Politics on the fault line in divided Virginia
ARLINGTON, VA . — The latest bright knight of the flag-waving Right in the Commonwealth of Virginia is a Harvard Law graduate, Christian minister, ex-U.S. marine, ex-juvenile delinquent, schoolteacher’s husband, slave’s great-grandson, Republican Party candidate for lieutenant-governor, and gay-trashing patriot named Bishop Earl Walker Jackson, Sr., known to one and all as E.W.
Like all politicians — and, maybe, like all clergymen — candidate Jackson is the reflection-in-flesh of the prayers and terrors of his communicants. These would include the weekly attendees of the bishop’s Exodus Faith Ministries, and — on the evening that I see him debate the pediatric neurologist, ex-army doctor, schoolteacher’s husband, and Virginia State senator who is running against him for the Democrats — it enfolds the couple of dozen middle-aged white people (and one black woman) who are waving signs and barking at passing cars and chanting “Vote For Jackson!”
“Why are YOU voting for Jackson?” I ask one of the demonstrators, who turns out to be a pastor’s wife named Janel Keaton from Smith Mountain Lake, Va.
“He stands for the Christian values that I stand for,” Mrs. Keaton replies. “He’s a constitutionalist. He stands for liberty and the values our country was founded on. I’m just a person who is tired of the direction our country is headed.”
(“I really believe that our country is heading desperately in the wrong direction,” Bishop Jackson will say in his opening monologue, as if Janel Keaton had penned his sermon.)
Extrapolate Keaton’s passion across the whitest ridings of the American Deep South, and much is explained: the Tea Party apoplexy that led to this week’s shutdown of the American government; the intractable stalemate within the Congress on immigration, health care and the national debt, and the incipient dawning of a permanent three-party system in the United States divided into liberals, moderates, and Ted Cruz missiles whose answer to every challenge of governance is simply to cry, as E.W. Jackson roars in a campaign flyer, “Let Liberty Light the Way!”
In this, the boundary between self-sure socialism, a moderate, flexible polity, and self-defeating, star-spangled stubbornness runs straight through Virginia, just as it did in 1860, when a threeway race for president solidified the South and split the Commonwealth, leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln with a minority of votes, to secession, and to civil war.
Even in this year’s contest for the usually punchless, part-time, and low-paid position of lieutenant-governor the rhetoric quickly tunnels into the mud.
“I’ve never been sued, never declared bankruptcy, never had liens against me, never been investigated for nonpayment of taxes,” Dr. Ralph Northam, Bishop Jackson’s opponent, smugly deposes, smearing the reverend’s rather untidy entrepreneurial history.
“Let’s not talk about the CARICATURE of someone,” Jackson seethes.
Sen. Northam then makes sure that we are aware that this is the very same Earl Walker Jackson, Sr. who has called homosexuals “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally,” and who once labelled “the Democrat Party and their black civil rights allies … partners in genocide.”
These comments were made in a church setting, the bishop counters, citing the clause in the Virginia constitution that guarantees that “all men shall be free to profess … their opinions in matters of religion, and the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
“I’m not running for preacher of Virginia, I’m not running for theologian, I’m not running for pastor, I’m not running for bishop,” E.W. Jackson says. “I know the difference between what I do there and what I do here.”
“Whether they’re said in church or on the floor of the Senate, they’re offensive,” says Northam.
This goes on for an hour and a half, just as it is going on this season in Kentucky, where the far-right faction is buying television ads that depict the moderate Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as a cartoon chicken and label him a “finger-lickin’ fraud;” in Alabama, where a Congressional candidate named Dean Young has advised voters that “If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, then go to the Democrat Party;” and in Louisiana, where a black State Senator named Elbert Guillory has been pleading for his fellow Republicans to tell “a story about our glorious civil rights leadership.”
Back on the sidewalks of Arlington, Va., even E.W. Jackson’s supporters seem to understand that their fervency is no defence against their failure, a message that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives seems to be too far away to hear.
“I honestly don’t know if he could even be accepted,” Janel Keaton sighs.