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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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VCDL has filed the motion to rule to show cause for violation of the court order. The evidence is damning, complete, and undeniable. The VSP implementation can't even depend on the new statute, because it hasn't gone into effect yet and can't constitutionally go into effect until July 1st. Though the state's politicians and stenographers are going to pretend it does anyway, since they didn't amendment out the "emergency status" text of the statute that they didn't get the votes to support.

It also doesn't matter.

VCDL's pleading is open-ended enough that it could be asking that Jeffery Katz and Jay Jones face criminal contempt, and the judge could theoretically pass such a recommendation to the local prosecutors or appoint a new one -- and it's not going to happen, full stop, period, it's like shouting about 18 USC 242 or promoting citizen grand juries where even talking about it just marks you as a crank. There's just a

Optimistically, the best-case scenario for VCDL is a declaration that the injunction wasn't dissolved yet, and that Virginia owes them reasonable fees. Aka, the state gets to enforce a law illegally for a few days or weeks, the taxpayer pays a trivial fee, and VCDL only loses time but not money. Maybe the Virginia State Police even comply, rather than just thumbing their noses and pretending a minor tweak or disclaimer and doing the same thing anyway is enough? Not like it'll cost them anything if they don't. And it's just a plausible that the court (or appeals, because sanctions and contempt findings are appealable orders) finds that the injunction was going to be dissolved eventually, and that the value of the intervening weeks is zero.