February 10, 2005
RedBurb/BlueBurb
Virginia's legislators are on a roll. Well, not a roll, but a hate-pastry of moldy crust filled with the rancid jelly of intolerance.
After working to keep the state (whoops, commonwealth) free of the Visible Underwear Menace, they're moving ahead with gay marriage and school prayer amendments to their constitution, which gets amended more often than "the list" of an AU sorority sister. Then there are the schools, where administrators worry about students catching the gay like it was pinkeye.
Virginia is a big state (whoops, commonwealth) and most of it lies far beyond Dr. Dremos/Pentagon City/Old Town sprawlosphere we visit when forced by circumstance or work. You don't have to go far on I-95 or I-66 to see a place that looks more like Deliverance than American Beauty. OK, you have to go farther and farther as the burbs fan out to where the farms and swamps used to be, but you get my point.
So, when will the state's business leaders at firms like AOL say 'Enough!' and put a stop to this madness for the sake of attracting talented technical workers straight out of colleges where boxers and agnostics weren't taboo?
The truth is, they won't stick their necks out as much as they would elsewhere. The common dichotomy explanation for the D.C. burbs is that Virgina has the "death sciences" companies that contract logistics and technology for the military and Maryland has the "life sciences" around the National Institutes of Health. Many of the larger firms in Virginia have many ex-military employees who aren't too keen on gay neighbors, even if it would mean they could reliably borrow a little cilantro without too much fuss. Demographers and sociologists, including pop-sociologist jerks like David Brooks, have pointed out that highly-qualified computer programmers have options: They can go to the liberal Bay Area or conservative Dallas. Business won't moderate Virginia's rabid right because there is enough of a labor force looking to live in a state (whoops, commonwealth) that reflects their "values."
Since the "underwear bill" became national news, more people are seeing Virginia as just another national embarassment, moving in away from the column of new-line techno-economies like Massachusetts and into culture war backwaters like Alabama, which will still undoubtedly attract people. So around the seat of government, put where it is today as a balance between north and south, we have an increasingly reactionary southern border and a liberal area to the north that will only become more so as people thinking about moving here have an increasingly clear choice about what kind of community they'd like to live in: One where the government is fighting over knickers, and one where it's doing battle on more important issues, like whether the mayor of the state's largest city is having an affair.
Posted by rj3 at February 10, 2005 9:21 AM
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