There are some folks I know and respect on the left who are willing to have Democrats lose this year as some kind of a wake up call. The thinking is that they will learn they need us DFH’s and then move the left legislatively. While I doubt this would ever actually work there is a more pressing reason for us not to support this idea. It would mean that the Republicans would be in office and perhaps in control of the Congress while Democrats got their act together.

The folks arguing for this “leave them high and dry” strategy don’t seem to understand just how bad that can be. Fortunately (for us if not the people of Virginia) there is a great example in the State of Virginia as to what modern Republican rule would look like.

The last two Virginia governors (Mark Warner and Tim Kaine), both Democrats, had signed executive orders on discrimination that included sexual orientation and sexual gender as protected classes that could not be discriminated against in state level hiring and firing decisions.

Just days after giving the Republican reply to the Presidents State of the Union address, the new Republican Governor issued a new executive order that stripped sexual orientation and sexual gender from the states anti-discrimination policy. To be clear he did it by merely leaving out these categories in the listed groups that would be protected.

That is bad enough, but on Friday the new Republican Attorney General of Virginia took it even further. He sent all of the public universities and colleges a letter explaining that if they had a policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation or sexual gender, it was not valid, as the Legislature had never approved such policies. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch article:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says Virginia’s colleges and universities cannot prohibit discrimination against gays because the General Assembly has not authorized them to do so.

In a letter Thursday to the presidents, rectors and boards of visitors of Virginia public colleges, Cuccinelli said: the law and public policy 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.“

Because the Republican Party’s base finds “the gay” icky Republican elected officials will do whatever they can to keep gay citizens from having the same protections and rights as non-gay citizens. Whether it is Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or marriage or something as simple as workplace discrimination protections they will go after them in whatever way they can.This includes telling institutions who decided on their own to exceed the inappropriately low level of anti-discrimination protection at the state level that their policies are not acceptable.

The VA Attorney General and the Governors Office say that they do not want anyone discriminated against, but they would rather rely on language that says best qualified should always be hired. What this completely ignores is the fact that “best” is a subjective value and as long as bigoted people know they will not be called to account for their bigoted decisions if the person happens to be gay, it basically gives the old wink and nod for any admissions office or University search committee to decide they do not want a gay student or professor and there will be nothing that can be done about it.

This is what we get from the governance of the Republican Party. There is no doubt that they will continue to push this idea of acceptable discrimination as long as they can. If we allow them to take back the Congress or even worse more of the Governorships or State Houses in 2010 out of disaffection or disgust about the actions of some of the Democratic Party we will have only ourselves to blame for the consequences. Yes, most of the Democrats in Congress could do better. They are a weak willed and cowardly lot who fail to understand that their agenda is actually popular with the nation. They seem congenitally unable to be forceful and stand together, but for all of that they are head and shoulders better than the best of the Republicans running for office today.

The floor is yours