Letters to the Editor for Wednesday, March 17, 2010

McDonnell caves to ‘gay elites’
Gov. Bob McDonnell’s recent executive order, as reported March 11 in The News & Advance, prohibits “discrimination” by state agencies and colleges by refusing to hire homosexuals based on their homosexual status alone. McDonnell’s order, he said, was based on the requirements of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In truth, the amendment does not require what McDonnell professed, based on the text of the amendment, nor even on the fanciful constructions which the federal courts have given to it or any law enacted by Congress under it.

Contrasted with McDonnell, the U.S. Supreme Court, when it had the chance, did not extend the amendment to homosexuals as a protected class in hiring situations, nor did Congress enact such a law under the amendment even during the administrations of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Neither is there any Virginia law that treats the refusal to hire homosexuals as illegal discrimination.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli recently issued a written opinion confirming that fact. Moreover, in 2006, when McDonnell was attorney general, he issued an opinion that reached the same conclusion as Cuccinelli did about state law. But as governor, McDonnell switched his decisional basis from state law, which is clear, to the supposed requirements of the federal constitution for which he claims a special, perhaps even unique, insight.

In essence, McDonnell’s executive order went beyond the point where the country’s top court, congress and the Virginia legislature have feared to tread in extending so called “homosexual rights” in a culture which still largely views homosexuality as deviant behavior despite the obvious efforts by presumed elites to convince us otherwise. Additionally, when this state’s rights were genuinely available to create Virginia policy, the governor discarded them in favor of a pretended, existing federal mandate.

What are we to conclude? In 2006, when still attorney general, McDonnell yet faced the gubernatorial election three years later in which he would need votes from Christian and other conservatives. McDonnell publicly raised no 14th Amendment scruples then nor indicated he would voluntarily surrender Virginia’s rights to far fetched federal claims in favor of homosexuals. Now that he has won the gubernatorial election, it appears the governor simply calculated that this was the time in his political career to take a measured, public step toward homosexuals. This slouching toward inclusiveness serves to make McDonnell acceptable as a potential vice presidential candidate to the Republican establishment, which for years has discreetly sent favorable signals to homosexuals in trying to win a share of this small but influential group.

In issuing his executive order, McDonnell achieved political transparency of a particular kind.
LOUIS SETTE
Forest