VB Dems

A couple of years ago I indirectly accused Delegate Sal Iaquinto of being a homophobe for his use of the term “secret agenda” in an email response to me. I was challenging his vote on a bill allowing school boards to prohibit student clubs that allegedly “encourages or promotes sexual activity by unmarried minor students”. It was aimed at denying youth the support they need by preventing Gay/Straight Alliances (GSAs). Turns out Iaquinto was naive to the real definition of “secret agenda”, a definition that I was highly suspect of having used it to beat down Virginia’s second biggest homophobe, former Delegate Dick Black. (FYI… Virginia’s biggest homophobe Del. Sideshow Bob Marshall unfortunately still holds office.)

I wish Soapblox would give me my data files so that I could link back to old VB Dems posts on this. I got pretty beat down with comments glowing about how cool Del. Iaquinto actually was – Sal himself even commenting in his defense.

Since then, Del. Iaquinto has bent over backwards to give fair hearing to GLBT issues. He is always quick to point out his support of legislation allowing hospital visitation rights to whomever patients choose. When a group of us from VB came to chat with him as a part of Equality Virginia’s lobby day, Sal momentarily left a committee meeting in order to talk to us. There have been other votes (one of which I got into a fight with Sean Holihan over) that I can’t remember and don’t have old posts to refer to. (Come on, Soapblox!)

Anyway, so here we are with a very important bill, SB 66, that just passed the Virginia State Senate and is now headed to the House of Delegates. This bill adds sexual orientation to the State’s nondiscrimination employment policy, alongside race, religion, gender, disabilities and other classifications.

Passage of this bill became all the more important as Governor McDonnell yesterday signed a non-discrimination order does not include sexual orientation.

So will Delegate Iaquinto put his money where his mouth is, exercise some leadership and rally his fellow Beach delegates to support SB66? He is the only normal sane person and the only hope we have amongst the rest of our Beach delegation. The others are either mindless sheep (Knight, Stolle, Villanueva) or batshit crazy (Tata, Purkey).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 6:06 am and is filed under 2010 GA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.