Tag Archives: Employment nondiscrimination

Here Come the Social Issues

Question: Does Victoria Cobb have dementia, or does she just believe that other Virginians do?

In an email she sent us this week, with the actual subject line “Here Come the Social Issues,” the Virginia Family (not yours) Foundation president tells us that, because there is now a Democratic majority* in the state senate, “Senator Democrats [sic] will elevate their abortion and sex agenda** to their top priority,” and “there is little doubt that ‘social issues’ will dominate their agenda in the coming days.”

I will pause here so that anyone who has been living in Virginia for the last decade or two can finish laughing.

There certainly has been quite a bit of forgetfulness lately on the part of individuals who have made an “abortion and sex agenda” their top priority, hasn’t there? And Victoria’s forgetfulness about her own organization’s mission has just shot to the top of the hit parade, as further down in the very same email she mentions the 2011 TRAP*** law that she and her allies in the General Assembly engineered by adding anti-abortion provisions to an unrelated law. And you might think that Victoria would want to present the means by which this law was passed as a legitimate process driven by evidence and debate. You would be wrong.

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Anti-gay, anti-trans Realtor terminated from Keller Williams

rutkowskiCrossposted at Equality Loudoun

UPDATE: Here’s Vivianne’s original post as it appeared on January 25, shortly before she deleted it.

Last week I accidentally discovered a blog post“Loudoun County in Virginia going Gay, Lesbian and Transgender” – published shortly after the Board of Supervisors voted to revise the county’s Human Resources Policy Handbook in 2010.

Written by Vivianne Rutkowski (pictured at left), a local Realtor affiliated with Keller Williams in Leesburg, the post made the offensive, ridiculous assumption that prohibiting discrimination against LGBT county employees would have a negative effect on the Loudoun real estate market. It also contained very ignorant and defamatory language of the sort one hears from hate groups obsessed with public restroom use. Ms. Rutkowski’s response to criticism only made things worse.

I want to immediately say that the responsiveness of Keller Williams to this situation has been outstanding. None of Ms. Rutkowski’s superiors at the agency were aware of this post, and are very grateful to us for calling it to their attention. This has been treated as a very serious matter with the potential to do real damage to their reputation and that of the real estate profession as a whole.

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