Virginia Republican state delegate Bob Marshall is preparing a bid for the House seat currently held by retiring Rep. Frank Wolf, according to a Virginia-based conservative blog. This would set up a challenge to fellow right-wing state delegate and former Clinton-hunter Barbara Comstock.
Just in case you aren’t familiar with Marshall, here is a quick refresher on some of his most extreme positions:
1. Disabled Children Are God’s Punishment For Abortion
At a 2010 press conference attacking Planned Parenthood, Marshall said that “the number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically” because “when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.” He called disabled children a “special punishment” from God on women who have had abortions.
It is no wonder that Marshall sponsored a personhood bill that would ban abortion in call cases along with some forms of birth control, one of several bills he proposed that would curtail abortion rights and contraception coverage.
2. Ban Gay Service Members From The National Guard
Marshall reacted to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell by proposing legislation to prohibit “active homosexuals” from serving in the Virginia National Guard, warning that the end of the anti-gay ban would “jeopardize our alliances,” ruin the military and possibly lead to a military draft. Marshall said that if he were in the military he wouldn’t trust gay service members because they might give him a sexually transmitted infection or harass him: “It’s a distraction when I’m on the battlefield and I have to concentrate on the guy 600 yards away, am I worrying about this guy whose got eyes on me?”
3. Anti-Gay Crusade
Marshall has staunchly defended of Virginia’s unconstitutional sodomy law, successfully pushed to block the appointment of an openly gay judge and attempted to stop the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank from flying a rainbow flag, warning that LGBT equality “undermines the American economy.”
He also complained that anti-gay activists are being treated in the same way as Dred Scott.
4. Health Care Reform Is Like Rape
In an attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act, Marshall demanded that Virginia exempt itself from the individual health insurance mandate, warning that health care reform represented “criminal activity” akin to the work of “mobsters.”
“This is a fight over whether you are a citizen or you are a serf,” he said. “It’s not your wallet that they want, it’s your soul, it’s your family.” But Marshall didn’t stop there: “Indeed, the individual mandate is not voluntary commercial intercourse; it is forcible economic rape.”
Marshall has also said that health care reform would “euthanize seniors” and “kill capitalism.”
5. Creating A New Currency
Marshall, fearing an economic collapse, called on Virginia to consider creating its own currency due to the likelihood of “a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System. He said that economic doom may be one result of the 2009 stimulus package, which he said is “as much a chain as ankle bracelets were as to African-Americans in the 1860s in this state...it is a chain of death that we’re not going to escape.”
