The Wedding That Started a Republican Civil War

Virginia's gerrymandered 5th Congressional District.

Virginia is rapidly becoming a blue state despite the efforts of the majority of Republicans, particularly those from rural, economically moribund areas of the state.  A minority of Republicans recognize that the either the Virginia GOP changes or the state will have a Democrat majority for the foreseeable future (Republicans last won statewide office in 2009). In a nod to change, 5th Congressional District congressman Denver Riggleman officiated at the wedding of a same sex, mixed race couple, Alex Pisciarino and Anthony “Rek” LeCounte.  Little did Riggleman realize that this simple action would ignite a civil war within the Virginia GOP with the forces of reaction seeking Riggleman's expulsion from the party and primary defeat to replace Riggleman with a knuckle-dragging candidate with past ties to the religiously extreme Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.  As a piece in Politico reports, the forces of reaction won and Riggleman ousted - likely to the delight of Democrats.  Here are highlights:

Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who became a target of conservatives after officiating a same-sex wedding last year, was ousted Saturday by GOP voters in a drive-thru district convention. 

Good’s victory came after a day-long convention held in the parking lot of a central Virginia church. He ran as a staunch social conservative, campaigning on a traditional view of marriage, his support to make English the official language of the U.S. and to end birthright citizenship.

A piece in The Atlantic looks at the effort behind Riggleman's ouster and the push to drag the Virginia GOP even further rightward and homophobic and racist.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia Republicans have spent the past decade getting routed in elections. They lost three U.S. congressional seats and control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2018 [and 2019] alone. Yet today, with another tough election less than five months away, Republicans in Virginia’s Fifth District will gather in a church parking lot to decide whether to boot their incumbent congressman, Denver Riggleman, largely because he officiated a same-sex wedding last summer. The unconventional convention will earn the grooms, Alex Pisciarino and Anthony “Rek” LeCounte, a distinction in their first year of marriage that most people never achieve in a lifetime: They started a Republican civil war.

Virginia’s Fifth is a district where Bible Belt activists, suburban moderates, and college-town free-market types mix together in one massively gerrymandered area larger than New Jersey, stretching from the state’s southern border almost all the way to D.C. Riggleman, who owns a distillery outside Charlottesville, was one of the few rookie Virginia Republicans to win a competitive district amid the Democrats’ 2018 wave. But Riggleman’s success, and even an endorsement from President Donald Trump, may not save his job: The idiosyncrasies of Virginia election law mean there is a real risk he will be ousted by his own party. As Virginia turns blue, the question is whether the GOP can stay close enough to the center to hold competitive seats—or whether it will become more extreme as it shrinks.

“We don’t want a party so small that it just fits in the bedroom,” says Riggleman, an Air Force veteran with libertarian leanings on marijuana legalization, social issues, and small-business regulations. His opponent, Bob Good, who declined to speak with me, is a former athletics director at the evangelical Liberty University who has described himself in interviews as a “strong, bright-red,” “biblical,” and “constitutional conservative.” After Good was elected to the Campbell County Board of Supervisors in 2015, one of his first acts was signing onto a resolution declaring the U.S. Supreme Court “lawless” for legalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, comparing the decision to the Dred Scott case.

“We’ve played the ‘Who’s the bigger Christian?’ game in the Republican Party for a long time,” says Matt Hall, a conservative commentator who writes for Bearing Drift, a website focused on Virginia politics. “Bob comes from that minority—that small group of people that says you have to be this way or that way to be a Republican.” Riggleman’s liability, at least in this district, is that he is unwilling to conform to a culture-wars strategy. “Bob Good doesn’t get to define what’s Christian and what’s not Christian,” he told me. “You can say you’re a Christian conservative all day long. What I’m going to say is that I’m going to protect your right to be a Christian conservative. But I’m also going to protect your right to follow any religion that you want to.”

When Pisciarino and LeCounte moved to Charlottesville for graduate school in the summer of 2018, they wanted to get involved in local politics. Pisciarino, who is white, and LeCounte, who is black, were impressed by Riggleman’s record on LGBTQ issues. After Riggleman won, they figured it would be fun to ask him to officiate their wedding, a way of “celebrating the fact that we had a congressman we liked and wanted to elect,” LeCounte told me. . . . . Although they expected that local papers might write a story or two about the congressman’s involvement in their ceremony, LeCounte said, “We were not remotely expecting it to become the kind of story where we’re giving interviews about it almost a year later.”

The backlash was immediate. Melvin Adams, the district committee chair, wrote a post on the district’s website about “inclusiveness,” emphasizing that the Republican Party is committed to recognizing marriage “as the union of one man and one woman.” One Republican group after another in the Fifth District voted to censure or condemn Riggleman: in Cumberland County, then in Rappahannock. “The sanctity of marriage does not need to be redefined because it has been defined for thousands of years as one man and one woman. That’s a standard that I don’t think you can change, because that’s the standard that I believe the God of Creation established in the very first chapters of the Book of Genesis,” Travis Witt, a Bob Good supporter and pastor who serves on the Fifth District committee and the Republican Party of Virginia’s state central committee, told me.

Riggleman may have had an easier time securing his seat in a primary election; he has pitched his campaign as one of broad, conservative-coalition appeal. But the GOP’s Fifth District congressional candidate is about to be chosen by the party’s most ardent activists. Virginia election law allows districts to hold nominating conventions rather than primaries. Out of the roughly 3,500 people preregistered as delegates, some will have to drive several hours to cast their ballot on Saturday morning in the parking lot of Tree of Life Ministries in Lynchburg—Good’s home turf—remaining in their cars to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The whole process is set up to encourage participation from the people with the strongest views.

All of this may end up putting a relatively safe Republican seat in jeopardy. . . . . Choosing the more socially conservative candidate may end being an expensive form of purity: “It will cost the party a lot of money to defend a seat, and possibly lose a seat, that otherwise they’d walk into,” Davis said.

When Bob Good came to Charlottesville, Pisciarino and LeCounte attended one of his campaign events. They wanted to hear for themselves how their wedding had become part of his stump speech. Good moved through that section quickly, presumably because they were there, LeCounte said, but the experience was surreal: “It’s extremely bizarre to watch people argue about what they consider an abstract issue, which is our lives.” Pisciarino and LeCounte haven’t particularly enjoyed receiving calls from reporters to talk about the wedding that might unseat their friend and congressman. But they wanted “to take control of a narrative that was going to include us, one way or another,” LeCounte said. When the couple load up their blue sedan, with its Riggleman and UVA bumper stickers, and drive to Lynchburg today, they won’t just be voting for Riggleman. They’re voting for a different kind of Republican Party.

Sadly, there will not be a different kind of Republican Party in Virginia.  Only more and more electoral defeats will finally force change or see the much deserved death of today Virginia GOP..