Category Archives: Gay rights

McAuliffe: Can a Schmoozer Transform?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

On Easter Sunday, I was driving in a cold rain to Charlottesville for a family event. My cell phone started beeping with messages from Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe.

He said he was on his way to his own family brunch but wanted to tap me for $5. I got similar messages from two other staffers.

Why bother me at Easter? Political analyst Larry Sabato wondered the same thing. In a tweet that day he complained about finding “11 obnoxious messages for $$$. Now I know the answer to the age old Q; Is nothing sacred?”

And that may be McAuliffe’s biggest problem as he faces arch-conservative Ken Cuccinelli in the off-year governor’s race. In my profile of him in Style Weekly, I note that McAuliffe is trying to rein in an expansive personality that has made him a top political schmoozer and fundraiser for Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

A decades’ long political operative who has never been in elected office, he can be bombastic and smooth, as his recent dealings with GreenTech Automotive shows. He flirted with Virginia for a hybrid  car plant before going to Mississippi. He has been accused of somehow using the car plant to win special visas for foreign workers and maybe misleading the Virginia Economic Development Partnership about his intentions in the Old Dominion.

Meanwhile, he must overcome some of his misunderstandings of traditional Virginia thinking. However, it’s probably a good thing that he’s going to skip the Shad Planking in Wakefield tonight with its Confederate flags where Cuccinelli will be keynote speaker.

While polls are about 50-50 in the race, McAuliffe’s fundraising prowess has shown brightly. In the first quarter, he raised more than $5 million — more than double the take of Cuccinelli, who has hamstrung by not being allowed raise money during the General Assembly session because of his position as Attorney General. Read on…

(Also, here as a Q&A with McAuliffe)

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Cuccinelli visits UVa and evades the issues

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Groveton| 5 Comments

Road trip!  Gubernatorial candidate, Attorney General and budding author Ken Cuccinelli visited the University of Virginia this week at the invitation of well known professor Larry Sabato.  Reports from those on the scene indicate that Mr. Cuccinelli spent most of his time dancing around the issues rather than presenting any coherent plans.

Just say maybe.  Asked about the possibility of Virginia legalizing marijuana, Cuccinell had this to say, “I’m not sure about Virginia’s future [in terms of marijuana legalization], but I and a lot of people are watching Colorado and Washington to see how it plays out.” How enlightening.  In the spirit of colleges and multiple choice tests, let’s see if we can help Mr. Cuccinelli organize his thoughts.  Mr. Cuccinelli, please select either a) or b) – “I a) support, b) oppose a ballot initiative for Virginians to decide whether marijuana should be legalized in the state.” Please note, there is no option to pick “both” or “none of the above” for this question.

In a glass house with a bag of rocks.  Having said exactly nothing in response to the question of legalizing marijuana Mr. Cuccinelli moved onto the matter of economic development.  From the Cavalier Daily article, “Cuccinelli criticized Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, the likely Democratic nominee. He said McAuliffe had failed to take a strong stance on economic policy.  ’In my opponent’s economic proposals he’s talked more about taxes,’ Cuccinelli said. ‘When the economy is in the kind of state it is in, we want to be careful with that.’  Cuccinelli thinks McAuliffe has failed to take a strong stand on economic development? One assumes that Cuccinelli must have a strong position on this matter.  Apparently not.  A visit to the Cuccinelli for Governor web site brings us to the Issues tab.  That tab has the following categories:  The Constitution and Liberty, Healthcare, Life, Immigration, Taxes & Spending, 2nd Amendment.  It seems economic policy didn’t make the cut of major issues for Mr. Cuccinelli.  Maybe there’s something under Taxes & Spending?  ”As Governor, Ken will continue to support a free market environment for starting and growing business in the Commonwealth, including using his political influence to fight tax increases.”  Free market good, taxes bad.  That’s it?  Time for a “yes” or “no” question.  Mr. Cuccinelli, if you were Governor right now would you veto the proposed legislation allowing jurisdictions in Tideater and NoVa to impose up to a 1% income tax without a voter referendum?  Again, Mr. Cuccinelli, that’s either “yes” or “no”.

Mann oh Mann.  Mr. Cuccinelli, an alumnus of the University of Virginia, visited the University of Virginia and “forgot” to mention his two year legal battle against the University of Virginia in regard to Prof. Michael Mann’s research at the University of Virginia.  Perhaps Mr. Cuccinelli should have tied a ribbon around his finger to help him remember his nationally reported legal battle with the university he was visiting. Mr. Cuccinelli, if you ever address a LGBT group you may need all of your fingers for ribbons.

Motherhood, apple pie and college tuition.  Again, from the Cavalier Daily article, “One concern I have is pricing higher education out of the reach of middle class families,” Cuccinelli said. “Making sure students can access an education … and that’s tied into financial stability.”  That’s super helpful, Ken.  Heck, people might vote for you based on that pithy and insightful comment alone.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign to date has been a train wreak.  He’s refused to honor thirty years of precedent by resigning from his position as Attorney General in order to campaign for governor.  He’s publishing a book that, among other things, takes public swimming pools to task for competing with private physical fitness enterprises (page 240).  Now, he’s bumbling across the state belching great gusts of hot air rather than saying anything concrete about his position on the issues affecting Virginians.  Cuccinelli is widely reported to be a shrewd, brilliant and cunning politician.  So far, he seems a lot more like the Great and Powerful Oz than the savior of the Republican Party.

DJ Rippert

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Posted in 2013, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Gay rights, Politics, Uncategorized

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Inside Kenneth’s Head

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Groveton| 9 Comments

Ken, meet Herman.  Back in the early 90s there was a short-lived sitcom on Fox called Herman’s Head.  In this generally forgettable show a man named Herman faced the vagaries of life while four other actors portrayed the various voices speaking to Herman inside his head.  Theoretically, the show was funny because you could watch the voices talk to Herman as he decided what to say and do.  Ken Cuccinelli’s decision to publish a book of his thoughts on America and American politics has me wondering about the voices inside Kenneth’s head.  What voices are telling Mr. Cuccinelli that a political book is a good way to kick off a campaign for governor?  What arguments do the voices make to convince Ken that using a book to (presumably) move further to the right is a good idea in a state that just voted for Barack Obama?  Who are the voices and what are they saying?

What a character.  In the original “Herman’s Head” show, the voices were portrayed by characters named angel, genius, wimp and animal.  In this new version of the show, to be reprised as “Inside Kenneth’s Head”, the voices will be portrayed by characters dubbed Mirror, Prince William, Dubya and Einstein.  The new show is far from finished and is scheduled to be pitched to Fox (who else?) in the near future.  However, the first episode entitled “Throw the Book at ‘Em” is done.  In this inaugural episode the four voices counsel Kenneth on the wisdom of writing a book in the middle of a campaign.

Mirror (portrayed by Karl Rove).  “Let’s be honest Ken, you never met a mirror you didn’t like.  And for good reason!  Behind your Adonis like face is a Fort Knox brain.  Full of gold!  You need to let that gold flow through your fingers onto the keyboard and into history.  The hell with the Pulitzer Prize, this book is going to be the next chapter added to the King James Bible.”

Prince William (portrayed by Bob Marshall).  “Agenda 21 is coming.  Obama’s death panels are being formed as we speak.  Hillary will be elected the next president using computer viruses in the voting machines.  Worse yet, Joe Biden is being set up to become NFL commissioner.  We have to stop this, Kenneth.  We need a book.  A book that will cause the invisible majority to rise up with pitchforks, torches and large-magazine assault weapons!  Otherwise, nothing will stop them.  We will become their servants.”

Dubya (portrayed by Rodney Dangerfield).  ”Kenny, you don’t get no respect.  You try to deny health coverage to the gay partners of state employees and whadda you get?  Some ‘law’ thrown in your face like a banana cream pie.  Hey, it’s not like you’re the Attorney General or nothin’.  And that McDonnell guy.  Who does he think he is?  You know what you need?  A book.  McDonnell don’t got no book and he’s already been governor.  Yeah, that’s the ticket – a book.  That’ll get you some respect.”

Einstein (portrayed by Ronald Reagan).  “Well Kenneth … I’m glad to see all the good things you’ve been doing since I’ve been gone.  And now you’re running for governor.  Well, well.  I ran for governor once.  People said I was a B list actor without any practical ideas.  They said I never created a job or met a payroll.  And they were right.  Worse yet, my opponent had a lot of real world experience and a lot of practical ideas.  Mommy and I were wondering what to do when an idea hit me.  I’ll switch opponents.  I’ll run against ’government’ rather than a person.  Heck, I couldn’t have beaten my human opponent.  So, I wrote some speeches and hit the campaign trail running against ‘government’.  Everybody forgot I was a radical.  You can do the same thing.  Just one thing, Kenneth, I don’t want to be mean but I’ve heard you speak in public.  Maybe a book?”

The missing voice.  Cuccinelli’s book will be available to the general public next week.  In the meantime, a number of media outlets received an advance copy.  Politico received a copy and wrote a synopsis.  One of the most telling comments involved Cuccinelli’s disinterest in Bob McDonnell.  “Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is only mentioned once in the book, in the context  of signing a state law to oppose mandates in March 2010. He is not thanked in  the acknowledgements. By contrast, James Madison is cited 11 times and Thomas  Jefferson comes up nine times.”

Hey Ken – you might want to add the very popular sitting governor’s voice to the cacophony inside your head.  He might have said, “A book?  Now?  Have you lost your mind?”

– DJ Rippert

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Posted in 2013, Gay rights, Health care, Politics

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Here Comes Cooch-ageddon!

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

Illustration credit: Ed Harrington, Style Weekly.

Hard right conservative Kenneth T. Cuccinelli has a very good chance of becoming the next governor. At least that’s my view 11 months out.

I disagree with Cuccinelli on almost everything and will spare my readers the list. But I do agree on one thing: he has proved to be a wily politician. He’s turned the Republican establishment on its head. His likely opponent Terry McAuliffe has yet to prove himself as a viable opponent if he is indeed the Democratic choice, as he now seems he will be. Cuccinelli’s off-year race will be one of the most closely watched by the national media.

Enough talking. Read my cover story in Richmond’s Style Weekly.

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A Respite from the Culture Wars?

Posted on November 28, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 15 Comments

Bill Bolling. Photo credit: Times-Dispatch

by James A. Bacon

It sounds like Virginia Republicans have learned a lesson — at least temporarily — from the shellacking they took in the November elections. All the talk of “legitimate rape,” rape-induced pregnancy as a “gift from god” and, earlier this year, trans-vaginal ultrasounds has poisoned the Grand Old Party in the minds of thousands of voters who otherwise would be receptive to its message of limited government.

I believe that most Virginians belong, like me, to the “muddled middle” in the culture war, uncomfortable with positions staked out by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. A majority of Virginians also are concerned that government has grown too big, too intrusive, too heavily in debt (at the federal level) and a hindrance to economic growth. But many, fearing that Republicans want to roll back the clock on gay rights and women’s rights, cast their ballots for Democrats instead.

It appears that Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling has gotten the message, according to Jim Nolan writing in the Times-Dispatch. Speaking to a recent gathering of Republican women in Charlottesville, Bolling called for Republicans to learn the lesson from the election. “I’m a pro-life guy — I have always been a pro-life guy,” he said. “But I understand that within our party we have pro-life Republicans and pro-choice Republicans. Whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice there needs to be a respect of opinions on both sides of the issue.”

Meanwhile, other ranking Republicans have signaled a reluctance to resume the abortion fight. House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford told Nolan: “There’s sort of a feeling that we’ve pretty much done everything that needs to be done.”

Sen. Stephen H. Martin, R-Chesterfield, said that the GOP-controlled Senate Education and Health Committee, which he heads, would not reconsider “personhood” legislation.

Bolling defended legislative initiatives in the 1990s and early 2000s that enjoyed broad public support, such as parental notification and consent to abortion, a ban on partial birth abortion, and higher patient safety standards for abortion clinics. But more recent initiatives have turned off voters. Republicans, he suggested, should pick different issues.

“Why aren’t we the party that champions efforts to reduce teen pregnancy in Virginia, which results in so many abortions? Why aren’t we the party that champions support for crisis pregnancy that helps women deal with unwanted or unintended pregnancies? Why aren’t we the party that does more to promote adoption as an option to abortion?”

Ken Cuccinelli

Excellent questions, all. Republicans could frame such proposals as win-win initiatives that win the support of independents and Democrats. Unfortunately, Bolling this morning announced that he would withdraw from the 2013 governor’s race, depriving himself of a soapbox to advance those very causes. His decision effectively cedes the nomination to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a firebrand cultural conservative.

In an interview with Nolan, Cuccinelli said that the GOP needs “to be open to people of different perspectives. … I think that the center of the Republican Party is one that favors life and protects it, but I don’t think we have — and we have to be cautious not to have — an exclusionary mentality for people with different views.”

It’s all well and good to say that the GOP should be a big-tent party. But how would Cuccinelli govern? Would he champion culture-wars issues that turn off the electorate? Or, as a small-government conservative, would he devote his energy to holding the line on taxes while preserving essential state government services? Would he be willing to tackle the deep, structural challenges facing Virginia — the crises in declining economic competitiveness, K-12 education, higher ed, health care, transportation and land use — or would he just paper them over?

We won’t know the answer until 2014 — assuming Cuccinelli assuages voter fears of his deep-rooted cultural conservatism and manages to win the election. Until then, we can at least console ourselves that we should get a break from the culture wars in the 2013 General Assembly session. The big question, then, is this: If the culture wars are off the table, will legislators have anything else to discuss?

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Posted in 2012, Abortion, Gay rights

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President Barack Obama!

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 15 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

President Barack Obama’s re-election and success with Virginia in Tuesday’s contest could provide  a fresh opportunity to solidify more economic recovery than what have otherwise may have happened. It could be a real chance for bipartisan progress.

Here’s my takeaway at 2:30 a.m.:

  • Virginia has again shown that it is morphing into a different kind of state. Losing some but not all power are the Old Republicans and their new iterations. Gaining power are Democrats, many of them newcomers with diverse backgrounds.
  • Bye, bye Tea Party. The anti-government, anti-spending curmudgeons of  two years ago are quickly fading in influence. Good thing. They had been a major and negative force trumping any bipartisan progress. Although Eric Cantor got re-elected, he’ll have a harder time playing obstructionist since he’ll no longer have a parade to try to race to get in front of and lead. And maybe we can give those God-awful Patrick Henry costumes to Goodwill.
  • Obamacare will not be repealed. GOP hasn’t the votes. Alleluia. Although flawed, Obamacare means that more people will be insured and health insurers won’t be able to get away with such practices as denying coverage for “pre-existing” conditions. No goofy vouchers for Medicare recipients. Not with Democrats controlling the Senate. Let’s get on with price transparency and breaking the stranglehold of Big Insurance and Big Pharma.
  • Hello manufacturing. Goodbye “Knowledge Economy.”  Obama can now solidify gains in the reviving American economy and help us once again make real things instead of just be providers of services that only help export jobs.
  • No more lying ads. We won’t have to listen to Romney  falsehoods about how Obama has a ‘War on Coal” and how he helped kill a crappy Bill’s Barbecue chain and send Jeep jobs to China.
  • Toodles, Ayn Rand. We won’t have to listen to the importance of selfishness by such faddish True Believers as Paul Ryan who was surprisingly irrelevant in the campaign. Now we can concentrate on helping Americans, not lecturing them on their irresponsible, spend thrift ways.
  • Energy. Inevitable changes will proceed, including towards cleaner natural gas, away from dirtier coal and towards renewables. Now we might start paying serious attention to greenhouse gases and make coal mines safer.
  • George Allen’s defeat means we won’t have to turn our clocks back two decades.
  • It will be harder to wage the War on Women with social conservatives trying to dictate unwanted oversight of their personal matters. Medieval advocates of “legal rape” can crawl back in their holes. It looks like Roe V. Wade is secure.
  • All in all a great night.

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It’s Time For Loudoun to Dump Delgaudio

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 1 Comment

By Peter Galuszka

Since 1999, Loudoun County voters have strangely backed radical conservative Eugene Delgaudio as Sterling District supervisor despite his eccentric antics.

When not working at his county job, Delgaudio leads a group called Public Advocate of the United States that bashes gays and pushes limited government. The group has been tagged by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of its strong anti-gay propaganda

Never shy about causing trouble, Delgaudio now finds himself involved in yet another controversy. This time it could have serious consequences for him.

Donna Mateer, a former part-time aide on the county payroll, claims she spent  her workdays fund-raising for Delgaudio before being fired earlier this year. According to The Washington Post, she has filed a workplace complaint with the county and has been interviewed by the FBI, the Post reports. Delgaudio claims Mateer was raising money for a youth football league.

Delgaudio has been in plenty of hot water before, including a recent lawsuit against Public Advocate of the United States by a gay couple whose wedding photo was allegedly altered and then used in an anti-homosexual political campaign in Colorado. The supervisor has won national attention for claiming that a Florida pirate festival was a secret confab of radical homosexuals, staging 1960s-style guerilla theater performances replete with Delgaudio in bizarre costumes and a Public Advocate of the United States e-mail depicting bloodstains from a murder scene in the colors of the gay rights movement.

In the Mateer case, the FBI will not comment. If Delgaudio in fact used a county employee time for his personal fund-raising, he could be in serious legal trouble.

There also are calls for his ouster, too, but Delgaudio has weathered that kind of storm before. He’s been reelected since he first ran for county office 13 years ago. In last year’s election, he easily beat Democrat Al R. Nevarez.

Voting patterns generally reflect the suburban area’s conservativism, but there are far more reasonable right-wingers available. One was former Broad Run Supervisor Lori Waters, who used to work for limited government activist Phyllis Schlafly and then for a charter schools group. Highly respected, she did not run for reelection last year and has since moved to Florida.

Certainly, there are many other conservatives in the county like her, which makes it it seem even odder that Loudoun, the richest county in the nation and among the best-educated, keeps returning Delgaudio to power.

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Posted in Children and families, Gay rights, Immigration, Media, Money in politics, Politics, The Economy

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UNDERCLASS LOVER

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 4 Comments

I want to be an underclass lover

Lay it down like a big ole’ brother

No mind who gets stuck

With the leftover

I get my F&%#

Without too much workover

Don’t care about the deficit

Don’t give a damn about the debt

’cause when it comes to lov’in

You ain’t seen noth’ yet

Ya know, the over class

They got theirs!

Henry the Eighth

And all them squares

And their deficit

Almost as big as mine

So hang on honey

Here it comes

Just a second now, we’re headin’

Right to BOOMERGEDDON!

Oh-YAAAA!

– PAG

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Are We Going Back to Selma?

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 16 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Imagine it is Alabama in early 1965. The Southern state, like Virginia, has for decades deployed a number of ruses such as poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent U.S. citizens and state residents from voting. These people otherwise would have been qualified voters but also happened to be African-Americans whom the ruling white elite wants to keep from exercising their constitutional right. In Selma in 1965, three civil rights workers, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb and Viola Luizzo who are advocating for voter rights, are shot and killed in their car by the Ku Klux Klan.

Travel a bit farther into south Texas and find that the Lone Star State has its share of disenfranchisement devices in use to stop Mexican-Americans from voting, even though some have been legal residents from the day Texas became a state and part of the United States. In some counties, Mexican-Americans are by far the large group, which is exactly why the white elite want them not voting in strength.

And imagine, a well-meaning, white, privileged and otherwise intelligent man from these parts supporting restrictions on voting, telling people they should “get over it.”

Welcome to the future. The events in 1965 resulted in the Voters Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation. Yet when Gov. Robert F. McDonnell signing his own weasely version of the voter identification law supported by arch conservative Republicans in the General Assembly, the Old Dominion, most of which still under federal election supervision for its tarnished past, is putting new roadblocks in front of voters.

They used to have to show a photo ID and if they didn’t have one, they’d sign an affidavit saying they were who they claimed to be. Now, their vote will be “provisional” and they will have to show up official at a later date and show the ID. Only then will their vote be counted. To make things easier, McDonnell is ordering millions of new “voter ID” cards to be issued statewide. Odd that he doesn’t mention how much this will cost since the flavor of the moment is strictly containing budget expenses.

A few points on this rather strange set of events:

  • There have been absolutely no known major scandals involving voter fraud in Virginia. So, if there’s nothing broken, why go through all the trouble to “fix” it?
  • It is clear that restricting voting is a major ambition of the Republican Party which fears that President Barack Obama may get the boost in November’s election as he did in 2008 from the poor, the minorities and the young.
  • Regarding these groups, 25 percent of African-American voters do not have valid government-issued IDs compared with 8 percent of whites, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some 15 percent of people earning less than $35,000 a year likewise have no such ID. According to the Project Vote, about 15,000 people voted without IDs in Virginia in 2008.

Thus, Virginia’s conservative leaders and their cheerleaders are targeting what they consider to be a threatening group of voters as part of a campaign to correct a phony “wrong.” This is just another part of a sweeping socially-conservative agenda that has women, gays, dark-skinned immigrants and African-Americans in their crosshairs.

And no, I’m not going to “get over it.” I refuse to be patronizing when it comes to basic civil rights.

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Posted in Abortion, Budget, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Electoral process, Entitlements, Finance, Gay rights, Governance reform, Race and race relations, Social services, Taxes, Unemployment

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Virginia’s Perpetual Bigotry

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 17 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

All the talk of a “new” Virginia that is somehow the apple of Richard Florida’s “New Urbanist” eye got a drubbing this week when the General Assembly voted against a gay man for a judgeship, showing just how badly the social right-wing is running amok and how more thoughtful people can’t control them.

Tracy Thorne-Begland, an openly gay man who had been in the Navy for 20 years and had served as deputy commonwealth’s attorney in Richmond, was rejected as a new general district court judge. He was strongly opposed by the Family Foundation lobby and ultra-rightist Del. Bob Marshall who told CNN that “sodomy is not a civil right.”

Even Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli had said that sexual orientation should not be a criteria for deciding judgeships. Ditto Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling. The man who looks the most gutless in this sorry episode is Gov. Robert F. McDonnell who had supported Thorne-Begland then left him twisting in the wind. The freshly rightist General Assembly had made McDonnell look so Neanderthal on gay and women’s issues just as he was making progress resetting himself as a moderate in a ploy to make him a vice presidential candidate.

The pathetic thing about all of this is that Virginia just can’t shed its historic tendencies for bigotry against African-Americans, gays or brown-skinned foreigners.

Over a vacation, I finished Robert A. Caro’s “Lyndon Johnson, The Passage to Power” which is part of a trilogy. This book covers LBJ from 1960 to 1965 from his hapless vice presidency to his dynamic leadership as the new president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

At one point, Johnson needed Virginia’s notoriously racist Senator and Kingmaker Harry F. Byrd to agree to a tax bill that would meet Byrd’s demands as head of the Senate Finance Committee to bring down the federal budget (sound familiar?). This was part of Johnson’s agenda for sweeping civil rights reform, which Byrd would naturally oppose.

After all, writes Caro, Byrd was openly hateful of African-Americans and had a very bad reaction when Virginia was forced to conform to the 1954 Brown versus Topeka decision by the Supreme Court that integrated schools and school buses. Caro writes:

“When a federal judge had issued a ruling to enforce it (integration)  in Byrd’s native Virginia, the senator had pointed out the dangers. Six-year-old children of both races were going to be “assembled in little huts before the bus comes, and the bus will then be packed like sardines,” he said – and everyone knew what would come of that: What our people fear most is that by this close intimate contact future generations will intermarry.” Intermarriage! Miscegenation” the mongrel race. . . “

Substitute ‘gay” for “African-American” and you get Marshall, who is today’s “Byrd.”

Odd that one of our esteemed bloggers has just returned from a “New Urbanist” conference in Florida where he waxed eloquent on the teachings of Richard Florida, who believes that a “creative class” of innovators, many of them gay, will be more important than corporations in defining the future of cities. This is a world view one often reads in Bacon’s Rebellion – how Virginia fits very neatly into the Florida ideal.

What the Thorne-Begland decision shows, unfortunately, is that this world view is so much dreamy bullshit. The Old Dominion will never really advance until it sheds its Old Bigotry.

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Posted in Children and families, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Economic development, Economy, Federal, Gay rights

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