Usually when you think of religious anti-gay bigots, the image of an
older person, say someone in their 60′s, 70′s or 80′s, comes to mind.
Think, the late
Jerry Falwell or octogenarian
Pat Robertson, or even
Maggie Gallagher,
who’s 52. And given that America’s Catholics today support same-sex
marriage at a higher rate than the rest of America — the majority of
America, about 55 percent, already support marriage equality — you
wouldn’t necessarily expect a 44-year old east coast Catholic to be as a
big an anti-gay bigot as
Ken Cuccinelli is. And you’d be wrong.
Ken Cuccinelli, who is running for governor of Virginia against Democrat Terry McAuliffe,
on Saturday morning told voters that he is standing his ground when it
comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. And that ground in the
recent past has included comments that gay people have no souls, are
self-destructive, and that “homosexual acts” are “intrinsically wrong.”
The radical right-wing Republican attorney general of Virginia was
asked Saturday morning by PBS’ Judy Woodruff at the Virginia Bar
Association gubernatorial debate if he still believes “same-sex acts are
against nature and are harmful to society,” as he said a few years ago.
Cuccinelli’s response was straightforward:
“My personal beliefs about the personal challenge of homosexuality haven’t changed.”
But the married 44-year old Roman Catholic and father of seven didn’t
expand on what “the personal challenge of homosexuality” actually is,
leaving many, at least on Twitter, to wonder — and leaving Cuccinelli
the laughing stock of the week.
Cuccinelli is so anti-gay that among his first acts upon taking
office in 2010 was — literally unprovoked and out of nowhere — writing
the University of Virginia Board of Governors to tell them that they did
not have the constitutional authority to protect LGBT people from
discrimination.
In the past, as a state senator running for AG in 2009, Cuccinelli
said:
“My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but
homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a
natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that
reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think
that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be
polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate
is not healthy to society.”
And in 2008 Cuccinelli,
told
the Virginia Family Foundation that when “you look at the homosexual
agenda, I cannot support something that I believe brings nothing but
self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.”
Watch (apologies — audio very low):
