* * I’m running for State Delegate. Here’s why.

Mark Obenshain got me off the proverbial dime.

One of the most difficult experiences I have ever faced was when my wife Jane had a miscarriage. Jane and I married later than most, and she was already nearing 40 when we decided to start a family. Her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Then so did the second and the third. These miscarriages were awful, horribly sad. We tried every fertility measure known to medicine. Finally, this story had a happy ending. Our only child, Whitney, was born in 1991. She graduated from my alma mater, Virginia Tech, last month and has a good, professional job.

A few weeks ago, the Republican party nominated Mark Obenshain for Attorney General, the most powerful lawyer in the state, the people’s lawyer. In 2008 he proposed a law that would have made it a misdemeanor punishable by up to $2500 fine and a year on prison for a woman to have a miscarriage without informing the police within 24 hours. I’m serious.

Our miscarriages were terribly unhappy. When you want a child but instead get a toliet bowl with a bloody mass instead, it is horrble. Why would our state wish to force this completely medically unnecessary intrusion on a young woman during one of her darkest hours? Why would we criminalize a non-criminal, passive act? Why is it in the interests of the people and general welfare for our police departments to know if a woman has had a heavy period? What exactly are our law enforcement officials to do with this knowledge?

Okay, so maybe Obenshain is a bit of a kook. Oh, but he is assuredly not the only one!

Not to be outdone, the next guy up the ticket is Bishop E. W. Jackson. According to Jackson, the Democratic Party has supported Planned Parenthood which has killed, “tens of thousands of black babies” and is “far more lethal than the KKK ever was”. (Note, Jackson is black.) And he said homosexuals are very sick people psychologically and mentally and emotionally.” In an October 2012 op-ed in the Washington Times, Jackson wrote that Democrats have “an agenda worthy of the Antichrist.”

At the top of the ticket is Ken Cucchinelli. Until these other two came along, he was considered as radical as anyone on the scene. As our current attorney general he has defended sodomy laws to prevent gay people from having sex, worked hard to shut down our state’s abortion clinics, and hounded a UVA professor and expert on climate change. In 2010 Cuccinelli filed a lawsuit in the US District Court challenging the constitutionality of the Obamacare.

These are the people the Republican Party of Virginia wants to govern us, the most incendiary, uncompromising and backward-leaning ticket in my lifetime. We are up against the most radical bunch the Tea Party activists could drag up. This is the sad state of a party that once gave us honorable people like John Warner, Mills Godwin and Lynwood Holton.

My state delegate is a man who kowtows to the party line. He goes to Richmond, votes as his party votes, comes home and attends some civic club meetings and chamber of commerce ribbon cuttings, and calls it a good job. Where is he in standing up for the hard-earned rights of women, minorities, and gays? Does he support this radical agenda? We don’t know; let’s ask him.

What we’re in Virginia is nothing less than an epic struggle for the soul of the Commonwealth.

The Republicans want to strip away decades of hard-earned rights, to punish those who have sexual attractions they don’t share or understand, to punish women who choose to make reproductive decisions on their own, to punish those who suggest our roads and bridges need better maintenance, and to punish those who speak the truth about climate change, gun violence, and air and water pollution.

The Democratic Party is the party of optimism. We want ours to be the best state in the nation to raise a family. We want a fair and reasonable state to operate and expand a business and get a good education that doesn’t cost a fortune. 

For the last couple of years, I’ve been content to sit on the sidelines and complain about the inactivity of my delegate and beg for somebody else to challenge him, as nobody should run unopposed. Obenshain’s selection to the top of the ticket made me change my mind.

I’m running for House of Delegates because I think I can do a better job of making our state more progressive, fair, and efficient. I am a businessman, a husband and father, and a writer, seeking to represent my homeland. I want to be there to support those leaders who take us forward.