Youngkin asks former GOP governor infamous for racist slur to join his transition team

Republican Glenn Youngkin was narrowly elected Virginia governor last Tuesday after a campaign built on the argument that “the political insiders who have been running Virginia have failed us” and a promise to “rebuild a better Virginia for everyone who calls it home.”

But his newly announced transition team is filled with political insiders with a history of advancing discrimination.

Youngkin said Wednesday that his “incredible transition team” would include former Republican Virginia Gov. and Sen. George Allen as honorary co-chair. Allen, who had a long history of racism and ties to white supremacists, lost re-election in 2006 after he was caught in a viral video using a racist slur at an event to refer to an Indian-American campaign tracker.

In the notorious video, Allen called the 20-year-old tracker “Macaca” — a racist slur likening people with dark skin to monkeys — and sarcastically welcomed him to America.

Allen has also spent much of his political career fighting against equal rights for LGBTQ people. In 1994, when he was governor, Allen said in a radio broadcast that homosexuality should be illegal and that he didn’t want his kids to think it was “acceptable behavior.”

As a U.S. senator, Allen co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage and opposed adding sexual orientation to federal hate crimes law. He also fought protections for LGBTQ Americans in the workplace, and even refused to adopt a nondiscrimination policy for his own office employees.

In 2012, while running for Senate against Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Allen bizarrely promised to “vote against adding sexual orientation to federal hate crimes statutes,” despite the fact that President Barack Obama had already signed such protections into law three years earlier with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

Allen isn’t the only ex-politician with a history of bigotry that Youngkin tapped to help lead his transition from candidate to governor. He also named disgraced former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell as an honorary co-chair.

One of McDonnell’s first acts as governor was to strip protections for Virginia state employees against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Prior to that, as a state legislator, he infamously helped get a judge kicked off the bench because he thought she was a lesbian. He also worked to preserve Virginia’s unconstitutional ban on consensual sodomy.

Youngkin’s two transition co-chairs — Republican State Sen. Steve Newman and Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James — also have long histories opposing LGBTQ rights.

Newman is best known in Virginia as the co-author of a 2006 amendment that enshrined the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in the state constitution. Six years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, Newman still voted to keep his language in the state constitution.

In 2020, Newman was one of a handful of state senators who opposed housing and employment protections for LGBTQ Virginians and was one of five state senators who voted against every single pro-LGBTQ rights measure, according to the group Equality Virginia.

James is president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative, anti-LGBTQ think tank. James opposes the Equality Act, which would give LGBTQ people broad legal protection against discrimination. In 2019, James tweeted that the bill is “anything but equality” and claimed it “would shut down businesses and charities, politicize medicine, endanger parental rights, and open every female bathroom and sports team to biological males.”

In the 1990s, James worked as senior vice president of the Family Research Council, now designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. In her 1995 book, James reportedly likened homosexuality to alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, and other “sinful” behavior.

Throughout his gubernatorial campaign, Youngkin tried to hide his most extreme views in a bid to appeal to both moderate and conservative voters in Virginia. Still, several moments from his campaign suggested that does not support equal rights for LGBTQ Virginians.

In an interview with the Associated Press — one of the only interviews his campaign granted to a news outlet — Youngkin said he is “called to love everyone” but refused to say whether he personally supports marriage equality. He admitted same-sex marriage is “legally acceptable.”

Other statements make clear Youngkin’s views on LGBTQ rights. Youngkin said he doesn’t believe transgender girls should be able to participate in school sports with cisgender girls, defended an anti-transgender teacher who refused to use his students’ preferred pronouns, supported parents who tried to get “LGBTQ-themed books” removed from their public school libraries, and attended a gala event hosted by the rabidly anti-LGBTQ Family Foundation.

In addition to his anti-LGBTQ comments and actions, Youngkin has also mounted racist attacks on Virginia’s public schools by seizing on conservatives’ fervor about so-called “critical race theory” — the idea that teaching public school students about the United States’ history of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination is somehow radical liberal indoctrination.

It doesn’t stop there. In April, Youngkin came under fire for calling Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders “yellow” — an offensive, outdated term. And on Friday, the progressive blog Blue Virginia reported that Youngkin’s prep school yearbook from 1985 included a photo of him at his senior prom next to images of students in “rice hats” and geisha robes. The prom’s theme was “An Oriental Occasion” — another offensive term for people of Asian descent.

In addition to the anti-LGBTQ people on his team, Youngkin also named former Democratic Gov. Doug Wilder as an honorary co-chair. In 2019, an investigation found that Wilder kissed a 20-year old student without her consent while he was a distinguished professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Government Affairs. Wilder has denied the charges.

Youngkin is set to take office on Jan. 15.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.