Breaking News: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Retrofuck jackholes take over state; gays hit the road.

Twenty states have amended their constitution to ban same-sex marriage since 2004. Virginia state legislators passed a law two years ago that prohibits "civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage." A proposed constitutional amendment, which will go to voters in November, excludes any "unmarried individuals" from "union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage."

Many gay people in Virginia and some family-law attorneys say they worry that the state law and proposed amendment are more far-reaching than simple bans on gay marriage -- that the measures could threaten the legal viability of the contracts used by gay couples to share ownership of property and businesses.

…Married people get these rights automatically through long-established common law.

LGBT folks are increasingly moving out of Virginia for the more legally supportive D.C. (or elsewhere). Fuck Virginia; there is no sanity clause.

Emmanuel Vaughan, who writes customer-service training scripts, is another transplant. He moved to a place in the District in October, putting his Arlington house up for sale. He said he moved because he became angry over what the state legislature was doing, and he worried that he and his partner, Drew Lent, an international trainer, could be in legal jeopardy.

"As an African-American, having grown up during the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, Ala., I am not willing to have my rights taken away from me by ignorant, religious zealots who don't respect the constitutional understanding of separation of Church and State when scripting laws," he wrote in an e-mail. "It was apparent to me that things weren't getting any better, but worse. Why should I continue to pay taxes to support such a hateful government?"

Why indeed. When even your basic rights of inheritance, hospital visitation, joint property ownership, parenting, marriage—all the things straights take for granted—are not guaranteed, and are in fact targeted for prevention, you’re being subjected to no less than taxation without representation. Gee, didn’t we fight a war over that once…?

It’s precisely this kind of backwards, regressive, punitive legislation directed at gays, and its counterpart regarding reproductive rights (including conscience clauses and the sale of emergency birth control) directed at women, that will divide America into two countries. There will be states in which people are truly equal, and states in which people are not, forcing them to seek out a full life of realized potential and opportunity elsewhere. And it’s not difficult to see what that means for the economies of those respective states, as educated, upwardly mobile, independent, creative, forward-thinking people turn the blue enclaves even bluer, and leave the puritanical, ignorant backwater states from which they come even redder, wallowing in a brain-drain and an environment hostile to modern corporations who assert the need to treat all employees equally.

There was a time, not so long ago, that a state could get away with shit like this and not suffer for it, because nowhere else was so much better. That’s just not true anymore.

(Pam’s got a great rant on this one. Head on over and check it out.)