Gov. Abigail Spanberger campaigned for Virginia Question 2 on Saturday, Oct. 31, at Babes of Carytown, a lesbian bar in Richmond. She joined the Human Rights Campaign and Equality Virginia there to kick off a get-out-the-vote push for the marriage equality amendment, WTVR CBS 6 reported.
Virginians for Marriage Equality, the Yes on 2 campaign, called the day “Knock, Call & Slay.” Its kickoff featured Spanberger and Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson at Babes, the campaign posted on Instagram that night. “Then our volunteers hit the doors around Carytown before ending the day with Drag Out the Vote.”
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The Virginia marriage amendment would pull the 2006 ban out of the state constitution. It would also affirm that “two adults may marry regardless of sex, gender, or race,” the official ballot question says.
“While at the current moment, the right to marry is protected based on a Supreme Court decision… the fact that at this moment we still have a ban in our state constitution casts a bit of a shadow,” Spanberger said, according to WTVR.
She meant Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling. Without it, the old ban would be enforceable again, the state’s explanation for voters says.
“It means a lot to me as a person. It means a lot to me because I have many friends who are married under the shadow of that ban,” she said.
Passing it, Spanberger said, “would speak to the fact that when given the opportunity to right a past wrong of our Commonwealth, that the people of Virginia take it.”
“I hope that gives a bit of solace or contentment to those who have lived under the shadow of our current constitutional ban,” she said.
Spanberger Was a Newlywed When Virginia Banned Same-Sex Marriage
She married months before the 2006 vote. “Back in 2006, I was a newlywed when Virginia’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage passed,” Spanberger said in a campaign statement on Jan. 14, 2025, after the House of Delegates passed the repeal. The ban limited the rights of loved ones who’d celebrated her own wedding a few months earlier, she wrote.
Voters approved that ban, the Marshall-Newman Amendment, with 57% of the vote, Radio IQ reported.
Adam Ebbin, then a delegate and the state’s first openly gay lawmaker, fought it on the House floor in 2005. “We are about to actively write discrimination into our state constitution,” he said, as Radio IQ recounted in January.
This year’s version came from Mark Sickles, a delegate at the time. He came out in 2014. “It’s going to be a 20-year anniversary vote. Which is kind of coincidental, which is nice it only lasts 20 years,” he told Radio IQ.
Babes of Carytown and the Block Named for Vicky Hester
Babes is “one of the nation’s oldest lesbian bars,” WTVR has reported. It opened as a steakhouse in 1978 and turned into a mostly lesbian bar in the late 1980s, RVA Magazine reported last year.
Vicky Hester owned it for 47 years. She died in September 2025 at 71. This September, Richmond gave the block of South Auburn Avenue beside the bar the honorary name Vicky Hester Way, NBC12 reported.
“Imagine being my age and in this struggle for fifty-plus years and finally earning the right to marry the person you love,” Hester told RVA Magazine in April 2025.
When she died, Virginia Pride’s James Millner said, “Our hearts are with Vicky’s family, especially her wife Ashley, and the entire team at Babes,” WTVR reported.
Virginia Question 2 Opponents Zero In on ‘Gender’
Former Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican Spanberger beat for governor last year, has toured the state urging no votes on two of the three constitutional amendments on the 2026 ballot. “I’ve always said I support civil unions, that’s not an issue,” she said, Cardinal News reported in August.
“There are no protections for those who have deeply held religious beliefs,” Earle-Sears added. She cited a Republican Senate amendment, voted down by Democrats, to protect clergy who won’t perform marriages that go against their beliefs.
Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, objects to the ballot naming sex and gender separately. “By separating the terms sex and gender in this constitution, they are implying that one can be a different gender than their sex,” Cobb told WRIC 8News in June.
Occoquan Bible Church Pastor’s Lawsuit Won’t Be Heard Before Tuesday
Ben Purves, a pastor at Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, sued to void Question 2 in Prince William County Circuit Court on Oct. 22. His complaint says copies weren’t posted “at the front door of the courthouse” before the 2025 House elections, as state law requires, The Christian Post reported.
Cobb also leads the Founding Freedoms Law Center, which filed the suit. “If it’s now going to be changed, it needs to be done the right way, and that was not done,” she said, the Christian Post reported.
Purves said, according to FOX 5 DC, that marriage belongs to God. “It doesn’t belong to us to reshape it in whatever way we would like,” he said.
Del. Kirk McPike, D-Alexandria, said, according to the station, “We like to say Virginia is for lovers, but we’re also for families, and that includes all families.”
The suit won’t go before a judge before Tuesday’s vote, FOX 5 DC reported.
