Gotta love this.
Dear Senator Hurt:
It is unacceptable for a candidate seeking public office to not only refuse to facilitate informed decision-making by Virginia’s voters but to actually impede the democratic process. Such are the consequences of your continued refusal to participate in any candidate debates in which independent candidate Jeffrey Clark is a participant, which stands in sharp contrast to Mr. Perriello, who has repeatedly expressed his willingness to engage both you and Mr. Clark in debates.
Your repeated dismissal of Mr. Clark’s campaign as lacking viability is presumptuous and short-sighted. Virginia’s voters do not need your campaign to determine the viability of other candidates. Rather, what they need is an opportunity to decide for themselves…
By consistently undermining a critical component of the political process – the opportunity for voters to educate themselves on the various candidates seeking election – you are doing a great disservice to the Commonwealth…
[…]
Whatever the cost to your own individual candidacy, we urge you to bear the cost in furtherance of transcendent First Amendment values and in faith that where all ideas are allowed to compete, the best ones will be adopted on the strength of their own merits.
The Rutherford Institute adds that Hurt is demonstrating either “a dismal understanding of the First Amendment’s values of ‘uninhibited, robust’ debate and the free marketplace of ideas, or a lack of commitment to upholding the document that Abraham Lincoln referred to as the ‘only safeguard of our liberties.”
By the way, this is from the same group that wrote letters to Tom Perriello, protesting his office location as a (supposed) violation of their 1st Amendment rights, since they had to protest on the sidewalk not in the parking lot (after months of blocking all the parking spaces). Now, they’re after Robert Hurt for his “dismal understanding” of the 1st Amendment and his contempt for Democracy in general. Fun times in the 5th CD.
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