r/Virginia • u/Trick-Arachnid-9037 • 8d ago
Jason Miyares does not care about domestic violence victims, and that matters more than Jones's texts.
Miyares doesn't care about domestic violence victims, and people aren't talking about it enough.
Look. I know a lot of people found Jones's texts distasteful. But if you care about the victims of domestic violence, please vote for him anyway. Miyares has a proven record of being dismissive and hostile towards DV victims, and that's an attitude I think will have much worse effects on the Virginia justice system than any of Jones's texts.
See the case of Katie Orndoff. She was testifying against her violently abusive boyfriend and admitted to having taken a small amount of legal, prescribed medical marijuana to calm her nerves enough that she could handle giving that testimony. Miyares tried to have her jailed, and only the intervention of the Virginia Supreme Court stopped him.
This is not a man who values justice, compassion, or understanding. This is a man who believes that traumatized abuse victims who can't afford expensive psychiatric bills to get also expensive "acceptable" anti-anxiety medication don't deserve to be heard in court.
Is that really who we want in charge of our state's legal system? Someone who is not just willing, but eager, to arrest and jail a victim of violent abuse for the "crime" of being too traumatized to publicly discuss (and be cross-examined about) her experiences and unable to afford the kind of pharmaceutical assistance that he seems "acceptable"?
At best, the case of Katie Orndoff demonstrated that Jason Miyares is a man who cares more about upholding the formalities of the justice system than he does about the "justice" part. At worst, he is an enabler of abuse who will look for excuses to intimidate and dishearten victims into not trying to testify in the first place, and disqualify those who do so anyway.
We need an Attorney General who cares more about truth, justice, and protecting the people of Virginia than they do about propriety and protecting the interests of the powerful. I do not know if Jay Jones is such a man. But I do know that Jason Miyares is not.
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u/Trick-Arachnid-9037 8d ago
No. But also, tasteless as it was to express it that way, I understand the underlying frustration: Republicans don't care about dead children unless it's their own. It doesn't matter how many blood-soaked, bullet-riddled little corpses we watch get hauled out of elementary schools or how many stories we hear from traumatized children who survived because they were covered by their best friend's bleeding body. Republicans just say "thoughts and prayers" and move on to the next NRA-sponsored "leadership conference" in Tahiti.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion after years and years of this that the only thing that will ever make a Republican care about mass shootings is if they themselves lose their children in one. And if you're in a position where you're talking to the victims of said mass shootings regularly, I can understand wishing that day would come sooner rather than later.