The Hypocrisy and Racism of Jerry Falwell Jr. and the "Leave Virginia" Crowd

Would that Falwell would spend more time with his pool boy.

For 26 years Virginia Republicans controlled the Virginia General Assembly and utterly disregard or thwarted the will of a growing majority of Virginians.   Then, last November, the majority of Virginians, sick and tired of the Virginia GOP's pandering to white supremacists, gun nuts, and religious extremists (the three go together and make up the Virginia GOP's base), finally voted in a Democrat majority to the Virginia General Assembly and long desired legislation is poised to become reality.  But for unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, the Virginia's GOP stranglehold would have ended earlier and it took court rulings striking down GOP drawn districts to help end the tyranny of the GOP minority over the majority of Virginians.  The loss of political power and the ability to ride rough shod over the majority of Virginia's populace has Virginia Republicans and the hate merchants among the party base shrieking as if the world was coming to an end.  In addition, some - including grifter Jerry Falwell, Jr., who must not be spending enough time with the fit much young men he seems to favor - are calling for western Virginia counties to leave Virginia and join West Virginia. 

Several things are noteworthy: (i) West Virginia is a far poorer state with a median income of $43,469 versus Virginia's $71,535; (ii) West Virginia is in economic decline and Wikipedia notes that West Virginia's population is expected to decline by more than 19,000 residents by 2030, and West Virginia is the only state where death rates exceeds birth rates, (iii) in terms of health, West Virginia, however, ranked either last or second-to-last in 20 categories, including cancer, child immunization, diabetes, disabilities, drug deaths, teeth loss, low birth weight, missed work days due to health, prescription drug overdose, preventable hospitalizations, and senior clinical care.  While Virginia doesn't place in the top states in these areas, its economy and population are growing and the health of its citizens is far exceeds what one finds in West Virginia and its education system ranks in the top five nationally. The other reality is that - much like red states that survive off of the federal government teet - rural western counties in Virginia receive far more in state funds than they pay in.  Stated another way, Northern Virginia, Richmond, Hampton Roads and other urban areas financially support these would be seceding counties. 

So why leave an up and coming state to join a failing state with far less financial resources?  The breakdown of the two states' population diversity perhaps provides an answer.  Virginia is currently 62% white,  19.8% African American, 9.4% Hispanic/Latino, 6.8% Asian, and 0.5% Native American  West Virginia, in sharp contrast is 91.1% white, 3.6% African American, 1.1% Asian, 1.1% Hispanic, and 0.1% Native American.  I would suggest, these would be renegade Virginia counties want to join a state where white privilege still predominates and they don't have to deal with those their politicians and scamvangelists like Falwell deem "other."

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A column in the Virginian Pilot condemns those who would splinter the state in their conniption fit over having the majority of Virginians plot the state's future.  Here are excerpts:

The loss of political power — and coming to terms with it — manifests itself in different ways. Some may be described as productive. Others as counterproductive.

And some are just downright ridiculous.

Take, for instance, the nonsense which unfolded last month at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in Martinsburg, W.Va.

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., appearing at a media conference with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, argued that new Democratic majorities in the Virginia General Assembly constitute “a tragedy in the making.”

“Democratic leaders in Richmond, through their elitism and radicalism, have left a nearly unrecognizable state in their wake,” Falwell said, perhaps not aware that the legislature had yet to deliver a single bill to the desk of Gov. Ralph Northam.

“If you’re not truly happy where you are, we stand with open arms to take you from Virginia or anywhere where you may be,” Justice said, in making his pitch for a West Virginia empire.

Now, there’s some history to this line of thinking.

Around the time of the American revolution, setters living west of the Allegheny Mountains and east of the Ohio River tried to form their own state, known as Westylvania. Appalachian Magazine writes that the proposed “14th state” would have encompassed “southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, most of modern-day West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and portions of what is now southwest Virginia.”

And West Virginia itself was born during the Civil War, when western counties of the commonwealth objected to slavery and secession, deciding that separation from the Old Dominion was a better course. That’s why West Virginia is known as the child of rebellion.

State lawmakers there are stoking that revolutionary spirit now, urging counties in western Virginia — those upset by Democratic majorities in the legislature and the growing influence of left-leaning voters in northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads — to leave.

They’ve even filed bills in the West Virginia legislature to encourage independence votes and speed those counties toward adoption. The nerve.

But that’s not all.

Republican Del. Dave LaRock of Loudoun County made headlines last month when he suggested the commonwealth concede the cities of Arlington and Alexandria to Washington, D.C. Such an alignment, he argued, would remove communities which skew Democratic from Virginia and “square the box” of the federal city’s original design.
LaRock, a New York native, apparently believes the commonwealth is diminished by people moving to the commonwealth and, well, voting. And he perpetuates the false notion that folks who live in northern Virginia are somehow less Virginian than the Virginians who live in other parts of Virginia.

Never mind that the whole of the commonwealth benefits from the economic power generated by those cities (Amazon’s HQ2 ring a bell?) or that removing the western counties would render Virginia more of a Democratic stronghold.

Recall that Democrats wallowed in the General Assembly for 20 years, watching their bills die in early-morning committee meetings without debate or recorded votes in session after session. For years they perched on the verge of a majority, thwarted only by unconstitutional racially gerrymandered legislative districts.

Calls for secession during that time? Zero. Overtures for West Virginia to please take our western counties? None that anyone can recall.

Not that these "Vexit” overtures are made in good faith. Quite the opposite: They are incredibly reckless and made out of self-interest rather than concern for the people who live in western and southwest Virginia.

Former Reagan Aide: South Should Secede And Form New Country

Some days it is hard to keep up with the growing insanity infecting the Republican Party.  Swamp fever doesn't even begin to describe how far the party has drifted from what I and my ancestors supported.  Now, former Ronald Reagan aide Douglas MacKinnon, is arguing that certain Southern states - South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida - need to secede to avoid the scourge of gay marriage and to implement a government based on "traditional values" which one can only assume include, homophobia, racism, and the subjugation of women to name a few.  The name of this new nation? Reagan.  These folks truly belong in an insane asylum.  Salon looks at the batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

What does conservative columnist and former Reagan aide Douglas MacKinnon see when he surveys the current state of affairs? A world, he says, that’s been “turned upside down if you do believe in traditional values.” Just look, for instance, at those uppity gays and their demand for equal treatment.

“If you happen to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because it goes against your religious beliefs, you can be driven out of business,” MacKinnon told right-wing radio host Janet Mefferd yesterday.  “If you’re a football commentator and you happen to just say innocently that maybe I wouldn’t have drafted a gay football player because I wouldn’t want to deal with the distraction, many people on the left will try to drive you out of your job as well.”

So what’s a God-fearing, gun-toting, gay-loathing supporter of traditional values to do? It’s time, MacKinnon argues, to start thinking about drastic measures. The author was on Mefferd’s program to promote his new book, “The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values County … Now.” You can guess what he proposes.

He just wants his dear readers to think about what a “Duck Dynasty”-watching, Cracker Barrel-patronizing, skeet-shooting republic with NO GAYS ALLOWED would look like.  MacKinnon reckons that we don’t need all of the former Confederate states to secede for this purely hypothetical, totally academic, completely theoretical project to work.

And the consensus was that the three best states in the union would be South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida,” MacKinnon told Mefferd, citing the states’ population, natural resources, infrastructure and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.  No Texas? There’s reason enough for that, MacKinnon explains.  “[T]here have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico,” he said.

“The interim name for the country, by the way, is Reagan.” OK, but didn’t we fight a Civil War over this kind of thing? Relax, MacKinnon assured Mefferd. “The eyes of the world would be watching” how the U.S. government responded to the Republic of Reagan’s formation, so Dictator Nobama won’t be launching a Second War of Northern Aggression.

So dare to dream, culture warriors. Picture a country where tyrannical homosexuals don’t insist on “rights” and “equality,” ketchup is a vegetable, and the kids Just Say No.

The Christofascists' Great Secession

As they continue to isolate themselves from the rest of society and alienate the younger generations in particular, many Christofascists are retreating into their own insular cult like mindsets and gatherings.  While the goal may be to remain true to their sick fear and hate based dogma, the "godly folk" are marginalizing themselves even more.  Personally, I don't view that as a bad thing since, in my view, in the last analysis conservative religion of all stripes is a negative for society given that it seems to always lead to the rejection of knowledge and modernity and seems obsessed with division and the condemnation of others who refuse to subscribe to their ignorance embracing beliefs.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon.  While the author maintains society looses too when the religious retreat from society (something I view as totally wrong), he is correct on the issue of who the "godly folk" hasten their own demise and accelerated the move towards irrelevance of their faith tradition.  Here are article highlights:

Religious business owners have declined to provide services for gay weddings and commitment ceremonies and refused to offer insurance that covers certain kinds of contraception (as in the Hobby Lobby case that came through the Supreme Court this term). Mississippi passed legislation in April allowing businesses to claim a religious defense if sued for discrimination; Arizona almost passed such a law (after intense debate, the governor vetoed it); similar measures are in the offing elsewhere. The apparent aim of these bills is to let people like caterers, bakers, photographers, and florists decline to provide services for gay weddings or gay-pride events. But the laws are written broadly and could be used to defend discrimination of many sorts. “We’re trying to protect Missourians from attacks on their religious freedom,” the sponsor of one such bill told The Kansas City Star.

I am someone who believes that religious liberty is the country’s founding freedom, the idea that made America possible. I am also a homosexual atheist, so religious conservatives may not want my advice. I’ll give it to them anyway. Culturally conservative Christians are taking a pronounced turn toward social secession: asserting both the right and the intent to sequester themselves from secular culture and norms, including the norm of nondiscrimination. This is not a good idea. When religion isolates itself from secular society, both sides lose, but religion loses more.

[T]he desire to be left alone takes on a pretty aggressive cast when it involves slamming the door of a commercial enterprise on people you don’t approve of. The idea that serving as a vendor for, say, a gay commitment ceremony is tantamount to “endorsing” homosexuality, as the new religious-liberty advocates now assert, is a far-reaching proposition, one with few apparent outer boundaries in a densely interwoven mercantile society. It suggests a hair-trigger defensiveness about religious identity that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. As far as I know, during the divorce revolution it never occurred to, say, Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, “Your so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.” That would have seemed not so much principled as bizarre.

Why the hunkering down? When I asked around recently, a few answers came back. One is the fear that traditional religious views, especially about marriage, will soon be condemned as no better than racism, and that religious dissenters will be driven from respectable society, denied government contracts, and passed over for jobs . . . .

A second factor is the failed promise of what seemed, around the turn of the millennium, to be a grand new partnership between our elected and religious leaders. . . . .   trust eroded, DiIulio says, and then collapsed as factions on both sides, especially the right, drew red lines, set conditions, and lawyered up.

The problem is that what the social secessionists are asking for does not seem all that reasonable, especially to young Americans. When Christian businesses boycott gay weddings and pride celebrations, and when they lobby and sue for the right to do so, they may think they are sending the message “Just leave us alone.” But the message that mainstream Americans, especially young Americans, receive is very different. They hear: “What we, the faithful, really want is to discriminate. Against gays. Maybe against you or people you hold dear. Heck, against your dog.”

I wonder whether religious advocates of these opt-outs have thought through the implications. Associating Christianity with a desire—no, a determination—to discriminate puts the faithful in open conflict with the value that young Americans hold most sacred. They might as well write off the next two or three or 10 generations, among whom nondiscrimination is the 11th commandment.

This much I can guarantee: the First Church of Discrimination will find few adherents in 21st-century America. Polls find that, year by year, Americans are growing more secular. The trend is particularly pronounced among the young, many of whom have come to equate religion with intolerance. Social secession will only exacerbate that trend. It is a step toward precisely the future that brought such fear to the eyes of that woman in Philadelphia. For religious traditionalists, it is a step toward isolation and opprobrium—a step bad for society, but even worse for religion. 

I have repeatedly argued that those who claim that they seek to protect religion and religious belief are the ones who in reality will be the death of religion, especially the hate filled conservative brand of Christianity.  These people fear that they will be equated as modern day segregationist but then proceed to act just as the segregationists did.  They are their own worse enemies in the long run.  Frankly, I hope they continue this mindless behavior since it will marginalize them all the faster.

GOP Senate Candidate Addresses Neo-Confederate Group That Promotes Secessionism

Only in today's Republican Party and in the Deep South will one find a candidate for the United States Senate appearing at a conference of Neo-Confederates who advocate secession.  Welcome to GOP dysfunction writ large.   Seemingly, there is no limit to what is acceptable in today's GOP.  The crazier and more extreme, the more welcome batshitery is within the party base.  All of which, in my view relates back to the rise of the Christofascists in the Republican Party.  Only the broad influence of those who deny science, deny objective reality and oppose all forms of modernity can explain Chris McDaniel who is in the words of Mother Jones, taking the "GOP Civil War" to a new level.  Here are highlights from the Mother Jones piece:

Chris McDaniel is taking the "GOP Civil War" to a new level. Two months ago, the tea party-backed Mississippi Senate candidate addressed a neo-Confederate conference and costume ball hosted by a group that promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the "war of southern independence." Other speakers at the event included a historian who believes Lincoln was a Marxist and Ryan Walters, a PhD candidate who worked on McDaniel's first political campaign and wrote recently that the "controversy" over President Barack Obama's birth certificate "hasn't really been solved." 

McDaniel, a state senator, is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Thad Cochran in next summer's GOP Senate primary. After announcing his run last week, McDaniel quickly picked up endorsements from the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a prominent backer of the tea party. Both groups are key players in the internal GOP battle between establishment-minded Republicans and tea party insurgents and are backing right-wing challenges to incumbent Republicans whom they deem insufficiently conservative.  


With their endorsements of McDaniel, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth have shown just how far they are willing to go in terms of embracing the far right to prosecute their war for the soul of the party. In August, McDaniel addressed a neo-Confederate conference in Laurel, Miss., near his hometown of Ellisville. A local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Jones County Rosin Heels, hosted the two-day event, which the group described in invitations as a "Southern Heritage Conference" for "politically incorrect folks."

The Rosin Heels does more than regret the outcome of the Civil War. Its monthly newsletter routinely features articles and essays advocating for present-day secession. Its August newsletter highlighted the seven-year-old "Burlington Declaration" from the First North American Secession Convention, which stated that the right of secession was a "[truth] of natural law and the human experience."  . . . .A note from the editor stated that "we are living in the times that Jefferson Davis predicted would one day come," in which the conflicts that presaged the Civil War would flare up again. The June issue compared Obama's policies to the ravages of Reconstruction: "Our people have had to put up with for the last FIFTEEN DECADES!!!"

McDaniel was joined at the Southern Heritage Conference by Al Benson, a historian from Louisiana, who talked about his book Red Republicans & Lincoln Marxists, which speculates that Lincoln's actions during the Civil War were influenced by the writings of Karl Marx.

Hobnobbing with birthers and Lost Causers may not be an impediment for McDaniel as he tries to dethrone Cochran—he is, after all, in Mississippi. According a 2011 survey from Public Policy Polling, only 47 percent of Mississippians—and 21 percent of Mississippi Republicans—were satisfied with the outcome of the Civil War.

Again, only in today's insane GOP would folks like McDaniel be taken seriously.