Virginia’s public colleges and universities may be able to ban anti-gay discrimination after all.
Days after the state’s attorney general told the institutions that they couldn’t ban discrimination against gay people, the governor said they could. Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s announcement came amid growing student protests about the attorney general’s policy and strong statements by some college officials that suggested they would ignore the attorney general. Both McDonnell and the attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, are Republicans.
Cuccinelli infuriated many students and faculty members in Virginia when they learned from The Washington Post that he had sent a letter to public colleges and universities last week saying that they lacked the authority to bar discrimination against gay people as part of their anti-bias policies. Cuccinelli argued that only the General Assembly could bar such discrimination and since it had not done so, the public colleges couldn’t.
If that logic held, many public colleges would have been forced to change their anti-bias policies, which do in fact include sexual orientation among factors on which discrimination is banned.
On Wednesday, as 1,000 students from Virginia Commonwealth University held a protest of the attorney general’s letter, the governor weighed in.
Comments
There should be no discrimination against any gay man or woman. I hope this continues to be upheld.
Let this serve, as a lesson, to the Attorney General, in his first, and last, term of office.
No Virginian, even those who are members of university faculties or student bodies, will have any enforceable right to be free from discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or expression until Virginia law is changed and the Virginia Human Rights Act and other applicable sections of the Code are amended to grant such protection. The Executive Directive issued by the Governor only applies to employees of executive branch agencies (President Casteen’s hopeful interpretation to the contrary), and it grants no enforceable rights even to those it covers. (A current case before the Virginia Supreme Court held that even Executive Orders cannot be enforced by individuals in court). Students and other beneficiaries of state programs are not covered at all. The Attorney General’s advice to colleges that their current policies have been adopted without authority has not been rescinded. Virginians who care about assuring that we are, indeed, a Commonwealth of Opportunity for all should let the Governor and their legislators know that they want the Human Rights Act amended to codify as state policy that no person should be subjected to discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity and the state personnel laws amended to guarantee all public employees (state and local, including teachers and college professors) the right to go to work each day without fear that they will be fired or otherwise discriminated against just because of who they are. More information about the campaign to end workplace discrimination in Virginia at www.equalityvirginia.org.
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