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During a Labor Day cookout at the Crittenden, Eclipse and Hobson Ruritan Club, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin discussed transgender policies, nuclear power along with making a pitch for local Republican Party candidates.

During the stop Monday, Sept. 4, Youngkin showed his support for GOP candidates Del. Emily Brewer who is seeking election to the Virginia Senate and Michael Dillender who is running for a seat in the House of Delegates in the November state elections.

After the event is when Youngkin took time to address the two hot topics — the new Virginia Department of Education transgender policies and Surry’s Small Modular Nuclear Reactor project. 

On the VDOE transgender policies, when asked what would happen if school systems follow Virginia Beach’s lead in refusing to adopt the new state rules, Youngkin stressed the importance of the policies ensurement of protecting children.

“Our policies have been written in order to ensure the dignity, the privacy, also the safety of all children and to empower parents,” he said. “This is a moment for us to just step back, let politics get out of this issue and recognize that at the heart of the issue is parents having a fundamental right to make decisions for their children and children deserving a parent in their life.”

Youngkin said children belong to families, not the state, which is why he believes this is why this is so important.

“I think second of all, we just got to be clear that boys should not be playing sports with girls, and this is just clear. The attorney general made it very, very, very plain and simple this is not something that school districts have the ability to not adopt,” the governor said. “They have a choice. They can either adopt our model policies or policies that are consistent with them. Those are their only choices and unfortunately, folks I think have gotten off on the wrong foot. They got to come back and vote again. They either can adopt policies consistent with ours, or our policies. That’s the only choice they have. This is the law, they should follow the law.”

On Surry Country’s SMR project, Youngkin discussed the importance of having multiple options in energy.

“We have a real challenge in Virginia today, we’re growing. And in fact, previous policies that were passed decommissioned important base load power and in fact, placed all of our future in wind and solar,” he said. “Now, I’m not against wind and solar, but we need all-of-the-above,” Youngkin said. “We want to keep our natural gas base load power.”

Youngkin said the plan is to build more and innovate around nuclear power.

“We’re going to innovate around hydrogen. We’re going to innovate around carbon capture, and we’ll innovate again around long-term storage,” he said. “We got to do it all because the commonwealth is growing, and when we grow, we need more power.”