Loudoun Democrats

The following was written by Lu Ann McNabb who is on the Sully Democratic Committee in Fairfax. I think it brings Sen. Cuccinelli and his tea bagger friends into historic perspective. Read and then share this with all of your VA friends.

Tim Buchholz
Chairman, Loudoun County Democratic Committee

Yesterday, my husband and I drove to Charlottesville to watch UVA succumb to Duke but that’s another story. On Route 29, we passed a flagpole with the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag flying with the Confederate flag. As many of you know, State Senator Ken Cuccinelli has adopted “Don’t Tread On Me” as his motto. But those two flags together symbolize Virginia’s shameful past- one of bigotry and intolerance. I can appreciate Mr. Cuccinelli’s defiance against the federal government by stating he will fight for state’s rights, but let us remember that it was the federal National Guard who protected the
black students walking in to schools and universities from angry, screaming crowds. It was the federal Supreme Court who declared segregated schools as unconstitutional and the federal Justice Department that denied tax exemptions to churches who only allowed white children to attend their classes. It was also the federal Supreme Court that overturned Virginia’s law disallowing mixed couples to marry. And it was the Congress that gave African-American citizens the right to sit anywhere and have full voting rights.

Let us not forget what the Confederate flag stood for - and I say this as a great-great-great granddaughter of a Confederate who fought in the Alabama regiment and whose cousin owns his musket and sword. And let us be wary of these two flags that predominate at gun shows, along with the Nazi flag, representing a belief that we should not enact commonsense gun laws because for some reason background checks interferes with one’s freedom to own a gun. At the same time, these flags reflect a belief that supports governmental interference in the most personal decisions one can make.

More importantly, the pairings of those two flags symbolizes to me what is at stake in this election-whether we remain a moderate state with elected officials who will solve problems or return to a state with a worldview that we abandoned a long time ago.

Lu Ann McNabb
Sully Democratic Committee, Fairfax

This is a pretty unequivocal endorsement:
“If the current campaign for governor has clarified anything, it is that state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee, has the good sense and political courage to maintain the forward-looking policies of the past while addressing the looming challenge of fixing the state’s dangerously inadequate roads. The Republican candidate, former attorney general Robert F. McDonnell, offers something different: a blizzard of bogus, unworkable, chimerical proposals, repackaged as new ideas, that crumble on contact with reality.”

There’s more:

While “Mr. Deeds has compiled a moderate record on divisive social issues that reflects Virginia’s status as a centrist swing state,” his opponent “has staked out the intolerant terrain on his party’s right wing, fighting a culture war that seized his imagination as a law student in the Reagan era;” a Virginia subject to a McDonnell agenda would “would be one where abortion rights would be curtailed; where homosexuals would be treated as second-class citizens; where information about birth control would be hidden; and where the line between church and state could get awfully porous. That is a prescription for yesterday’s Virginia, not tomorrow’s.”

I would add that Mr. McDonnell is so out of touch with genuinely centrist Virginia that he didn’t even realize that the ideas expressed in his thesis would be controversial. The carefully calibrated “moderate McDonnell makeover” couldn’t prevent that inconvenient truth.