The Republican nominee for Virginia governor scrawled a handwritten note on a bill passed by the state assembly saying she was “morally opposed” to same-sex marriages.
Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears added her personal touch to the legislation to protect gay marriages passed by Virginia’s General Assembly and signed by current Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Her signature was required as president of the state senate to show that the measure had been passed into law. But Earle-Sears then went one step further.
“As the Lieutenant Governor, I recognize and respect my constitutional obligation to adhere to the procedures laid out in the Constitution of Virginia,” she wrote. “However, I remain morally opposed to the contents of HB 174 as passed by the General Assembly.”
HB 174 amended the laws in Virginia to mandate that marriage licenses should be issued irrespective of “sex, gender, or race.” It includes a provision allowing religious organizations and clergy members to decline to officiate if they feel the ceremonies “violate their conscience.”
The bill became law in July 2024, but Earle-Sears’ scribbled entry has only just come to light.
Democratic Del. Rozia Henson, the bill’s author and the Virginia General Assembly’s first openly gay Black member, said when it passed: “The governor has signaled with my bill that Virginia will be for lovers.”
After learning about the Lt. Gov.’s handwritten addition, he said he’d never heard of a comparable incident: “She knows I’m an openly gay Black state representative, so the fact that she wrote something personal on my bill, knowing that she knows me and my family, that was somewhat disheartening,” he added.
Earle-Sears’ campaign told News4 TV channel: “She has already shown she will always be a governor for all Virginians. She has always been open and honest with the people of Virginia about her values and her unwavering commitment to both respecting and upholding the law.” The Daily Beast has contacted the office-holder for comment.
Earle-Sears became the Republican nominee for governor last month. The state’s gubernatorial elections will be one of the few major electoral tests in November. Unusually, the state prohibits sitting governors from running for re-election.
The revelation of her handwritten note came after Youngkin called on the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor John Reid to drop out of the race amid claims that he posted lewd photos online. Reid, the first openly gay man to run on the Virginia ticket, has said the pictures were not his and the account was fabricated.
Earle-Sears came to the notice of MAGA supporters across the country for her TV appearances in 2022 after the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school. She claimed one of the reasons for the bloodshed was that “we have emasculated our men.”
She repeated the claim at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Houston and during an appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend.
“We have fathers who aren’t home,” she said on Fox News. “We have emasculated our men. Our children are at stake. You notice that these shooters, they have had family problems. The Parkland shooter—37 times police were called to his home. It’s not the gun.”
The GOP nominee had previously sidestepped questions about whether she would support banning gay marriage in Virginia, saying in 2022: “The Supreme Court has already said that that’s not going to be part of the issue. That’s a whole other thing that’s totally different from abortion. I’ve been on the record as saying that, when it comes to civil unions, I’m all for that.”
Civil unions are different from marriages as they do not entitle partners to some federal benefits, such as joint filing of taxes, and are not recognized in different states.
Earle-Sears was the commencement speaker last month at Regent University in Virginia Beach, a Christian college that describes “homosexual conduct” as “indecent” and “Obscene.”
The school also says that it expects students to believe that a person’s gender is the “biological sex the person has at birth.”
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