GAZETTE COLUMN: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW – UNLESS YOU’RE GAY by John P. Flannery

Our Governor is not the worst homophobe in America but he is a contender.

Our Commonwealth is not the worst in its intolerance of gays but it’s got nothing to be proud of either.

In Loudoun County, we have a Board of Supervisors indifferent to the fact that one of its members, Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio, is a gay bashing demagogue.

I wrote each member of the Board of Supervisors to ask them to disavow this bigotry.  Our Board has no shame in its silence. As that old 60s tune went, “Hello Darkness my old friend.”  Janet Clarke wrote she felt no obligation to respond at all.  And she didn’t.  By their silence, may we know them.

Virginia has had a discouraging history when it comes to individual rights and liberties.

Virginia had to be told by the Supreme Court in 1967 that a ban on mixed-race marriages was unconstitutional as it violated “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

No doubt Virginia will have to be told its constitutional amendment against same sex marriage is unconstitutional as our General Assembly has presently decreed - VIRGINIA IS NOT FOR GAY LOVERS.

A Roman Senator once said that the fates lead you to your destiny, or they drag you to it.  Our Commonwealth has had to dragged before to its destiny and forced to end slavery, to grant women suffrage, to end segregation, to stop its massive resistance to integration.  Not too many years ago, our General Assembly defeated the equal rights amendment for women.

The Commonwealth is like a child that must be forced to do what’s right because it won’t do what’s right on its own.  It’s hard to support the Commonwealth’s insistence on its State’s rights when that means violating individual rights for its citizens.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said that “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

The test is whether Justice Kennedy will follow his own teaching and provide the swing vote to affirm same sex marriage as a right.

If not, then what Kennedy said, is an example of “people talking without speaking,” afraid to disturb the “sound of silence” that embraces such bigotry.

I am reminded of that popular Simon and Garfunkel song from the sixties, the “Sounds of Silence,” because it reminds us how the more we think we’ve advanced in tolerance, the more we must confess that we’ve advanced hardly at all.

So many who discriminate against gays hide behind some religious text or other that finds no support in anything that Jesus ever said.  Apparently we are all made in the image of God – unless, by the twisted view of some Christians, your image is gay. 

Nor is there much validity to the notion marriage is only to procreate, especially given our nation’s over-populating copulation with so many children born orphans and unwanted who can’t find adopting families.

When the mind of man scours the Old Testament to find support in Leviticus for a biblical sound bite to justify discrimination, they defy the teachings of Jesus to love one another. 

Ask yourself if Leviticus is really where we should be getting guidance anyhow?  Leviticus insists women are unclean and sinful after child birth (Leviticus 15:19-30), that a man who has sex with a slave woman won’t be punished, but the slave will be (Leviticus 19:20-22), and priests may only marry virgins (Leviticus 21:13-14).  Perhaps the Old South found comfort in Leviticus (Leviticus 25:44), stating “you may buy male and female slaves” but only from the surrounding “heathen” nations, a passage obscured in some translations, and,  of course, you may keep the children of these slaves as well (Leviticus 24: 45).  Some casuists say their slavery (in the time of Leviticus) was not like our slavery.  Oh really?

But I digress.

Our government is not the Holy Roman Catholic Church, nor any other Theistic entity, by which we are constrained to measure the rights of an individual in our constitutional society.

It is time to end this foul form of discrimination against gays so easily embraced by our political leaders and by our friends and neighbors.

Our individual dignity is insulted and abused by this persistent permeating prejudice visited on others.  Our silence is acquiescence and does “like a cancer grow.”

Some travel on missions around the globe to inform other nations of the values of democracy and others travel to teach the word of God.  We have plenty of soul work to do here in America to dismantle the neon God we’ve built that allows many to say this discrimination against gays is what God wants.  We have plenty of work to perfect our union, and to find our voice again, rather than remaining silent in the face of such bigotry.

GOVERNOR MCDONNELL BULLIES WOMEN by John Flannery

PROTEST IN VIRGINIA FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

OFFENDS GOVERNOR MCDONNELL

SO HE MUSCLES THE WOMEN AND THEIR SUPPORTERS

OFF TO THE RICHMOND JAIL

______________________

 

- observations by John P. Flannery -

 

Just watch this video and make up your own mind -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQXjsEGTeEU&feature=youtu.be

if you want to get an idea of how our Virginia Governor handles objections to Virginia's backward legislative policies that disrespect and abuse a woman's constitutional right of privacy.

 

It is hard to imagine that Governor Bob McDonnell is the Governor of a Commonwealth once headed by Thomas Jefferson when he summons an array of State and City Police, heavily armed, to suppress a crowd of mostly women, obviously unarmed, who showed up to protest his policies against them in Richmond yesterday, March 3, 2012.

 

When the unarmed crowd assembled peacefully yesterday afternoon on the steps of the Capitol to protest, the SWAT team arrived in full battle regalia, at the Governor's orders, to war against their First Amendment exertions to assemble and speak. 

 

It was as if he said - "don't these women know their place?" - and he set out to put them in their place because plainly they went where he forbade them to be. 

 

Perhaps it's time to go back and read the Governor's doctoral thesis again - and re-visit what he said he'd abandoned, as youthful mutterings.  Now we know he was lying to us so - that he'd changed - so he could become Governor - and do precisely what we said he would.

 

 

 

 

At first yesterday, the police obstructed the access of the demonstrators to the Capitol grounds, and then the citizens walked across the grounds, so recently made so pristine with our taxpaying funds, so they could do what normally happens all over Richmond Capitol grounds.

 

But these speeches were not by the legislators. 

 

They were by the people who objected in as much force, and with arguments more plainly righteous, in opposition to what the General Assembly wrongly did to them days earlier.

 

Plainly, the Governor had enough, no more dissent for him, not another day in which their public expressions might turn even more public opinion against his constitutional misconduct.

 

The Governor and the General Assembly acted in such a heavy-handed and unfair fashion, doing so much wrong, that citizens from around the world and journalists and late night comedians ridicule us for what our General Assembly did.

 

 

 

 

 

What the protesters did not understand when they thought they could "get away" with expressing their critical opinions again was that, while you may have freedom OF speech, you almost certainly don't enjoy freedom AFTER speech - at least not down Virginia way. 

 

 

 

 After the crowd chanted, "This is what democracy looks like, This is what democracy looks like,..." O'Donnell's goons - and that's what we'd call the henchmen of any gangster - moved in to change the democratic tableaux, from what democracy was intended to look like, to destroy any notion that we here in Virginia may officially respect differing views. 

 

There were the vacant "have-a-nice-day-we're-here-to-help-you-stares" -- through plastic shields - while they cleared well meaning Virginians from the public square who wrongly thought that hey could say what they thought in the so-called "land of the free and home of the brave."

 

They thought they could stand and speak in front of the Capitol.  Think again!

 

McDonnell's muscular puppets isolated those who stood on the steps in protest, divided and separated the groups of protesters, and then moved in on the smallest group remaining on the steps to arrest them.

 

 

If you listen to the tape of this unconstitutional debacle, in defiance of assembly and free speech, you'll hear the crowd protesting, demanding that one officer who approached one of the women on the steps, take his unconsented and offending hand off her shoulder. 

 

Could there be a more apt offense to demonstrate the protesters' point - that Virginia has decided to assault the privacy of women generally and individually. 

 

The crowd objected to this officer presuming to address so intimately and intimidatingly - while he places his hand on her person.

 

There were additional cries from the crowd at the armed men, carrying automatic rifles, apparently sub-machine guns - when no one in the crowd had anything more offensive than a clear voice to suppress.

 

We praise the citizens of other nations who protest their wrongful governments and castigate these foreign leaders at any hint that they suppress their citizens' expressions in protest. 

 

By that standard, shouldn't we be castigating Governor McDonnell for not being able to withstand the heat of public declamation at his policies? 

 

Or did it hurt his frail male ego so much more that it was women, a group he would relegate to chattels, that had the nerve to object to his paternalistic administration of their private lives?

 

 

 

The other marchers cheered those who were caught in the web, not for being caught, but for having shown the strength of their convictions, for having been hauled off because they sat on the steps, the public steps, and objected to what our shameful legislators said and did only days before, led by their Governor.

 

In a nation of invertebrate politicians, is it possible that our democratic ideal, if it is to be preserved, will in the end be won or lost by what we citizens do to protect that ideal - as there were no legislators in evidence to fight for us? 

 

But isn't it true that, in all the great battles for rights in this nation, we the people must lead our elected officials.

 

Are they the last and most timid of the people's allies in these struggles for a right and just society because they care more about keeping their job than doing it?  I'm afraid so. 

 

And this tragedy in Richmond is only the most recent example.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQXjsEGTeEU&feature=youtu.be

 

If you want to see the face of Virginia, a haunting spectre true to life, that we thought a thing of the past, that we'd left behind us long ago, in the 50's perhaps, or maybe the 60's, this picture (below) of impersonal dark forced SWAT goons really does say it all.

 

The New Dominion has grown old again and the rights of individual citizens wither before the muscle of men who do what they're told and  have neither respect for women nor for the liberties and rights that Thomas Jefferson struggled to defend and protect. 

 

So let us consider what we could say about a Republican ticket that would consider for even a brief moment having our Governor on the ticket.

 

Would that be a hidden indiscreet promise that we could expect to see more suppression of the same in our nation's capital after their inauguration - should we dare to disagree and then, even worse, seek to invoke our First Amendment right to assemble and to speak?

 

It will be interesting to observe if the Republican party finds our Governor still worthy of being Vice President after his casting efforts for the role. 

 

We sincerely hope they find him overzealous and out of bounds - because that would favor our constitutional government.

 

On the other hand, if he is chosen, that would tell us a lot bad of what we can expect from the Republican Party of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and the many others in that party who have let us know that they care not so much for women's rights.

 

Of course, then we would have to make the error of licensing them to repeat these dark practices in the nation's capital - were we foolish enough to allow them to win the vote in November in the first place.

 

 

GAZETTE COLUMN: WOMEN - KNOW YOUR GOVERNOR, KNOW YOUR MORTAL ENEMY by John P. Flannery

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R) doesn’t respect your constitutional right of privacy as an individual, not if you’re a woman.

Governor McDonnell seeks to zero out any medical advice you might get and any abortion you might seek to have in your first trimester – if it’s from any of the 20 affordable clinics in Virginia.

He also wants to prevent any woman from paying for any health insurance coverage rider on the state insurance exchange that would cover an abortion in the first trimester.

This is nothing new to women who have known men all their lives who try to tell them what to do and who treat them like they’re property – consistent with the “original intent” of our flawed constitution before its belated amendment in 1920.

The Governor insists in sonorous incantations, at the drop of a political leaflet, that women should be grateful that he has interfered with their health choices, first, by imposing new stringent and unnecessary health regulations that shall operate to bar first trimester abortions in any of the 20 clinics that already follow unassailable medical procedures, and second, by banning private insurance coverage riders for abortion care on the state insurance exchange.

The Governor forces on women his factually unsupported religious belief that a fetus is a person in the first trimester.  No matter that the constitution says otherwise as a matter of law.

McDonnell disclosed his eccentric projection of the ideal “American Family” in a 1989 graduate thesis at Pat Robertson’s “university.”   Bob later said he didn’t really mean what he wrote, but his public actions since have confirmed that he really did.

O’Donnell said in his thesis that birth control and abortion had “reduced birth rate below that which is required to replenish the current population” (at p. 6).  Our 2010 census, however, demonstrates that this nation was 4.6% of the global population in 2000, at 282 million people, and has enlarged its footprint, at 4.9% of the global population, with 310 million people.

Bob said he believed the “trend of working women and feminists” encourages the “non-parental primary nurture of children” (at p. 40).  In other words, Bob wants women pregnant and bare foot, and not working -- so they may “nurture.”  “Feminism,” Bob wrote, lest you have any doubts about his chauvinism, is among the “real enemies of the traditional family” (at p. 65).

“Blue law” Bob also decried “the perverted notion of liberty that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way he chooses without interference from the state” (at p. 9).

To preserve and protect the family, Bob said the government “has the right to legitimately discriminate in support of this goal” (at p. 34).  O’Donnell explained that the way he’d do that would be to “chip away at the fringes” of the law that allows for a woman’s constitutional right of choice (at p. 54).  Obviously, precluding health care and insurance coverage fit his stratagem.

Like the indifferent play-acting Monty Python physicians, in “The Meaning of Life;” Bob is telling women who believe that they have the right to control their own bodies, to think again, “you are not qualified.”