Today, shortly after long-serving Rep. Bob Goodlatte announced that he planned to retire, pro-Trump Virginia activist Cynthia Dunbar announced that she would run for his seat.
Dunbar first gained national attention when, as a member of the Texas State Board of Education, she worked to incorporate Christian nationalist historical revisionism into the state’s textbooks. The fact that she had called public schools unconstitutional and “tyrannical” didn’t deter her in that project.
Dunbar later moved to Virginia to work at Liberty University, and last year was a state co-chair of Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and member of the national Republican platform committee.
As we wrote when Dunbar joined Cruz’s campaign:
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.”
That came as no surprise, as 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.”
Dunbar also has a long record of anti-LGBTQ views, including once claiming that gay rights activism is “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.” In 2008, she questioned President Obama’s American birth and claimed that he “truly sympathizes” with America’s enemies.
In a speech to an event hosted by Religious Right activist David Barton last year, Dunbar warned that legal abortion, homosexuality and “socialized education” are working in concert to lead the country astray:
She also cited a bogus statistic from Barton that “94 percent of the quotes of the founding fathers contemporaneous to our nation’s founding were either directly or indirectly from holy scripture”:
Dunbar is still in the textbook business. Last year, the Texas State Board of Education unanimously rejected a textbook on “Mexican American Heritage” that her textbook company had produced that portrayed Mexicans as “lazy” and included passages about slavery and Reconstruction like this:
Forcing civil rights on Southern states during Reconstruction failed because it bypassed representational avenues and trumped the beliefs of millions of citizens, including veterans and previous legislators from the South. While freed slaves were being mass registered for the Republican Party by Republican governors, southern white citizens had been disenfranchised.
When controversy erupted over the book, Dunbar said she hadn’t hired Mexican American scholars to help write the book because they would have been biased.
Dunbar has already earned the endorsement of her brother-in-law, extreme anti-LGBTQ activist Matt Barber, who called her “one of America’s top constitutional scholars.”
