Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R)

The Washington Post reports:

Marshall’s proposal goes beyond the governor’s comments, which were made in the course of a radio interview Tuesday. Marshall would not only allow staff with concealed handgun permits to carry them in schools, but require school districts to designate some staff members to do so. Those employees would have to be certified in gun safety and competence, Marshall said.

Marshall told the Richmond Times Dispatch, “I’ll bet there are people who have concealed-carry permits in most every school in the commonwealth. They’d be the ones to volunteer to get certified.”

While a growing list of pro-gun lawmakers have indicated that they will reconsider gun control in the wake of Friday’s tragedy, some are using the tragedy to push for even more guns. McDonnell, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Republican legislators in Oklahoma, Nevada, and South Dakota have embracing the idea of arming adults in schools.

Virginia Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw strongly objected to McDonnell’s suggestion, saying, “And when that fails to stop this, what’s next? Arm the students? If teachers wanted to carry guns in order to do their day job, they would have become policemen.”

Gay judicial candidate Tracy Thorne-Begland during his military service

Earlier this week, the Virginia House of Delegates rejected Tracy Thorne-Begland, a former Navy pilot and top Virginia prosecutor, for a seat on Virginia’s lowest ranking trial court because, in the words of Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA), Thorne-Begland’s gay “lifestyle is exactly contrary to” his obligation to uphold the state constitution. On CNN this morning, Marshall doubled-down on this view, explaining that he blocked Thorne-Begland because the judicial candidate had the audacity to serve his country while gay:

MARSHALL: [Thorne-Begland] had to misstate his background in order to be received into the military in the late 1980s. There was a specific question, “are you a homosexual?” He had to say no. He took an oath of office which he had to defy. . . . Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office that they broke. Sodomy is not a civil right. It’s not the same as the Civil Rights Movement. You have to look at the past, and, in fact, look, in late 2011 he was critical of the, you know, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. He criticized our attorney general simply for explaining what the law of Virginia is with respect to certain protected classes.

Watch it:

First of all, “sodomy,” as Marshall so quaintly puts it, is a civil right. That was the holding of Lawrence v. Texas, which established that consenting adults have a right to be free from government interference in their “private sexual conduct.”

Additionally, while it may in fact be true that Thorne-Begland once misrepresented his sexuality in order to serve his country in the United States Navy, it is important to understand exactly what he signed up for when he told this potential lie. Tracy Thorne-Begland was a Navy pilot, and his superiors did nothing to hide from him the dangers inherent in this job. When Thorne-Begland was stationed at Virginia Beach, he was informed that 25 percent of pilots are killed in action over the course of a 20 year career. This was the job he might have lied in order to sign up for — to risk his life every day in defense of his county. Bob Marshall, by contrast, never served a day in the United States military.

Nor, apparently, did Marshall familiarize himself with civil rights history during all that time he spent not serving his country. Martin Luther King may not have taken an oath of office, but his entire career was rooted in a campaign to peacefully defy unconstitutional laws. And while there is some dispute over whether Rosa Parks’ famous decision to keep her seat on a Montgomery bus violated a city ordinance or merely a racist custom, her refusal to stand is widely perceived as an act of civil disobedience that triggered a movement of opposition to Jim Crow laws. A judge’s oath is to the Constitution, and Thorne-Begland acted with the greatest respect for our founding document when he fought back against the unconstitutional and now-repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R)

Tracy Thorne-Begland served his country for 20 years in the Navy. After his discharge, he then rose to become one of the top prosecutors in the city of Richmond, Virginia. He was sponsored for a low-level trial judgeship by a bipartisan mix of state lawmakers, and seemed a shoo-in for the job. And then this happened:

Delegate Bob Marshall said he will seek to remove the name of Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland from a list of proposed District Court judicial appointments.

“I don’t even think it’s proper to put his name forward because of his behavior,” said Marshall, who called Thorne-Begland “a homosexual activist,” in a press release.

Thorne-Begland has been nominated to serve as a judge for Richmond’s General District Court, but, Marshall challenges the nomination on the grounds of the prosecutor’s sexual orientation.

“We have a constitution which says marriage is between one man and one woman and if he’s taking an oath, he has to uphold and defend that as a judge,” said Marshall.

“If his lifestyle is exactly contrary to that… I don’t see how he could do that,” he said.

Last night, the Virginia House of Delegates fell 18 votes short of the 51 needed to appoint Thorne-Begland to the state bench, effectively killing his opportunity to become a judge. Had he been appointed, Thorne-Begland would have been the only openly gay judge on the Virginia bench.

Moreover, its worth noting that the General District Court is the very lowest court in Virginia, hearing little more than misdemeanors and small dollar civil suits. So it’s unlikely that a gay rights issue could even come before Thorne-Begland if he joined this court.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R)

This is hardly the only example of this Personhood bill’s chief sponsor, Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA) showing disregard for women who have been sexually assualted. In a brief he submitted earlier this week opposing the Affordable Care Act, Marshall claims that requiring most Americans to carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes is just like rape:

As the Government admits, the individual mandate is designed specifically to “internalize” the risks and costs of health care, which it has the temerity to call “classic economic regulation of economic conduct.” In fact, the mandate is classic sumptuary legislation, prohibiting personal spending choices which offend the moral or religious beliefs of Congress. Thus, the Government’s individual mandate is not a regulation of commerce; it is a compelled societal duty. Indeed, the individual mandate is not voluntary commercial intercourse; it is forcible economic rape.

Marshall, of course has a long history of such opposition to modernity. An arch-nullificationist, Marshall once claimed that children with disabilities are God’s punishment to women who had abortions, and his disregard for reproductive choice and the Constitution is rivaled only by his disdain for gay people.

Nevertheless, Marshall’s latest statement is beyond the pale even by his standards. Enacting an economic regulation that is essential to the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions is absolutely nothing like rape.