Some people call what's happening simply a blurring of party lines.
Politicians at all levels of government and on both sides of the aisle are borrowing the opposition's issues and tailoring them to look like their own. When Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore calls for a separate state holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr., or GOP House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr. wants to spend millions to protect land from development, it may sound odd or even obnoxious, but it's probably just savvy politics and innocuous in the long run. In the General Assembly, the moment of silence bill that's passed the Senate and awaits action in the House is a good example. Conservative lawmakers have been trying to get prayer back into the public schools ever since that day in 1963 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws requiring prayer are unconstitutional. They'll try just about anything because, as they see it, they're answering to a higher power.