Equality Virginia’s James Parrish hasn’t stopped fighting for LGBT rights
In a year of heightened political awareness and polarity, Executive Director for Equality Virginia James Parrish is fighting an uphill battle to secure LGBT rights in the commonwealth that some would be surprised to find aren’t already written into law.
Equality Virginia is a nonprofit political organization with two sister organizations that advocate for LGBT rights, which includes lobbying, fundraising, and public outreach. At the helm, Parrish is working constantly to ensure protections in schools, employment, and housing — despite efforts from Republican lawmakers.
Parrish, who got his bachelor’s degree in scientific research at the University of Virginia, began as EV’s finance director and became the executive director in 2011. Since then, EV has grown into the state’s largest LGBT-focused political organization and has been involved in some stories of national interest, such as the Gavin Grimm Supreme Court case.
Gavin Grimm is a transgender male graduate of the Gloucester County school system who was forced to use the bathrooms corresponding with his assigned gender. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to the Supreme Court, claiming that the school had denied Grimm his rights.
This case highlights the limitations of Equality Virginia and how it operates. It’s not a legal organization — it doesn’t have a team of lawyers who could represent Grimm — and the ACLU rightly took the lead for Grimm’s case. However, when a member of the Gloucester County School Board reached out to Parrish and his team for guidance, they were able to help.
“A school board member reached out to us for support and talking points,” Parrish said. “We came to the school board meeting and took notes on the positives and negatives. We came back and held a community meeting that we invited the school board members to. We addressed transgender issues and what the schools need to provide to transgender students.”
Small-scale action like this is very effective in Virginia, a state where public education is very decentralized and policies can be vastly different from district to district. Despite these victories, Democratic lawmakers have failed to get bills through the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate that would codify these rights in the legislation.
According to Parrish, there are glaring and serious gaps in Virginia law which threaten the rights of LGBT people. His group sponsored two bills that were defeated in this year’s General Assembly that would have outlawed discrimination against LGBT people in employment and housing.
“There was overwhelming support for both of these bills, they’d been passing for three years in a row,” Parrish said. “Then they go to the House of Delegates, and we have a new house this year with a new leader. We knew, post-election night, that we had to votes on the house floor for these bills. We were pretty confident we had the votes. Last minute, the new speaker, which he has complete power to do, had them assigned to a special meeting of a subcommittee to have them killed.”
Parrish said it took a year of hard work to get the votes and support needed to pass the bill, and that this time last year he knew there wasn’t a chance of it passing.
The newly elected house speaker, Kirkland Cox, has spurred national interest for his potential to rebrand the GOP in the important swing state. One of the ways in which he seems to be achieving this is through deferring political action which might expand LGBT rights.
Marilyn Drew Necci, who is the editor for GayRVA, a leading Virginia publication dedicated to covering LGBT news, said up until the bills were killed, Cox wasn’t on her radar.
“Based on what happened, it seems like he’s fighting against our interests,” Necci said.
In her mind, however, the most pressing threat to LGBT equality and interests of groups like Equality Virginia is gerrymandering in the state. According to research group Azavea, Virginia is the fifth most gerrymandered state in the country. This is proven to tip the balance in elections, and Necci says that’s the biggest hurdle to overcome before some the pro-LGBT measures will pass through the legislature.
“I live in an area where there’s a lot of gay people, there’s a lot of poor black people and there’s a lot of working class people in general who have social issues and concerns about their rights. About whether they’re being treated fairly by the government,” she said. “It’s never going to go Republican because it was drawn that way. It perpetuates itself because once it’s in place, how do you get the representation to overturn it?”
And Necci wants that representation now. Without it, it’s unlikely that the Virginia legislature will get to some of the further protections that Necci would like to see. These include protections in both private and public employment, housing protections, changes to hate-crime laws so they’d apply to LGBT people and the requirement for health insurance providers to cover transgender healthcare.
“All of these are things, had the general assembly gone differently this year, we could be seeing signed into law. Governor Northam would sign all of these into law if they were put on his desk. It didn’t happen,” Necci said.
These are issues which many Americans — citizens and politicians — have a hard time approaching pragmatically. The history of gay and transgender people in the U.S. is an embattled one, filled with inflammatory rhetoric and violence. Parrish has the difficult job of mediating both sides.
“We have some supporters who want to say ‘You’re either with us or you’re against us.’ What you have to remind people is that a decade ago, a third of the people voting with us right now weren’t with us,” Parrish said. “Where do you draw that line in the sand? ‘If you weren’t pro-gay January 1, 2017, then I’m never going to work with you.’ If I had done that in 2009, there’s a lot of people I wouldn’t be speaking to in that building who now support me.”
That thick skin is a critical aspect of heading Equality Virginia, Parrish said. He can’t take every affront to his efforts, every defeated bill, personally. Otherwise, he’d have given up long ago.
Instead, he has to play the give-and-take game of politics. While there’s a place for protest in this political theater, EV plays the important role of pressing for concrete, incremental changes to ensure protections, rather than inflaming without results.
“People want to march in the streets and they want everything to change, but I think a lot of times, expectations get unrealistic,” Necci said. “The way our actual political systems works, unfortunately, those changes aren’t going to come quickly. It’s going to happen over decades.”
