Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has a pretty consistently antagonistic record on LGBT issues. He insisted that VA’s universities could not protect gays and lesbians from discrimination, going so far as to say that homosexual acts are “a detriment to our culture.” More recently, he opposed allowing same-sex couples from being allowed to adopt, a position that influenced the State Board of Social Services to vote down the proposed provision.

This week, he’s now punishing law firm King & Spalding for backing out of its contract to defend the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. Calling the firm weak and untrustworthy, he terminated the state’s relationship with the firm such that they are no longer on retainer to provide special counsel to the state:

King & Spalding’s willingness to drop a client, the U.S. House of Representatives, in connection with the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was such an obsequious act of weakness that I feel compelled to end your legal association with Virginia so that there is no chance that one of my legal clients will be put in the embarrassing and difficult situation like the client you walked away from, the House of Representatives. [...]

Virginia does not shy away from hiring outside counsel because they may have ongoing professional relationships with people or entities, or on behalf of causes that I, or my office, or Virginia as a whole may not support. But it is crucial for us to be able to trust and rely on the fact that our outside counsel will not desert Virginia due to pressure by an outside group or groups. [...]

Virginia seeks firms of committment, courage, strength and toughness, and unfortunately, what the world has learned of King & Spalding, is that your firm utterly lacks such qualities.

Cuccinelli conveniently ignores the fact that K&S’s contract with the House was not properly vetted and contained provisions that compromise the firm’s principles. Perhaps he thinks a “strong” firm is one that betrays its own employees and never revisits decisions that were made hastily and improperly, let alone correct them.

In the wake of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Stanford University this week became the third prominent university (joining Ivy Leaguers Harvard and Columbia) to invite the military’s ROTC program back onto campus. Yale is considering doing the same. Most of these universities banned ROTC in 1969-70 due to student outrage over the Vietnam War, but more recently, they have opposed military recruiters on campus because DADT conflicts with their sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies.

With the impending repeal of DADT, campuses no longer see a conflict and are ending the ban. Unfortunately, a conflict persists. While the repeal of DADT will end discrimination based on sexual orientation, the Uniform Code of Military Justice will continue to discriminate against people who are transgender and gender non-conforming. Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford all have nondiscrimination protections for gender identity/expression in addition to protections for sexual orientation. By welcoming back ROTC, these campuses are suggesting it was not okay to discriminate against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but it is okay to discriminate against the trans community.

Stanford’s President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchmendy attempted to address this conflict in a joint statement:

Our support for reestablishing the ROTC program should not be misconstrued. We understand the concerns about the military’s continuing discrimination against transgender people, and we share those concerns. But if the leadership of the military is drawn from communities that teach and practice true tolerance, change is more likely to occur. The U.S. military has demonstrated an ability and willingness to change over time, and we believe Stanford can contribute by providing leaders capable of helping create that change.

The only conclusion is that either the university was not interested in teaching tolerance under DADT or it’s unconcerned with persisting discrimination now. Harvard and Columbia‘s presidents did not acknowledge the conflict with transgender discrimination in their statements.

Unlike its Ivy League brethren, Brown University decided this week to maintain its ban on ROTC, but did not directly address the issue of transgender discrimination.

Perhaps having bored of directly attacking law firm King & Spalding for backing out of its defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), critics are now attacking the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) for having pressured K&S to make that decision.

A surprising number of newspapers who oppose DOMA have been among the chorus of critics. A Washington Post editorial asserted that HRC “sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.” The Los Angeles Times said HRC had “stumbled,” intentionally downplaying K&S’s commitment to being an inclusive firm as “no contradiction.” Margaret Talbot echoed this sentiment in The New Yorker, suggesting the tactic carried “an unfortunate whiff of McCarthyite groupthink.” Even Attorney General Eric Holder, in addition to defending Clement, compared HRC to those who criticized the lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees, implying that a law like DOMA and a person like a detainee have the same “right” to a defense.

Ever eager to self-victimize, marriage equality opponents like the National Organization for Marriage have similarly embraced the opportunity to paint LGBT activists as “bullies.” Glenn Beck took time to reinforce this meme on his show Wednesday:

BECK: So a private firm picked the case up. Well, here’s where the bullies come in. They start getting hammered with phone calls. This law firm gets hammered with phone calls and pressured. And so all these activists force the law firm to reconsider and they dropped the case. We’re trying to teach our kids about bullies in school, and boy do we teach them every day because we let the bullies win every day.

What all of these critics ignore is K&S’s own integrity as a law firm. If it stakes its reputation partly on its commitment to not discriminating, its clients (like Coca-Cola) should be concerned that it has accepted a contract that allows for such discrimination, particularly if the firm’s Diversity Committee was not consulted. If it’s defending a statute that harms many of its employees and even limits their right to speak out against it, there should be nothing wrong with encouraging those employees to voice their concerns. HRC’s campaign to hold K&S accountable to their own commitment to equality is anything but “bullying.”

Throwing around the term “bullying” like that is not only an inaccurate depiction of HRC, it ignores the severity of true bullying that LGBT youth experience every day. While someone will eventually have to defend DOMA so the cases can proceed, K&S is under no obligation to be that someone.  Talking a friend down from the edge of a cliff is not “bullying.” Perhaps critics of HRC should evaluate the difference between positive and negative peer pressure when determining who the real bullies are.