• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

RVA Mag

Richmond, VA Culture & Politics Since 2005

Menu RVA Mag Logo
  • community
  • MUSIC
  • ART
  • EAT DRINK
  • GAYRVA
  • POLITICS
  • PHOTO
  • EVENTS
  • MAGAZINE
RVA Mag Logo
  • About
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Sponsors

Clarence Thomas Pens Scathing Attack Suggesting Same-Sex Marriage Must Be Overturned

New Civil Rights Movement | October 6, 2020

Topics: Clarence Thomas, Kim Davis, marriage equality, Obergefell v. Hodges, religious freedom, US Supreme Court

The opinion, co-authored by fellow Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, made the argument that marriage equality should never have been allowed, because of (you guessed it) “religious freedom.”

Former Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis won’t get a hearing from the U.S. Supreme Court. A case against her, brought by several same-sex couples she refused to grant marriage licenses to, was rejected Monday by the country’s top court.

But ultra-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to attack the court’s landmark Obergefell case, which found the Constitution allows same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities of marriage as their different-sex peers.

Thomas, who has a direct line into the White House via his activist and lobbyist wife Ginni Thomas, slammed the decision, suggesting the case should be overturned, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports.

Why?

“Religious liberty.”

Thomas claims Kim Davis “may have been one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last.”

His words are scathing, and a direct assault on equality.

“Due to Obergefell, those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul of Obergefell and its effect on other antidiscrimination laws,” claims Thomas, five years after the decision.

“It would be one thing if recognition for same-sex marriage had been debated and adopted through the democratic process, with the people deciding not to provide statutory protections for religious liberty under state law,” he adds. “But it is quite another when the Court forces that choice upon society through its creation of atextual constitutional rights and its ungenerous interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, leaving those with religious objections in the lurch.”

At the time of the Obergefell decision, same-sex marriage was supported by six out of 10 Americans.

In the 2015 Obergefell case, Justice Thomas writes, “the Court read a right to same-sex marriage into the Fourteenth Amendment, even though that right is found nowhere in the text.”

Thomas is a textualist, or originalist, adhering to conservatves’ pseudo-theory created in the 1980’s that claims the Constitution is not a living document, written broadly to stand the test of time. Rather, they believe it must be interpreted as the Founders conceived, with the words being interpreted exactly as the document’s authors intended.

(Textualism, or originalism, has been called “a scam” and Thomas has been blasted for “his hypocrisy” surrounding it.)

“Several Members of the Court noted that the Court’s decision would threaten the religious liberty of the many Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman. If the States had been allowed to resolve this question through legislation, they could have included accommodations for those who hold these religious beliefs,” Thomas writes.

“The Court, however, bypassed that democratic process. Worse still, though it briefly acknowledged that those with sincerely held religious objections to same-sex marriage are often ‘decent and honorable,’” he continues, “the Court went on to suggest that those beliefs espoused a bigoted worldview.”

Believing that LGBTQ people are not equal to non-LGBTQ people is the very definition of bigotry.

Justice Thomas uses the word “bigot” four times in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attempting to force through the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, giving the Court a 6-3 conservative super-majority.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image by Thomas Cizauskas via Flickr and a CC license

Bob Good’s Path To Congress: Inciting Fear of Transgender People

Marilyn Drew Necci | August 21, 2020

Topics: 5th Congressional District Republican Committee, anti-trans discrimination, Bob Good, Cameron Webb, Denver Riggleman, General Assembly, religious freedom, US Congress

Bob Good, who successfully wrested the Republican nomination for Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District seat away from incumbent Denver Riggleman, is using fears of “a man dressed as a woman” in his campaign literature.

We haven’t checked in on the Republican Party of Virginia’s 5th Congressional District since last year, when the coalition that had sent Denver Riggleman to Congress in 2018 was, only a year later, publicly tearing itself apart in heated fashion due to the fact that Riggleman had officiated a same-sex wedding between two of his former campaign staffers. Since then, things have only gotten more heated and dramatic, culminating earlier this summer with a party convention that chose to nominate Campbell County Board of Supervisors member Bob Good to run on the Republican ticket in November instead of Riggleman.

Riggleman has recovered well — he’s remained active in Congress despite suddenly finding himself a lame-duck Representative, and is now apparently mulling a third-party run for Governor in 2021. Meanwhile, Virginia’s Fifth District has found itself with a choice on its hands that is far different from the one it faced in 2018. And with Bob Good on the Republican ticket, it’s a significantly more controversial one as well.

You see, until January of this year, Bob Good was Director of Athletics at Liberty University. And now that you know that, it may not surprise you very much to learn that Good has an extremely negative attitude toward the LGBTQ community. Even before he’d announced his intention to run against Riggleman for the Republican nomination in the Fifth District, he condemned Riggleman’s having officiated a gay wedding on his Facebook page. In one comment, he said that “supporting gay rights” meant that “Denver Riggleman does not represent the values of conservative Republicans in the 5th District.” In another, he said, “You can’t flaunt your apparently progressive/liberal values in front of the conservative Republican base in the district and expect to not catch any flack for it.”

Riggleman officiating the wedding of two of his campaign staffers. (photo by Christine Riggleman)

After Good officially declared his campaign for Riggleman’s Congressional seat, he said at a February campaign event, “I have a biblical view of marriage, very different from the congressman’s view on that.” Meanwhile, on Good’s website, he republished a letter from 11 Fifth District voters, originally sent to the Bedford Bulletin, in which they characterize homosexuality as a mental illness. “Homosexuality is a very complex subject that medical science has confirmed is psychological moreso than genetic,” they write, in the midst of arguing in favor of voting Good into Congress.

Now, with a recent campaign mailing inviting clergy members to meet with Good about the importance of “religious freedom” — a loaded phrase, to say the least, where LGBTQ rights are concerned — Good has used the existence of transgender people, and specifically trans women, as an opportunity for fear-mongering.

“What happens when a male member of your congregation goes on vacation and returns four weeks later as a female?” the invitation read. “What do your church bylaws state regarding a man dressed as a woman who attends a church function and expects to use the women’s restroom?” Though the email using this language wasn’t signed by Good, it was sent by the Good campaign’s “Faith Coalition leader,” Travis Witt. The subject line read in part, “When a man becomes a woman.”

The invitation also used the spectre of the Virginia Values Act, passed by the General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Ralph Northam earlier this year, as a bugbear. In the mailer, Good’s campaign claims that the Virginia Values Act — which prohibits discrimination in housing, employment, and public accomodation to anyone on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity — infringes upon… yup, you guessed it: religious freedom.

“Bob Good, candidate for Congress, is interested in preserving religious liberties as defined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Witt’s invitation to Fifth District clergy read. “He is extremely concerned about the recent changes that now affect both large and small churches.”

Bob Good meets with clergy in Madison County (Photo via Bob Good for Congress/Facebook)

This move from a relatively moderate Republican who supported LGBTQ rights to a candidate who’s centered his campaign on attacking our rights has, in the minds of many Democrats, put the Fifth District into play in November. From being a state that went Republican in presidential elections for over 40 years straight, Virginia has transformed significantly in recent years. As of now, only four of Virginia’s 13 legislators in Congress are Republican. On the state level, Democrats hold both the governor’s mansion and both houses of the General Assembly — something that, at the time of the 2019 election, hadn’t been true in over two decades. For Democrats to take one of those four remaining Republican Congressional districts would be a huge coup. And it’s one Fifth District Democrats hope to achieve with their current candidate, Cameron Webb.

Webb, a doctor who teaches at the University of Virginia, would become the first Black physician to serve in Congress if elected in November. Political experts still see the district as leaning Republican, but polling shows Webb as close as two points away from Good, and between the possibility that Webb will draw a higher Black turnout in the election and Good’s choice to focus on opposition to LGBTQ rights, Democrats hope they can close that gap completely.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has infected over 100,000 Virginians and a recession that has put millions across the country out of work, but all Bob Good wants to focus on is same-sex marriages,” Grant Fox, a Virginia Democratic Party spokesman, told the New York Times. “Virginians need help, and Bob Good is spending his time convening church officials to figure out how to best discriminate against the LGBTQ community.”

The Human Rights Campaign has also rallied around Webb, and condemned Good’s discriminatory positions. “The 1.3 million Equality Voters across Virginia have no patience for this type of divisiveness and hate,” said HRC president Alphonso David in a statement. “Bob Good might have been able to win a low-turnout party caucus by attacking LGBTQ people, but Virginia voters showed in 2018 and 2019 that attacking LGBTQ people is no winning strategy. Transphobia and anti-LGBTQ attacks are unacceptable. We need leaders like Dr. Cameron Webb in Congress who will bring us together and expand opportunity and rights for everyone, not amplify hate and division.”

Dr. Cameron Webb (Photo via Facebook)

Will the Fifth District’s Republican Party allow far-right intractability over LGBTQ rights to derail their ability to maintain representation in a county that ostensibly leans Republican? Or is this going to be one of those times that we find out we share a state with people whose intolerance runs deeper than we ever expected? We’ll learn in less than three months; in the meantime, Cameron Webb’s campaign could sure use your help.

Top Photo via BobGoodForCongress.com

Trump-Appointed Judge Says It’s Constitutional for Businesses to Refuse Gay Customers

New Civil Rights Movement | August 18, 2020

Topics: Alliance Defending Freedom, Chelsey Walker, Justin Reed Walker, Louisville District Court, marriage equality, Masterpiece Cakeshop, religious freedom, Trump administration, US Supreme Court

Trump’s conservative judicial appointees continue to spread the idea that things like wedding cakes constitute “art” and are therefore exempt from anti-discrimination laws. Go figure.

Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Justin Reed Walker ruled on Friday that it’s perfectly constitutional for a Christian photographer in Louisville, Kentucky to refuse service to same-sex couples even though the city has an ordinance prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination and even though no gay couples have actually asked the photographer to take pictures of anything for them.

In his ruling, the judge wrote that “Christian” photographer Chelsey Walker cannot be compelled to take photos of same-sex weddings, even though she offers her photography as a public business, because her photos are “art” and art is a form of “speech.” Therefore, no government can force people to make any speech against their will. The judge said that requiring her to take photos of gay weddings would also go against Walker’s religious beliefs.

“Just as gay and lesbian Americans cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,” the judge wrote, “neither can Americans ‘with a deep faith that requires them to do things passing legislative majorities might find unseemly or uncouth.”

In 2019, Nelson asked the Louisville District Court to issue an injunction ensuring that she never has to comply with the city’s Fairness Ordinance. She said she worried about being sued if she marketed her business and the city became aware of her refusal to shoot same-sex marriages. She was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a right-wing Christian legal defense counsel that is regularly behind anti-LGBTQ lawsuits meant to challenge any expanse of non-discrimination laws or queer civil rights.

If the judge’s legal “reasoning” sounds familiar, it’s because it’s nearly the exact same argument that the Trump Administration used in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief in defense of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Colorado bakery that in 2012 refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

“An artist cannot be forced to paint, a musician cannot be forced to play and a poet cannot be forced to write,” the Department of Justice’s amicus brief said. The brief asserted that public accommodation non-discrimination laws (like Lousiville’s Fairness Ordinance) are supposed to apply only to goods and services (like dispensing pharmaceutical medicine or renting hotel rooms) and not to artistic creations that are “expressly communicative” like wedding cakes and wedding photography.

As Hornet explained, “If public accommodation laws require a baker to make a cake for a gay wedding, the brief argues, then they could also potentially force a freelance designer to design fliers for a neo-Nazi group or the Westboro Baptist Church.”

The brief went on to say that opposing racism and misogyny is different from opposing homophobia because the Supreme Court has not yet ruled that “eradicating private individuals’ opposition to same-sex marriage is a uniquely compelling interest” — that’s because gay marriage had only been legal nationwide for a few years.

But the fact is that the government does have a compelling interest to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring that all individuals are treated equally under the law, rather than allowing individuals to deny same-sex couples the same treatment as everyone else.

The case may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the ADF’s goal. They keep filing these lawsuits in hopes that the conservative-leaning courts will help strike down LGBTQ anti-discrimination ordinances nationwide.

Written by Daniel Villareal, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM

Civil Rights Office at HHS Moves Closer to Killing Protections for LGBTQ Patients

New Civil Rights Movement | April 29, 2020

Topics: Affordable Care Act, Department of Justice, Heritage Foundation, Obamacare, religious freedom, Roger Severino, US Department of Health and Human Services

Run by Christian right activist Roger Severino, the Health And Human Services office has been pushing in this direction for a while now.

Roger Severino, a Christian right activist who heads the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’s Office for Civil Rights, is one step closer to his own personal goal of removing protections for LGBTQ patients, a move that would allow discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.

Under Severino’s leadership, the Trump administration has been moving quickly toward the final stages of dismantling critical protections for LGBTQ patients, Politico reports. The Dept. of Health and Human Services has sent a draft of its rewrite of an Obama-era policy to the Dept. of Justice for review, a sign it could soon announce the rollback of hard-fought regulations protecting some of the nation’s most vulnerable people.

HHS has been working on re-interpreting and re-writing the nondiscrimination provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The agency’s website currently says Section 1557 of the ACA “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs or activities.”

“Advocates fear that it would allow hospitals and health workers to more easily discriminate against patients based on their gender or sexual orientation,” Politico reports, noting the provision “also offered specific protections for transgender patients for the first time and extended protections for women who had abortions.”

Severino has been called a “radical” anti-LGBTQ religious right activist. He previously served as CEO and counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious right non-profit that opposes separation of church and state. He also once served as the Director of the DeVos family’s Center for Religion and Civil Society in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity.

Late last year a federal judge voided a rule Severino had implemented allowing medical providers to cite their personal religious or moral beliefs as a reason to refuse to provide care to certain individuals or to perform certain procedures. It would have allowed doctors and other health care professionals to refuse to perform or participate in abortions, prescribe or deliver contraception, or provide care to and LGBTQ person.

Severino is also tied to the Trump administration’s efforts to ban same-sex couples and LGBTQ people from adoption services.

Severino has long sought to gut ObamaCare’s LGBTQ protections. Before coming to the Trump administration Severino co-authored a Heritage Foundation report claiming new proposed ObamaCare nondiscrimination provisions “threaten the religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and independent medical judgment of health care professionals.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

DOJ Intervenes to Support Lawsuit Filed by Christian Photographer Refusing to Photograph Same-Sex Weddings

New Civil Rights Movement | March 3, 2020

Topics: ACLU, Alliance Defending Freedom, Bill Barr, Chelsey Nelson, Department of Justice, Louisville, religious freedom, Trump administration

A Kentucky wedding photographer has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to protect herself from the possibility of a hypothetical gay couple trying to hire her for their wedding. And Trump’s DOJ is backing her, because of course they are.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice under Attorney General Bill Barr has intervened in a pre-emptive lawsuit filed by a Kentucky wedding photographer who claims her interpretation of her Christian religion bars her from taking photos of weddings of same-sex couples.

No same-sex couple has ever tried to hire Chelsey Nelson to photograph their nuptials, but her attorneys, the far right wing Alliance Defending Freedom, filed the lawsuit against Louisville city officials anyway, according to the AP. The ADF appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

And now the Justice Dept. in a 23-page “statement of interest” says the “Court should find that Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits.”

In other words, the DOJ has told the court hearing her case directly that it agrees with the ADF.

The Louisville law bans businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ people. Many legal experts agree that refusing to provide a service to an entire class of people is discrimination, hence the countless laws across the country that protect LGBTQ people and other minorities from being refused services their non-LGBTQ peers regularly pay for and receive without question.

The DOJ, however, in a press release claims the legal statement it filed explains that Nelson “is likely to succeed on her claim that requiring her to photograph weddings against her conscience constitutes government-compelled speech that violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

“The First Amendment forbids the government from forcing someone to speak in a manner that violates individual conscience,” said Eric Dreiband, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The U.S. Department of Justice will continue to protect the right of all persons to exercise their constitutional right to speech and expression.”

The ACLU disagrees, and “filed a brief defending the city, arguing that the Nelson’s intent to offer wedding photography only to heterosexual couples violates the city law.”

The renowned  civil rights group calls Nelson’s position “identity-based discrimination.”

The SPLC says the Alliance Defending Freedom “has supported the recriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and claims that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

Pence Brags About Trump Allowing Adoption Agencies ‘Right’ to Ban LGBTQ Parents

New Civil Rights Movement | November 15, 2019

Topics: adoption, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, Department of Health and Human Services, Mike Pence, religious freedom, Roger Severino, Trump administration

“We will stand for the freedom of religion,” Vice President Mike Pence said, defending the Trump administration move to allow adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Vice President Mike Pence this week attended a federal government event during which he bragged about the Trump administration’s latest attack on LGBTQ people. The vice president (video below) heralded a fast-tracked proposed policy from the Dept. of Health and Human Services that would reverse an Obama-era rule barring discrimination by adoption and foster care agencies against LGBTQ people and same-sex couples.

The proposed rollback of that rule is expected to go into effect in just a few weeks, granting government protection to religious, faith-based, or any other adoption organization that wishes to claim a moral opposition to LGBTQ people from facing a loss of federal funding.

“We will stand for the freedom of religion and we will stand with faith-based organizations to support adoption,” Vice President Pence told supporters at an HHS event Tuesday, as he pounded his fists on the podium, to cheers.

“I couldn’t be more proud that at President Trump’s direction and with the strong support of leaders across foster care, adoption, and our faith communities, we’ve taken decisive action,” Pence bragged.

That “decisive action” literally reduces the pool of prospective parents for large numbers of children who don’t have parents or homes.

“More than 100,000 foster children are awaiting adoption, according to government data, but a constellation of religious agencies refuse to consider same-sex parents when placing these children,” NBC News reports. “Shortly before the end of his second term, President Barack Obama changed nondiscrimination rules governing adoption agencies to expand the definition of groups protected against discrimination to include LGBTQ people. Trump’s proposed rule change will undo that.”

In fact, same-sex couples have far higher rates of adopting and fostering children than their different-sex couple peers.

“A 2018 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 1 in 5 of the estimated 114,000 same-sex couples raising children in the United States are raising adopted or foster children — significantly higher than the 3 percent of heterosexual couples doing so,” reported NBC News.

The latest discriminatory HHS rule Vice President Pence bragged about comes from Roger Severino, HHS’s Director of the Office of Civil Rights. Severino is known as a “radical” anti-LGBTQ religious right activist who previously served as CEO and counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious right non-profit that opposes separation of church and state. He also once served as the Director of the DeVos family’s Center for Religion and Civil Society in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM. Video via Washington Blade/Facebook. Hat tip: Towleroad

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • ⟩

sidebar

sidebar-alt

Copyright © 2021 · RVA Magazine on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Close

    Event Details

    Please fill out the form below to suggest an event to us. We will get back to you with further information.


    OR Free Event

    CONTACT: [email protected]