Virginia Republican lawmaker and marital rape denialist Richard “Dick” Black isn’t the only right-wing extremist who will be serving as a Ted Cruz campaign co-chair in Virginia.
Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the Texas State Board of Education who now works at the Lynchburg-based Liberty University, was also named a state co-chair in a statement from the Cruz campaign in November.
Before joining Liberty University, the evangelical school founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell, Dunbar stoked national controversy when she tried to insert historical revisionist views into the Texas public school curriculum and textbooks. Since many textbooks are designed for the large Texas market, the changes, which would have placed a right-wing spin on American history and the U.S. Constitution, would have had an impact in other states as well.
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.”
The Texas Freedom Network found that Dunbar also is no fan of public schools or President Obama:
Dunbar has clearly expressed her loathing for public education in her book One Nation Under God, calling public schools a “tool of perversion,” “unconstitutional” and “tyrannical.” She has also personally rejected the public school system, home-schooling her children. In fact, she wrote in her book that sending our children to public schools is “throwing them into the enemy’s flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”
Just before the November election, Dunbar also authored a vicious Internet rant in which she called Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer who wants to seize total power by declaring martial law. In another Internet screed, she charged that Obama is promoting Marxism by calling for “shared sacrifice and social responsibility.” (Not surprisingly, both essays have been removed from the Web sites that published them.)
Dunbar, unsurprisingly, is also a birther and an evolution denialist who promotes Young Earth Creationism.
She now helps lead the Virginia First Foundation, which has called for statewide civil disobedience challenging the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.
This would be in line with her radical anti-gay views. For example, in a radio show discussing gay members of the Boy Scouts of America, Dunbar derided gay activism as “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.”
She similarly claimed that people who oppose the teaching of Creationism in public schools are repeating what occurred “in pre-Holocaust Germany” when there was only “one ideology that’s acceptable.”
Dunbar’s claims about America turning into Nazi Germany due to the teaching of evolution and advances of gay rights will help her fit right in as a member of Cruz’s Virginia Leadership Team, as Dick Black, her fellow state campaign co-chair, once said that abortion rights in America are no different than the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
Other endorsers touted by the Cruz campaign have made the comparison as well: Flip Benham declared that legal abortion “is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany” and Troy Newman has railed against Obamacare and abortion rights as a return to Nazi crimes.
