There can be no doubt that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli doesn't like gay or lesbian people and will use his own convoluted thinking to argue away his bigotry.
He said the following in response to a question by a high school student at a recent Boys State event at Liberty University:
"Frankly, the category of sexual orientation would never have been contemplated by the people who wrote and voted for and passed the 14th Amendment."
That may be true, but fortunately the Supreme Court disagrees.
In Romer v. Evans in 1996, they stated, "If the constitutional conception of 'equal protection of the laws' means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest."
In other words, gays have 14th Amendment rights, and Mr. Cuccinelli should enforce those rights as attorney general, whether he believes people 140 years ago would or would not have "contemplated" them.
I went to see Mr. Cuccinelli's political adviser speak at Germanna Community College in April, and he dismissed this question also, saying he doesn't know constitutional law.
Mr. Cuccinelli doesn't know it either.
He is an embarrassment to this commonwealth. Why GOP leaders still think it's to their advantage to disparage gays is beyond me.
My partner and I just want to live our lives, and why people want to deny us basic rights is ethnocentrism to the extreme.
If people want to know why Virginia is thought of as a backward state, just look at what its attorney general says. Discrimination based on sexual orientation is wrong.
Patrick Victor
Fredericksburg