Category Archives: Culture wars

Being a Self-Righteous Pain is Not a Crime

Posted on February 21, 2019 by | 30 comments

Michelle Renay Sutherland, a New Yorker who traveled to Richmond to demonstrate in support of Virginia’s passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, is an annoying individual. Frankly, I find her sanctimonious posturing to be a pain in the ass. Maybe she violated the law for baring her breast when posing as the goddess Virtue in a reenactment of the Virginia state seal, maybe not. But her actions are hardly grounds for holding her in jail without bail for a month.

A magistrate set a bail of $700 for Sutherland, a Brooklyn artist with no criminal record. But General District Court Judge Lawrence B. Cann III ordered her held without bond until her trial, scheduled for March 21.

An article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch does not quote Cann as providing any justification for refusing to release Sutherland. Continue reading →

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Posted in Courts and law, Culture wars, Individual rights

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Assisted Conception Option For The New Realities

Posted on February 16, 2019 by | 5 comments

Rick Olson, Jay Timmons and children at their McLean home.

A major revision of Virginia’s assisted conception laws has fought its way through to a final vote in the State Senate Monday, pushed by a former Virginia official who has gone public with his unconventional and very 21st century family.

Jay Timmons and his husband Rick Olson faced a major legal battle in Wisconsin a few years back over the surrogacy agreement they had with the mother of their third child.  The child was conceived using a frozen embryo from a couple that had used a similar method to build a family of four, didn’t want to use the remaining embryos themselves, but also didn’t want them destroyed.   Continue reading →

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Posted in Children and families, Culture wars, General Assembly

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Why Whites Are More Hard-Line than Blacks about Blackface

Posted on February 10, 2019 by | 18 comments

Image credit: Washington Post

A Washington Post poll finds that Virginians are split about 50/50 on the question of whether Governor Ralph Northam should step down from office after revelations of his use of blackface during medical school some 35 years ago. The most fascinating finding within that poll was that whites are more likely (48%) than African-Americans (37%) to hold that position.

If whites are more outraged by the blackface incident than blacks, an interesting question arises: How much is white outrage driven by virtue signaling? Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations

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Dissent Must Be Crushed

Posted on December 7, 2018 by | 10 comments

Peter Vlaming. Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Social mores in the United States are changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. If you fail to conform to the latest turn in politically correct thinking, you’re toast. You could lose your job. Not just in California, but here in Virginia.

Peter Vlaming, a high school teacher in West Point, was fired yesterday by the West Point School Board for resisting administrative orders to use male pronouns to refer to a ninth-grade student who had undergone a gender transition, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Here are the details: Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars

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