Candidate for Oregon Governor Dennis Richardson is best known to the LGBT community as the legislator who equated our Oregon Equality Act with a violent massacre. Now he’s made it clear that he has no respect for the privacy rights of women.
Oregon has a well-deserved reputation as a left-leaning bastion of open-mindedness with a strong “live and let live” ethic. In many ways, the Beaver State is the flip side of Texas, where all elected state-wide seats are held by Republicans. Here they’re safely held by Democrats. Lest you begin thinking that sanity and respect for individual rights are the rule here, allow me to remind you that Republicans exist in Oregon, some of them as authoritarian, narrow-minded, and hateful of [insert name of minority class here] as anywhere else.
F’rinstance, consider Dennis Richardson, the Republican candidate for Governor. Richardson, like so many Far Right Oregonians, resents the demographic layout of the state. Most of the population lives in the Willamette Valley, with the vast majority of those folks living here in Portland (Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties). Take that away, and what you have left is West Idaho, a very Conservative and sparsely populated chunk of real estate that feels largely ignored by state government.
Richardson is running against three-time incumbent John Kitzhaber (full disclosure: I support the Governor and interviewed with the Kitzhaber campaign), who has a pronounced advantage in both money and poll numbers. The truth is that Kitzhaber will have to be caught in flagrant delicto with a dead underage male prostitute to lose this election. Dennis Richardson is just that…out there.
To his credit, Kitzhaber agreed to debate Richardson, though he had nothing to gain by doing so. Appearing on the same stage with the Governor only provided Richardson a degree of gravitas and credibility he doesn’t deserve. The debate did little to budge the poll numbers, and the intervening months between now and election day will only prove a boon for advertisers and fill up a lot of air time.
Richardson is really no different from other authoritarian arch-Conservatives in the GOP. The public space is by rights the province and property of wealthy White males. A woman’s uterus is the property of the state, and the fairer sex is of value only insofar as they serve the needs of men, make babies, and keep the home fires burning. Dennis Richardson is merely another denizen of the Todd Akin wing of the GOP, which, just in time for the midterm elections, is making its presence felt again.
Fortunately, voters here in Oregon have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
One of Richardson’s most loathsome tactics is his use of mass emailings to invade virtually every email box in Oregon. His campaign has spent a pittance purchasing mailing lists, and those lists have been put to invasive and rather annoying use. On at least a couple of occasions, he’s sent mass emails to several hundred Oregonians, including my fiancee. I figure it’s just a matter of time before his campaign gets a hold of my two email addresses.
The strategy seems to be to win the election by pestering Oregonians and getting them to vote for Richardson in the hopes he’ll leave them (and their email inboxes) alone. It’s not as if he’s offering a positive vision laying out how he plans to move Oregon forward.
Then again, the Todd Akin wing of the GOP has never been about positivity, vision, or the future. They can’t really tell you what they’re FOR…but they’ll certainly go on at length about what they’re AGAINST. It’s about power, control, and anger…and not necessarily in that order. The good news is that Oregonians as a whole aren’t favorably disposed towards big, intrusive, and authoritative “small government.” Dennis Richardson, along with the rest of the Oregon Republican Party, will be reduced to wondering once again why they can’t win here in the Beaver State.
Here, as in the rest of the country, self awareness has never been a quality the Far Right can claim to possess in abundance.
