across the country experienced harassment and abuse, students in rural areas were more frequently victimized than students in suburban and urban areas.

There is much, much more in the report and little of it is positive.  It underscores the reality that many in large progressive cities have no idea how horrible life can be for those of us in so-called red states, especially in rural backwaters like Martinsville and similar towns and cities across America.  Fueling all of the abuse and hate, of course are the "godly Christians" who believe they have the special right to torment and stigmatize anyone who doesn't conform to their backward, flat earth thinking.   The irony is that then these areas wonder why no new businesses and industries want to relocate to their regions.  Not surprisingly, Martinsville has one of the highest unemployment rates in Virginia.

Rural Virginians Cope with Limited HIV Resources - Tidewater Officials See Spike in ‘Down-Low’ Cases

This article from the Washington Blade (http://www.washingtonblade.com/2007/8-17/news/localnews/11074.cfm) reports on matters that are not that surprising given the realities of resources and outlook in Virginia outside of certain metropolitan areas. The two biggest obstacles to reducing HIV in Virginia's rural areas (and some urban areas) are (1) the anti-gay, head in the sand mindset of conservative churches, particularly black churches, and (2) limited medical and related resources.

The area referenced in the article on Virginia's Eastern Shore, for example, has only one hospital and very limited medical facilities. In addition, outside of gay friendly pockets like Cape Charles, in many ways the local social outlook is a couple of decades behind areas like Northern Virginia, Norfolk, and Richmond. Even in more progressive areas, the black churches - there are a number in Norfolk - preach anti-gay rhetoric and refuse to admit that HIV is a huge issue in the black community, both among men and women. Here are some highlights from the Blade Article:

RICHMOND, Va. — Administrators and caseworkers in southern coastal Virginia have confirmed the findings of a national study that found AIDS on the rise in rural populations among men who have sex with men. A report revised in 2006 by the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Research Institute, University of San Francisco, found 60 percent of the rural AIDS cases throughout the U.S. involved gay sex, while transmission through intravenous drug use accounted for 20 percent. The report cited statistics from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which said 68 percent of all rural AIDS cases in the nation were found in the South.

“In 2000, the rate of new AIDS diagnoses was three times higher for the South than for other rural areas in the U.S.,” it said. “In certain areas of the South, the rate of HIV/AIDS diagnoses is almost as high in rural areas as it is in urban areas.” Ann Verdine-Lewis, director of education for the Tidewater AIDS Task Force in Norfolk, Va., and Brian O’Dell, Tidewater’s program director, said they have seen an increase in HIV cases among black and Latino migrant workers on the “down-low” on the Eastern Shore and other rural areas of the state. These are straight-identified men in heterosexual relationships who also have sex with men.

The national report said blacks represent half of all rural AIDS cases, Caucasians, 37 percent, Latinos, 9 percent and Native American/Alaska Natives, 2 percent.

Sadly, until improved educational and medical resources are available and there is a stark change in the approach to gays in church communities, I do not see the situation improving. Of course, limited health insurance coverage in many impoverished rural areas only further aggravates the situation.