Photo by spiggycat.

It’s Capital Pride time in the nation’s capital, but Pride is hardly limited to the District. Take Richmond, where the Federal Reserve Bank is flying a rainbow flag to show its support during Pride Month. Of course, not everyone is thrilled about the flag — that’s your cue, Virginia Delegate Robert G. Marshall!

Marshall, who represents Prince William County in the state legislature, wrote a letter to the president of the Reserve, stating that “a celebration of ‘gay pride’ has anything to do with the mission of the Federal Reserve under the Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress,” because homosexuality “adds significantly to illness, increases health costs, promotes venereal diseases, and worsens the population imbalance relating to the number of workers supporting the beneficiaries of America’s Social Security and Medicare programs.”

“How can the American people trust the judgement of the Federal Reserve as an institution when its spokesperson celebrates an attack on public morals?”” asks the letter.

Of course, this kind of spew is nothing new for Marshall, who once attempted to bar gays from serving in the Virginia National Guard because “if [he] needed a blood transfusion and the guy next to [him] had committed sodomy 14 times in the last month, [he]’d be worried.”

Well, let this serve as a lesson to you, kids: hate only blinds you to important facts, like how decisions made by the Federal Reserve “do not have to be ratified by…the executive or legislative branch of government,” that Federal Reserve banks are generally considered private businesses, or that by flying the flag, the bank is just following the directives of the President, who proclaimed last week that all Americans should strive “to eliminate prejudice everywhere it exists, and to celebrate the great diversity of the American people.”