Just when you think Virginia’s finally entering the 21st century, it takes a major step backwards.
Take gay rights. Much of the rest of the country has come to terms with gays and lesbians and is accommodating them not as sinful folk but worthy individuals who can make big contributions to society and its economy. This is especially important to create jobs after the disastrous 2007-2010 recession. Indeed, many modern corporations understand this and have internal policies to protect gays and offer them benefits similar to what they offer to married heterosexuals.
So why, one wonders, is our so-called “jobs” governor, Bob McDonnell, getting away with throttling rights for state workers who happen to be gay? Unlike Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, the staunch social conservative and former graduate student at Pat Robertson’s university, which is hardly a bastion of tolerance, declined to include gays in an executive order forbidding discrimination against state workers.
Instead, McDonnell punted the issue of gay rights to the General Assembly, where a bill to protect gay state workers introduced by Democrat Sen. Donald McEachin, was killed in a House committee after being approved by the Senate. (The GOP controls the House and the Democrats control the Senate).
McDonnell is entitled to his personal views on gays which he spelled out in his infamous graduate student thesis at Regent University where he equated gays with sinful fornicators, as noted in a column by Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times Dispatch.
Unfortunately for the “jobs” governor, others are watching. As I noted in a story I wrote for Style Weekly, Richard S. Madaleno, a Democratic state senator in Maryland who happens to be gay, wrote to the CEO of Northrop Grumman noting McDonnell’s views on homosexuals and urging him to select Maryland over Virginia since it is friendly to gays.
Landing Northrop Grumman, already Virginia’s fifth largest employer, would be a feather in the cap for McDonnell since it would bring 300 high-paying jobs to Northern Virginia and further cement Virginia as a venue for defense contracting, which is a highly sustainable industrial sector during these days of layoffs and budget cuts.
Northrop Grumman, like a number of large corporations, is much farther ahead of states such as Virginia when it comes to diversity. NG has strict anti-discrimination policies for gays and offers generous benefits to them. In fact, a number of big firms doing business in Virginia — about 18 — offer same sex benefits. About 32 out of 50 top firms have exactly the same anti-discrimination policies that McDonnell refused to put in his executive order.
One reads a lot of pop sociology and urbanism in this post and, frankly, I often get sick of it. If I hear another tome about “clustering” by Michael Porter or another laud of the “Creative Class” by Richard Florida, I think I will be sick.
But consider what Florida wrote about gays:
“. . . the big new-ideas and cutting-edge industries that lead to sustained prosperity are more likely to exist where gay people feel welcome. Most centers of tech-based business growth also have the highest concentrations of gay couples. Conversely, major areas with relatively few gay couples tend to be slow- or no-growth places. Pittsburgh and Buffalo, which have low percentages of gay couples, were two of only three major regions to lose population from 1990 to 2000.”
So, there you have it. Too bad we are being taken back to the Dark Ages when we need forward thinking.
Peter Galuszka