The Washington Examiner is a conservative DC area paper, owned by right-wing billionaire Philip Anschutz, which this coming June will stop its daily print run and be replaced by a weekly magazine. That makes this story all the more delicious. The context of the story is that Democrats in Virginia have been pushing out a video taken by a tracker at a small small gathering of religious conservatives in Williamsburg, VA, in which the Virginia Attorney General and putative Republican nominee for Governor of Virginia equated abortion and slavery, as you can read in this AP story at Salon
The Examiner story’s 2nd paragraph reads
The outspoken conservative and candidate for governor made an almost identical statement in a 2008 “Cuccinelli Compass,” a regular letter he writes to supports to supporters, The Washington Examiner has learned. In it, Cuccinelli reviews a biography on British abolitionist William Wilberforce and draws a connection between Wilberforce’s fight against slavery to his own efforts in the Virginia Senate to curb abortions in the state.
The story also offers Cuccinelli’s defense of those remarks:
For his part, Cuccinelli defended the remark last weekend during a campaign stop in Yorktown.
“If you go back to my remarks, I talked about a series of things in history — I was talking to a Christian group — and the common theme there was it was Christians who fought these tragedies in our history,” Cuccinelli told The Daily Press. “It wasn’t that we were comparing slavery and abortion. We were noting that it was Christians who led the fight against slavery, and now years later it’s Christians who are on point fighting abortion.”
In one sense this should not be surprise. Extreme opponents of abortion have often used similar rhetoric – they have compared Roe v. Wade to Plessy v. Ferguson and abortion to the Holocaust. But in light of the backlash in last year’s election to remarks on abortion by the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock widely considered to have cost the Republicans two US Senate seats, some observers think that advocating positions such as these will hurt Cuccinelli in an election against pro-Choice Democrat Terry McAuliffe, whose campaign is making every effort to paint Cuccinelli as an extremist on multiple issues.
Again, it simply delicious that a rag owned by a right-wing extremist like Anschutz is helping in the process.
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