Liam Conner
Ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in West Virginia, three of the Republican candidates for governor have tried to outdo each other to prove their opposition to transgender rights.
In TV ads aired in West Virginia, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, Chris Miller and Moore Capito accused each other of harboring transgender sympathies while praising their own efforts to restrict LGBTQ rights.
“Unfortunately, these are not solutions-based campaigns,” the ACLU of West Virginia said in a statement to CBS News. “Instead, they rely on demonizing already vulnerable people to score cheap political points.”
Morrisey’s campaign website describes him as “one of the nation’s most outspoken advocates against biological males playing sports with women” and says he is a staunch supporter of the Save West Virginia Women’s Sports Act of 2021, which required every athlete participated in official or unofficial schools. -sanctioned sporting and athletic events are “based on the athlete’s biological sex as indicated on the athlete’s original birth certificate issued at the time of birth.” Morrisey recently announced that he plans to ask the US Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the legislation after the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law in mid-April.
Morrisey (AP file), Miller and Capito: campaign photos
In response to these efforts, the ACLU of West Virginia told CBS News: “The state has invested untold resources to prevent a girl from being on her high school’s track team, including asking the U.S. Supreme Court to address the matter as an emergency on the same level as national security.”
A super PAC supporting Morrisey, black bearreleased an ad targeting Republican candidate Chris Miller, claiming that Miller “looked the other way while pro-transgender events took place on his watch” while he was a board member of Marshall UniveCrsity in West Virginia.
Miller, who owns a group of car dealerships in the state, has promised to “protect our children from the radical transgender agenda” if he is elected governor. He responded with an ad accusing Morrisey of previously lobbying for a transgender clinic that would dispense gender transition medications to children in New York before he was elected state attorney general.
Capito, who previously served in the West Virginia House of Delegates, touts his fight to ban transgender surgeries on minors and to ban puberty blockers. He released an ad called “Girl Dad” that depicts a fictional race. In it, a runner who appears to be a less athletic male “intermediate finisher” easily outperforms working female runners, as the ad’s voiceover accuses “woke leftists” of destroying women’s sport. Captain campaign website says it will “ensure that biological men can NEVER be in the locker rooms with our daughters.”
So far, more than a dozen Republican-led states have filed lawsuits to block the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations that would protect transgender students from discrimination in schools that receive government funding. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced Last month, the 1972 law protecting discrimination based on sex extends to “discrimination based on sexual stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual characteristics.” The new regulations are scheduled to take effect on August 1st.
The GOP attorneys general who are suing the administration, including Morrisey, claim The administration’s changes extend Title IX coverage beyond what is permitted, calling them “broad and illegal.”
The rise of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric among Republican gubernatorial candidates and state legislators in West Virginia has attracted the attention of the ACLU, which has tracked 29 anti-LGBTQ bills there. The organization notes that While not all bills become law, “they all cause harm to LGBTQ people.”
The West Virginia Legislature adjourned in March after passing just one such bill, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Jim Justice, who is now running for the U.S. Senate seat left open by the retirement of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. The new law prohibits transgender and non-binary West Virginians from changing their sex on their driver’s license.
