Sunday, January 26, 2014

The Courts Are Saving Virginia from Itself on Ethics and Gay Rights





If  a majority of Virginia Republicans could have their way, Virginia would remain a corrupt state full of political bribes and graft where gays would forever be third or fourth class citizens.  On the latter issue, one only need look to Republican moves in the Virginia General Assembly to kill employment protections for gay state employees and to deep six a bill that would have allowed second parent adoptions in same sex headed families.  We hear lots of blather about protecting children and families, but that only applies to heterosexual headed families.  Children of gay couples simply get kicked to the gutter.  Thankfully, as a column in the Richmond Times Dispatch, lawsuits and a federal criminal prosecution may yet force Virginia into the 21st century despite GOP efforts.  Here are column excerpts:



Former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, are of modest physical stature. But in the cavernous courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Spencer, Virginia’s former first couple — he in a gray suit, white shirt and blue tie; she in a dress and dark-colored jacket — looked positively small.

The scene Friday morning — at the McDonnells’ arraignment at which they pleaded not guilty to corruption charges announced 11 days after he left an office once occupied by Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Monroe — speaks to the humbling effect of the law.

Such power was on display Thursday, as well, three blocks south of the gleaming courthouse, in a shabby state office building on Main Street.

There, the new attorney general, Mark Herring, announced that he would not defend in federal court Virginia’s 2006, voter-approved prohibition on same-sex marriage. He said he had concluded it is unconstitutional, wrongly denying gay couples a right that straight people take for granted. Herring had supported the ban as a Loudoun County senator. As his ambition swelled, his attitude shifted, making him acceptable to a Democratic base for which gay rights is a non-negotiable demand.

The courts — the federal courts — are taking Virginia where Virginia — through its elective government — has refused to go. This North-facing Southern state, at times paralyzed by divided government, is lurching forward at the point of a bayonet: federal judicial edict, actual and perceived. It is forcing those who govern to catch up with the governed.

It happened in the 1950s with the collapse of Virginia’s defiance to court-ordered school desegregation. It happened in the 1960s with the death of the state statute banning interracial marriage.

It happened in the early 2000s when a previous attorney general — Republican Jerry Kilgore — said, as Herring is on the gay marriage ban, that he would not argue in federal court on behalf of a comparatively mundane constitutional restriction: a limit on how churches manage their business affairs. Kilgore decided the measure was unconstitutional

For too long the law rested on a flawed assumption: That because Virginia politicians are presumed to be ladies and gentleman, they do not need to be reminded how to behave.

Tidying up Virginia may require more than straightening out ethics laws. Higher legislative salaries — they have been frozen at about $18,000 a year since 1989 — might discourage solons from walking around with their hands out. It could attract a broader range of candidates and professionalize a General Assembly that looks less like Virginia because, for example, it has more and more retirees.

Further, redistricting thwarts shifts in public opinion, freeing a Republican-dominated legislature to ignore the sentiments of Virginians, as a whole.

Nearly eight years ago, 56 percent of the electorate backed the constitutional amendment under which the state refuses to recognize same-sex marriage. A recent public-opinion poll shows that a similar percentage now favors same-sex marriage.

Virginia had a glorious group of leaders in the early days of this nation.  Leaders who were progressive for their time and had a vision of how government should be.  Sadly, for most of the last two centuries, Virginia's leadership has preferred to be backward thinking, supporting bigotry and prejudice rather than accepting the Founders statements that all men are created equal and that all of us are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And most of the time it has been "religious conservatives" who have championed backwardness and bigotry.  It's a very, very ugly legacy.  What the GOP controlled General Assembly refuses to do voluntarily, hopefully the federal courts will make it do.

 

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