In his Washington Post blog, Michael Shear has a rundown on Governor Kaine's first six executive orders. Shear focuses mainly on the first one, appropriately called "Executive Order No. 1," that continues Mark Warner's own executive order, back in December 2005, protecting gay and lesbian state workers. According to Shear:
For his first official action, Gov. Tim Kaine waded into controversy, signing an executive order that extends anti-discrimination protection to all gay and lesbian state workers. Executive Order No. 1, which was first amended to protect against sexual orientation discrimination by former governor Mark Warner, is likely to come under assault by the General Assembly this session.Conservative activists have assailed Warner for initially amending the executive order, which had already protected against discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed and national origin. Conservative lawmakers have promised to try and block the changes this year.
That took courage by our new Governor, no doubt. But, as we pointed out earlier today, Kaine's action is certainly not out of the Fortune 500 mainstream, and it's really hard to see how it's "controversial" except with the far-right extreme. Let's face it, this is utterly mainstream at this point. Currently, 461 (92.2%) of the those companies protect gay employees from discrimination. Also, 16 states and the District of Columbia have laws that prohibit sexual orientation discrimination in private employment, while eight other states (including Virginia), have laws prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination in public workplaces only. So, half the states and 92% of the Fortune 500 have some sort of prohibitions on anti-gay discrimination. The question is, what about the other half of states and the other 8% of corporations?