Here is what supporters of Virginia’s three constitutional amendments tell voters: The abortion measure merely “codifies Roe v. Wade.” The marriage measure simply “protects Virginia if the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges.” The voting measure just restores rights to felons who’ve served their time.
None of that survives contact with the actual text. And what the text actually says — what supporters hope you never read — is the real story of this election.
If Virginia passes these amendments in November, the winning strategy won’t stay in Virginia. It will be studied, replicated, and shipped to your state with the same soothing slogans. Virginia is the test market. Watch how it works.
Start with the abortion amendment. If codifying Roe were the goal, sponsors could have lifted a sentence from Planned Parenthood v. Casey: A woman has a fundamental right to an abortion on which the state may not place an undue burden. Courts have applied that for three decades.
They chose different words. The right belongs to “every individual” — no age limit, children included. Third-trimester abortion may be regulated, but never prohibited, provided a single physician decides it serves the patient’s “life or physical or mental health.” “Mental health” is undefined, too. The statute makes clear that no second doctor, no court, and no parent checks that single physician’s judgment. The state may assert no compelling interest except the health of the person seeking care. Child protection didn’t make the list. No one who assists with “voluntary consent” may face “adverse action.”
That is not Roe. It is a constitutional shield built to the specifications of abortion providers. And minors’ parents are written out entirely: Virginia’s parental-consent law, with judicial bypass, burdens a child’s “autonomous decision-making” under a text that names no interest sufficient to save it.
Supporters claim this is absurd, but I’ve seen how this works firsthand. In my years prosecuting sex crimes, I encountered cases where abusers took underage victims to clinics to terminate pregnancies precisely to destroy evidence. A former Planned Parenthood executive told me explicitly that staff were instructed to avoid questions that could reveal abuse and not report suspected cases. When Virginia does not treat pregnancy alone as mandatory reportage, and the Constitution bars adverse action against anyone assisting, the concealment becomes constitutional. Ask any centrist Virginian whether an 11-year-old’s abortion should require parental or judicial knowledge. That’s why the ballot summary doesn’t mention it.
The marriage amendment runs the same play. Same-sex marriage is already legal in Virginia, and repealing the dormant 2006 ban takes one sentence using “sex,” the word the court and Congress use. Instead, the amendment inserts “gender” — twice, undefined — into the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has never defined the term or recognized it as a protected class. Even its advocates describe gender as a fluid, self-declared “innermost concept of self.” Writing that into a constitution is not protecting marriage. It’s installing an undefined legal category with unknowable consequences for custody, adoption, inheritance, and employment law — precisely the chaos activists couldn’t achieve through legislation or the courts.
And the voting amendment could have done what Florida’s Amendment 4 did — restore the vote after prison, cleanly. Instead, it declares a “fundamental right to vote” that “shall not be abridged by law,” except during incarceration or incapacity. Those two exceptions are the entire list. Voter ID? Not on it. Absentee verification? Not on it. Registration deadlines, ballot security, residency rules? Not on it. Missouri courts used comparable language to strike a photo-ID law. Every routine safeguard becomes a constitutional lawsuit.
Here is the tell that reveals the whole operation: In all three cases, tested language existed. Sponsors knew about it. They quoted the cases themselves when selling the measures. Yet they chose the experimental language anyway. Simple words were available and rejected. The complicated words are the entire point.
So, when a campaign tells you it’s merely “codifying” a familiar right, and the constitutional text does something considerably more ambitious, believe the text. A governor can be voted out and a statute amended, but a constitution’s malformed language is inherited by every court, agency, and citizen for generations, waiting for litigants to claim what it plausibly permits.
I’M A DOCTOR. VIRGINIA’S ABORTION REFERENDUM GOES MUCH FURTHER THAN YOU REALIZE
Somewhere tonight, an advocacy shop is finalizing “reproductive freedom” language modeled on Virginia’s, ready to ship it to Iowa, Ohio, or Arizona with the tagline: codify Roe. If it works in Virginia, they’ll assume it will work on you.
Virginia voters can end the experiment before it ships. Read the amendments — the actual words, not the summary — then close the mouth of this gift horse.
Phill Kline served as the 41st attorney general of Kansas, as a Kansas district attorney, and state legislator. He presently is a law professor and lives in Amherst, Virginia, with his wife, Deborah.