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3 GOP candidates for West Virginia governor try to outdo each other on anti-LGBTQ issues
Leading up to Tuesday’s West Virginia primary, three of the Republican candidates for governor have been trying to outdo each other in proving their opposition to transgender rights.
In TV ads running in West Virginia, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, Chris Miller and Moore Capito have been accusing each other of harboring transgender sympathies while touting their own efforts to restrict LGBTQ rights.
“Unfortunately, these are not solutions-based campaigns,” the ACLU of West Virginia told CBS News in a statement. “They’re built instead 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’s a staunch supporter of the West Virginia Save Women’s Sports Act of 2021, which required that each athlete’s participation in official or unofficial school-sanctioned sporting and athletic events be “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 U.S. Supreme Court to consider the legislation’s constitutionality after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned 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 sunk untold resources into keeping one girl from being on her middle school’s track team, including asking the U.S. Supreme Court to treat the matter as an emergency on par with national security”
A super PAC supporting Morrisey, Black Bear, released an ad targeting GOP candidate Chris Miller, claiming Miller “looked the other way as pro-transgender events happened on his watch” while he was a board member at Marshall UniveCrsity in West Virginia.
Miller, the owner of an auto dealership group in the state, has vowed to “protect our kids from the radical transgender agenda” if elected governor. He hit back with an ad accusing Morrisey of previously lobbying for a transgender clinic dispensing gender transition medication to children in New York before he was elected state attorney general.
Capito, who previously served in West Virginia’s House of Delegates, touts his fight to ban transgender surgeries from being performed on minors and to outlaw puberty blockers. He released an ad called “Girl Dad” that portrays a fictional race. In it, a runner who appears to be a less athletic male “mid-pack finisher” easily outpaces harder-working female runners as the ad narration accuses “woke leftists” of destroying women’s sports. Capito’s campaign website says he’ll “make sure biological men are NEVER allowed to 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, which would protect transgender students from discrimination in schools receiving government funding. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced last month the 1972 law protecting sex-based discrimination extends to “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.” The new regulations are slated to take effect Aug. 1.
The GOP attorneys general who are suing the administration, including Morrisey, allege the administration’s changes extend the coverage of Title IX further than allowed, calling them “sweeping and unlawful.”
The uptick in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric among Republican gubernatorial candidates and state legislators in West Virginia has attracted the notice of the ACLU, which tracked 29 anti-LGBTQ bills there. The organization notes that while not all of the bills would become law, “they all cause harm for LGBTQ people.”
The West Virginia legislature adjourned in March after passing just one of those bills, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Jim Justice, who is now running for the U.S. Senate seat left open by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement. The new law bans transgender and non-binary West Virginians from changing their sex on their driver’s license.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required new cars to beep at drivers if they exceed the speed limit in an effort to reduce traffic deaths.
California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.
The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.
In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.
Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.
The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.
California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto disappointing and a setback for street safety.
“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”
The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.
The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
