Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 11, 1993 TAG: 9308250327
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The occasion: the 1993 gubernatorial nominating convention of the Republican Party.
The lunacy: the nomination of a three-man ticket - for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general - so repressively right wing that, win or lose at the polls in November, it will only set the cause of reason and enlightenment back another five centuries, or more.
The mischief was done, top to bottom, by a political newcomer named Michael Farris and his fervent followers, who in their zeal to purify Virginia of sin i.e., ``liberalism'' and ``big government,'' nominated not only Farris, who seeks to become lieutenant governor, but a lightweight hunk, George F. Allen, for governor, and an unknown suburban prosecutor, James S. Gilmore, for attorney general.
In doing so, Farris and his flock, who had packed the convention, steamrolled over the moderate gubernatorial candidacies of Woodstock Del. Clint Miller and Northern Virginia businessman Earle Williams, as well as the equally moderate candidacy for attorney general of Salem Del. Steve Agee.
All of this was done, clearly, according to democratic custom and convention rules, and neither disgruntled Republicans nor newspaper columnists need complain that in taking over the Virginia GOP the ``Christian conservatives,'' as Farris & Co. style themselves, conducted an illicit coup.
It remains true, however, that by pulling the state GOP sharply rightward, the Allen-Farris-Gilmore ticket dredges up tired complaints about government and frightening threats about what it seeks to do about certain vexing social issues that do nothing but divide Virginia rather than enlighten and educate it to the realities of 20th-century life.
Like their counterparts at the Republican National Convention last year - Pat Buchanan and his ilk - the Farris Republicans, with whom Allen appears to have made a nervous alliance, seek to ban abortion, return public prayer to such sectarian institutions as public schools, encourage gun ownership and halt all restrictions on gun purchases, and limit public funding for education, encouraging ``home schooling'' instead. ``Public education is not essential to the preservation of democracy,'' he says.
He seeks to get the federal government out of Virginia - which presumably would save us also from federal funding for highways, prisons, schools, libraries, the National Guard, etc.
This is the bilge only the most extreme ``conservatives'' expel, but it is the line of the political organizations guided by Pat Robertson, whom Farris follows, and their fellows in the so-called ``Christian right.''
I cannot imagine what is ``Christian'' about opposing equal rights for women and gays nor about teaching children at home, and I fail to see why it is especially ``Christian'' to pretend that the great evil in America today is government. We ought to be trying, instead, to make government more intelligent and more efficient than it either is now or has been for decades.
An additional pity in all of this is that it not only highlights the wrong problems but that it gives Republicans of moderate spirit and a preference for solving problems over punishing sinners nowhere to turn. One weeps for Clint Miller and Steve Agee, ``mountain-valley'' Republicans with brains and long public service, who were simply, with other maintream Republicans, labeled ``liberals,'' booed and shoved aside in Richmond Saturday. One wonders what would happen to GOP sturdies like Linwood Holton and Caldwell Butler if they were politically active today.
Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, is the convicted perjurer Oliver North. Last weekend the Virginia GOP paved the way for his equally lunatic senatorial candidacy in 1994.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.~
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB