Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) administration recently pulled resources for LGBTQ youth from the state’s Department of Health website, on the same day officials received an inquiry from a conservative outlet, according to The Washington Post.
The online resources for LGBTQ youth were reportedly removed on May 31, after receiving questions from The Daily Wire, an outlet co-founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
The Virginia Department of Health website previously featured links to Q Chat Space, a national LGBTQ center where teens can join online support groups moderated by professionals, as well as the LGBTQ and social justice website Queer Kid Stuff, among other resources.
The state’s health commissioner, Karen Shelton, told colleagues in one of several messages obtained by the Post that she was directed to pull the webpage by Health and Human Resources.
Employees with the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Family Health (OFHS) — which was at the center of this and other recent cases in which public health resources were removed — expressed concerns about the removal of the LGBTQ resources without their prior consultation.
“I’m having a bad case of déjà vu,” Vanessa Walker Harris, the director of the Office of Family Health, said in one email, according to the Post.
Harris went on to voice concerns that the division’s staff were being directed to remove the resources in response to “a politically motivated inquiry, yet again.”
“[Here] we go again with removing things from the webpage without consulting [OFHS],” another staff member of the Office of Family Health, Emily Yeatts, said.
Shelton later apologized for the way that the change was handled, saying that “there wasn’t much time to communicate about it,” the Post reported.
In the wake of the decision to remove the LGBTQ resources, Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter said in a statement to the Post that the government “should not facilitate anonymous conversations between adults and children without a parent’s approval.”
“In Virginia, the governor will always reaffirm a parent’s role in their child’s life,” she added. “Children belong to their parents, not the state.”
