Ted Cruz's Lunatic Virginia Campaign Chairs

Ted Cruz at "kill the gays" event last month

If one thinks Robert Lewis Dear, the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter, is a nutcase, he'd be in good company with the co-chairs of Ted Cruz's campaign here in Virginia.  One of them, Richard "Dick" Black, a long force for GOP idiocy in the Virginia General Assembly, is a Neanderthal who believes that marital rape is impossible.  The other, Cynthia Dunbar, is a former member of the Texas State Board of Education who now works at Liberty University,a bastion of religious extremism.  Dunbar opposes the principle of separation of church and state and supports a Christian theocracy.  Right Wing Watch looks at these scary individuals leading Cruz's campaign in Virginia.  Here are highlights:

Virginia Republican lawmaker and marital rape denialist Richard “Dick” Black isn’t the only right-wing extremist who will be serving as a Ted Cruz campaign co-chair in Virginia.

Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the Texas State Board of Education who now works at the Lynchburg-based Liberty University, was also named a state co-chair in a statement from the Cruz campaign in November.

Before joining Liberty University, the evangelical school founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell, Dunbar stoked national controversy when she tried to insert historical revisionist views into the Texas public school curriculum and textbooks. 

Among other far-right views, Dunbar says she opposes the separation of church and state since she believes the founders wanted the government to promote religion. After leaving the school board, Dunbar admitted that she tried to shape the state’s curriculum in order to cure America of being a “biblically illiterate society” by teaching “the ‘laws of nature’s God’ revealed through the Holy Scripture.”

Dunbar once led the board in praying for “a Christian land governed by Christian principles” and asserting that the Bill of Rights came straight out of the Bible. She similarly told a Washington, D.C., prayer rally that schools cannot instruct in an environment “devoid of the presence of the most high God,” praying for God to “invade our schools.” In a speech in favor of a sweeping anti-abortion bill, Dunbar asserted that lawmakers “don’t have the freedom to make any laws if they are contrary to what God has said in his Holy Scripture.”

Dunbar believes that the U.S. was designed to have “an emphatically Christian government” and must have a “biblical litmus test” for public officials, saying that they must have “sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

The Texas Freedom Network found that Dunbar also is no fan of public schools or President Obama.  . . . Dunbar, unsurprisingly, is also a birther and an evolution denialist who promotes Young Earth Creationism.

She now helps lead the Virginia First Foundation, which has called for statewide civil disobedience challenging the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.

This would be in line with her radical anti-gay views. For example, in a radio show discussing gay members of the Boy Scouts of America, Dunbar derided gay activism as “the same type of thing that was done in pre-Holocaust Germany, as far as propaganda and presentation and swaying the whole mindset of a nation.”

She similarly claimed that people who oppose the teaching of Creationism in public schools are repeating what occurred “in pre-Holocaust Germany” when there was only “one ideology that’s acceptable.”

 These people and Cruz himself are very scary.