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RICHMOND — Daniel “Danica” Roem, the first “transgender” state representative in U.S. history, won election to a new office last November and shared in a recent interview his intention to be sworn into the Virginia Senate with his hand on a heavy metal album rather than the Bible, as is tradition.
Roem, a male Democrat who identifies as a woman, defeated incumbent Republican Bob Marshall for his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017, an upset celebrated by LGBT activists. Last fall, Roem won his race to move on to the state Senate.
In an interview published on Tuesday by LGBTQ Nation, Roem, formerly a singer in a “death metal” band, shared, “I will be getting sworn in on a 1988 vinyl copy” of his favorite Metallica album, And Justice For All.
Roem was sworn in the next day, albeit without sharing details about the ceremony itself.
Virginia law says that “persons being sworn for any purpose may be required to place their hand on the Holy Bible” (emphasis added). It is a longstanding tradition in America that new officeholders recite their oaths of office while placing one hand on a Bible and adding “so help me God” if they so choose. Neither detail is usually mandatory, however, and officeholders of non-Christian faiths or no faith are generally permitted to substitute a different book.
Taking an oath on a piece of entertainment media is notably unusual, however. Conservatives have long argued that the connection between the Christian Bible and oaths of office is a vital piece of symbolism that affirms the source of the United States’ moral values, binding public servants to standards higher than themselves, and that replacing the Bible with any item an officeholder might find personally meaningful continues the cultural trend of replacing objective standards with relativism.
While Roem has described metal and Metallica as icons of “anti-authoritarianism,” conservatives decry the Democrat Party and left-wing LGBT movement to which he belongs as today’s real purveyors of conformity and control, from online speech through COVID-19 mandates.
In May 2021, Metallica’s own frontman James Hetfield said that he was “a little skeptical of getting the vaccine” and “hope[d] it doesn’t come to a point where you have to have that COVID stamp in your passport or something to go everywhere.”
