One step forward, two steps back. Literally.

Virginia gay state workers’ anti-discrimination protections were stripped away just days after newly-elected Governor Bob McDonnell took office. McDonnell signed a new state policy that specifically removed LGBTQ protections from his predecessor and DNC chair Tim Kaine’s policy. So, one day, if you worked for the state, you were protected from being fired if you were gay. The next day, you weren’t.

Now, McDonnell, who was the Attorney General before becoming Governor, has inspired the new Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli II, to further that policy against Virgina gay state workers. The Washington Post reports,

“Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has asked the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school Thursday that their boards of visitors have no legal authority to adopt such statements.

“In the letter, Cuccinelli (R) wrote that only the General Assembly can extend legal protections to gay state employees — a move the legislature has repeatedly declined to take, including as recently as this week.

“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,‘ or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly,” he wrote.”

(Emphasis mine.)

What is especially troubling is that where we are seeing the LGBTQ community gain a modicum of equality, conservatives are hard at work stripping us of those advances as hard as they possibly can. These calculated and targeted anti-gay rights actions are proof. Virginia gay workers are not the only ones losing ground, merely the latest.

For example, the gay community won marriage in Maine. Maine is a state that for years the public was if favor of same-sex marriage, but when groups like the National Organization for Marriage rolled in with their huge bank accounts and robocalls and lies and fear, and were able to get the law that a fairly-elected legislature and governor had passed and signed, put to a vote, we lost.

Now, in Virginia, Governor Bob McDonnell, who campaigned with a focus on not social issues, but the economy, has gone to work not only not for us, but actively against us. As has new Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli II.

This is unacceptable.

If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, if you have not yet read “Eight Months From Today, The America We Know Will Be Gone,” I urge you to do so now. Then make sure you are registered to vote. And make sure you do. Every candidate is important. I’m sure as Virginians were voting for Attorney General, the last issue they thought of was LGBTQ rights. But maybe they should have.

Right Wing Watch today quoted then-candidate Ken Cuccinelli II:

“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.”

Imagine years from now, if, like his predecessor, Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II becomes Governor.

Seeds of anti-LGBTQ bigotry are planted deep, and they’re growing.

Tagged as: Anti-Discrimination, Discrimination, Gay, governors, ken cuccinelli, lgbt, mcdonnell, Sexual Orientation, social issues, southern united states, Virginia, virginia gay