When Bob McDonnell became the governor of Virginia earlier this year, one of his first official acts was to strip gay and lesbian state workers of their job security by rolling back a non-discrimination policy that specifically included a category for sexual orientation.
Not to be outdone by his new boss, now Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has sent a letter to the state’s colleges and universities informing them that they can no longer include sexual orientation or gender identity in their non-discrimination policies, because such policies can only be created by state lawmakers. In the letter, Cuccinelli maintains that public institutions — including all of Virginia’s largest universities — which have proscribed discrimination in their hiring and admissions decisions have done so “without proper authority” and should “take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia.” Such non-discrimination policies are in place in hundreds of institutions across the country.
While there’s been no official reaction from the universities, students and others associated with the schools are understandably upset and confused. Student groups are launching Facebook sites and flooding their leaders with emails on the topic. Speaking to the Washington Post, Brandon Carroll, 21, student government president at Virginia Tech, said, “I’ve never gotten so many e-mails from students wanting to do something,” adding that adhering to Cuccinnelli’s directive is “going to make us lose top students. It’s going to make us lose top faculty.”
While observers frequently write — and rewrite — the religious right’s obituary, last year’s election of McDonnell and Cuccinelli shows how quickly those observers are proved wrong, winning in a state that had just one year before voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in decades.
When asked about homosexuality during the campaign last year, Cuccinelli said:
“My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that… They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.”
If Cuccinelli is going to resort to “natural law” to defend his animus toward gays and lesbians, I hope that he will at least have the decency to follow his own logic and refuse to extend anti-discrimination policies to heterosexual couples who cannot have children but presumably still have non-procreative sex, or to unmarried couples who are presumably having sex. One of the pillars of “natural law” where sex is concerned (thanks to Aquinas) is that sex is only moral if it is potentially reproductive (no contraception allowed), and done within the confines of marriage. He can’t use natural law to allow discrimination against one set of people, while allowing heterosexual couples to run willy nilly over natural law.
It’s really too much, though, to expect consistency from bigots. The “natural law” argument is a red herring as always. Both he and McDonnell are clearly who they have always been, and who they were advertised to be—conservatives who, once in power, will do all they can to roll back any progressive measures to protect classes of citizens they find objectionable. Those who feign surprise at their actions simply weren’t paying attention.
