Voters in Virginia have decided on a Tea Party candidate to run alongside Ken Cuccinelli in November’s gubernatorial election—Bishop E.W. Jackson will be the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. A former U.S. Marine and Harvard Law graduate, Jackson and his wife also founded Exodus Faith Ministries, a Christian church in southern Virginia.
In 2008 and 2012, Virginia elected Barack Obama by 53 and 51 percent of the vote respectively. In 2012, E.W. Jackson ran for a Virginia U.S. Senate seat in which he received less than 5 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. On Saturday, however, voters in the state elected one of the most conservative and intolerant candidates on the ballot—Jackson does not hold back when it comes to strongly denouncing people and ideas he disagrees with.
Here are the five most outrageous statements made by E.W. Jackson.
Photo: markn3tel via Flickr.com
‘The Idea Obama Is a Christian Is Laughable’
During a sit-down interview on the Victoria Jackson Show, Bishop Jackson made some strong—and incorrect—statements about President Obama. “The idea that Barack Obama is a Christian is laughable,” he said. “Barack Obama is at best a confused man, is at worst has the sensibilities, and I don’t know how this combination works, of an Atheist and a Muslim.”
This is not the first time he has attacked President Obama’s faith. While running to be the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, Jackson said during a public engagement, “Now I know there’s a lot of argument—‘is he a Muslim?’ I can tell you this, he certainly does have a lot of affection and favor for Islam. That seems to be his priority. I’ve heard him talk about Islam in ways I’ve never heard him talk about America. Well, Christianity, I don’t even think about that with him. I really don’t. I mean, come on, that’s a joke.”
You can watch the interview and the speech here.
Connecting Planned Parenthood To The KKK
Jackson’s clear anti-choice stance led him to make extreme claims against the non-profit women’s health organization Planned Parenthood, which aside from providing perfectly legal abortions also provides adoption services, makes resources available for victims of rape and domestic violence, and even offers “spiritual counseling on reproductive matters.”
In a made-for-YouTube video, while standing in front of photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, and Frederick Douglass, Jackson unleashed a full attack on Democrats, saying, “The Democrat Party [sic] has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party [sic] and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.”
Calling For A Mass Exodus From The Democratic Party
E.W. Jackson also founded his own PAC, Staying True To America’s National Destiny (S.T.A.N.D.), which aims to uphold “the traditional family and our Judeo-Christian history and values as the Foundation of our Constitution and culture.”
During a S.T.A.N.D. press conference last year, Jackson called for a mass exodus from the Democratic Party. “The Democrat Party [sic] has demonstrated itself to be so antithetical, so inimical to the values we hold dear, that it is time for us to come out of that party en masse. We are here to call for a mass exodus of Christians and Jews, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Filipino to come out of the Democrat Party [sic]—it has turned its back on us, it is time we turn our back on them.”
What brought on this call for mass evacuation from the Democratic Party? Jackson’s outrage came from learning that the Democratic Party had decided to embrace same-sex marriage.
You can watch the press conference in full here.
AP Photo/Steve Helber
African-Americans Won’t Vote For President Obama
In a Dick Morris-like calculation, Jackson predicted in 2012 that black voters would not be mobilizing for Obama because of his support for same-sex marriage. “When the Democrat Party [sic] said we’re making same-sex marriage a part of our platform and the president came out in support of it, I think those were straws that broke the camel’s back and people say ‘you know, we’ve had it.’ Black folks have voted overwhelmingly against these things when they’ve come up on state constitutional questions and now I think many are saying, ‘you know what, I voted for this president the first time, I cannot vote for him again and I cannot support this party because it’s in rebellion against God.’”
According to 2012 exit polls, President Obama faced no difficulty with the black vote — 93 percent of the black voters in Virginia took to the polls for the president.
AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot/Amanda Lucier
Attacks On The Gay Community
E.W. Jackson saves his most derogatory and hateful comments for the gay community. Jackson connected homosexuality and pedophilia, and made strong claims that gays are “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally,” they are incapable of love and their very presence is an attempt to “poison our children, divide them from their parents and the teaching of the church and basically turn them into pawns for that movement so that they can sexualize them at the earliest possible age.”
Jackson not only condemned the Democratic Party for their acceptance of same-sex marriage, but criticized CPAC for the same thing. He also called for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” deeming it “a disaster of historic proportions and it must be reinstated.”
There is no shortage of similar offensive comments expressed by Jackson;, however, in looking ahead to the November election, he may be interested in knowing that 56 percent of voters in Virginia agree with Democrats and support marriage equality.
AP Photo
