By Suzanne Bowdey

For most Virginians, three more years of Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) feels like an eternity. The mom-next-door-turned-radical-Democrat has spent the last seven months shedding her moderate skin and pushing policies that are wildly out-of-step with her middle-of-the-road state. And while voters can’t send her packing any time soon, they can deliver an emphatic rebuke to the historically unpopular governor on two issues that matter most: abortion and marriage.

In November, Virginians have a chance to beat back the extremists in Richmond on a pair of ballot initiatives that could turn the Commonwealth into a deep-blue stronghold on core social values. While the twin amendments to the state Constitution have flown under the radar, pastors like Cornerstone Chapel’s Gary Hamrick are sounding the alarm that the Left is on the move to wipe away every protection against late-term abortion, parental rights, same-sex marriage, and dangerous gender ideology.

“Virginia needs to wake up, and Christians need to be informed about this,” he told his congregation Sunday. “… We need to band together as one voice in Virginia. And we need to vote no.” Hamrick, along with Jonathan Falwell and Bishop E.W. Jackson, feel so strongly about the threat that they’re joining forces to host a string of townhalls across the state to get people off the sidelines before the midterms.

In a state where Donald Trump was extremely competitive in 2024, and Republicans consistently win 47% of the vote in legislative races, the idea of rewriting the Constitution in the image of far-left Democrats would be a shocking transformation. And yet, under Questions 1 and 2, that’s exactly what Spanberger and company are hoping for.

Question 1: The So-Called ‘Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment’

The state of Washington, Jefferson, and Mason — men who championed the “pursuit of life” in our guiding documents — would be stunned to learn that their descendants were fighting to make the killing of unborn children a protected act in the Virginia Constitution. “It would recreate the most radical abortion regime anywhere in the United States,” Family Foundation of Virginia President Victoria Cobb underscored. “If voters knew what was actually in this amendment, they would not vote for it,” she said, a nod to the overwhelmingly popular limits to abortion in America.

If Question 1 passes, Cobb’s group says locals are looking at a “zero-safety, no-guardrails abortion amendment [that] would legalize abortion up to birth, erase parental consent, and stop reasonable safety standards.” Of course, the problem, as so many pro-lifers warn, is that Virginians wouldn’t know any of this from the text of the initiative itself. “The language voters will see when they walk into the voting booth in November is engineered to obscure what this amendment actually does,” Cobb lamented.

Instead, it’s worded this way, intentionally innocuous: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to (i) protect the freedom to make personal decisions about prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion, miscarriage management, and fertility care; (ii) protect doctors, nurses, and patients from being punished for these decisions; and (iii) allow for restrictions on access to abortion during the third trimester of pregnancy except when the patient’s health is at risk or the pregnancy cannot survive?”

The reality is much more sinister. Moms and dads would be stripped of their authority to know — let alone intervene — in a major medical decision that causes significant risks for their daughters. In an age when schools need permission to hand out a Tylenol, the Commonwealth would push young girls into surgery, birth control, abortion drugs, or even sterilization without so much as a phone call home. And yet, legal experts caution, this same amendment could also open the door to secret gender-mutilating operations on kids too.

Late-term abortions, which used to require the approval of three doctors, would suddenly get the green light if even a single physician thought the “health of the mother” — an elastic term that could be loosely defined to include things like emotional health — was in jeopardy. In other words, former state Delegate Tim Anderson shook his head, “If a woman goes in to a doctor in the third trimester and has a perfectly healthy, viable baby, and there is a mental health reason for the mother that the doctor determines that the abortion should occur — baby’s healthy, mother’s healthy … the state would have no way to regulate that in Virginia.”

Among other “wild consequences,” Josh Hetzler, executive director of Founding Freedoms Law Center, explained, “It will eliminate statutory rape laws for consenting minors, since the amendment provides an unqualified ‘fundamental right to reproductive freedom’ to every ‘individual,’ without any limitation on age.” Former Delegate Bob Marshall agreed. “This effectively nullifies any minimum legal age of sexual consent. Note also that parents would be powerless to intervene or sue adult sexual predators, Planned Parenthood or similar groups from ‘changing’ the sex of minor children.”

Family Research Council’s Joy Stockbauer was adamant in comments to The Washington Stand, “The abortion activists behind this proposed amendment want you to believe you’re a terrible person who hates women if you vote no. In reality, there’s nothing hateful about protecting children. This shouldn’t be revolutionary to say, but killing a child is always wrong, even if it occurs while the child is still located in a womb,” she argued. “I say this as someone who’s actually given birth, and who knows that my birth canal didn’t magically bring my child to life. The same little feet I could see kicking my stomach every day during pregnancy now scamper around my house. Question 1 doesn’t empower women or expand access to real health care, it simply makes it easier to kill little humans.” She paused before declaring, “I urge all Virginians to vote NO to Question 1.”

This “goes far beyond even what Roe v. Wade previously allowed,” the Virginia Catholic Conference stressed, pointing to a doomsday for conscience protections for Christian health care workers and safety standards for abortion centers. “If the amendment becomes law, it will most certainly lock Virginia in a terrible situation,” the state’s Society for Life argued. “We will become a permanent destination for abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for women from all over the South.”

Question 2: ‘Remove Constitutional Same-Sex Marriage Ban Amendment’

While support for same-sex marriage is collapsing across the country, Democrats are racing to overturn Virginia’s 20-year-old amendment that protected natural marriage before the bottom of the social experiment falls out. Like a lot of states in the early 2000s, the Commonwealth overwhelmingly defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman at the ballot box in 2006. Those amendments all became moot 11 years ago when the Supreme Court decided to substitute the opinion of five unelected justices for tens of millions of Americans and thousands of years of human history.

Now that same-sex marriage is becoming more unpopular, Spanberger’s party wants to make sure that if the Supreme Court rolls back the 2015 Obergefell ruling, Virginia would stay on the side of LGBT extremism. Only four states have taken this controversial step — Nevada (2020), Colorado (2024), California (2024), and Hawaii (2024). And there’s serious concern that if Question 2 passes, voters would get a lot more than they bargained for.

“The repeal-and-replace marriage amendment would enshrine gender ideology into our state constitution, threatening girls’ safety and sports, as well as basic religious liberties,” Cobb’s Family Foundation admonishes. In other words, this isn’t just about marriage. It’s a stalking horse for the worst elements of transgenderism. “By separating the terms sex and gender in this constitution, they are implying that one can be a different gender than their sex, and what that does is open the door for the entire commonwealth, all its institutions, and businesses, and all the things that have been under dispute, girls’ sports, etc, it opens the door for that battle to begin all over again,” Cobb wants Virginians to know.

Anderson echoed her concern on “Washington Watch.” “Make no doubt about it — the gay marriage amendment is NOT about legalizing gay marriage. That has already been settled by SCOTUS. Any two gay men can legally get married in Virginia right this minute — no fuss — no obstruction. This is about transgender rights becoming protected classes in family law, school law and custody cases,” he points out. “This is about boys in girls’ locker rooms. This is about CPS being able to remove children from your homes if you don’t affirm their gender identity. This is about divesting parents of their rights … all cloaked under the ‘gay marriage’ banner.”

Early voting kicks off September 18, and there’s legitimate concern that if Virginians don’t engage, the swing state will become virtually unrecognizable. FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter urged the church to mobilize. “Virginia’s Christians have ample reason to show up to the polls in November and vote in droves against Amendments 1 and 2,” he told TWS, “repealing the state’s marriage amendment and enshrining limitless abortion in the state constitution, respectively. These amendments are far to the left of where the Virginia electorate is.”

“There’s no doubt Virginia has been trending to the left in recent years,” he acknowledged, “but it is by no means a deep blue state like New York or California. Since the election of Governor Spanberger in November, the Left has been on an unrelenting campaign to astroturf Virginia into a deep blue state, but the data shows clearly Virginia is not California or New York.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

This article originally appeared here.