
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 10, 1993                   TAG: 9306100425
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FARRIS IS NO RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST

NO SOONER had the votes been counted, when the local news media decried the GOP candidates as a product of the religious right. Myself and others are tired of it. Every time someone in our country speaks up for decency, morality, family values and the rights of the unborn they are immediately branded as the religious right.

Of course, to the liberal media, bastions of left-wing socialism and the espousers of rights for every radical fringe group anywhere, anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin is part of the religious right.

Our beloved Roanoke Times & World-News has joined the Democrats in trying to paint Mike Farris as a right-wing extremist who will be a millstone around the necks of George Allen and James Gilmore. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is not a book-burner or an extremist, but believes in the empowerment of individuals and their rights over the rights of government.

Farris believes in school choice - parents should have the right to determine what their kids are taught instead of appointed school boards that have their own (humanistic, socialistic and homosexual) agenda to push. How awful! How extreme! What would our founding fathers have thought?

He believes that Mary Sue Terry and Don Beyer have the extremist position on abortion. Pro-life is not extremist. Abortion on demand - at any time, without restrictions, parental notification or consent - is the extremist position!

It was Farris who galvanized and energized the Republican convention. He is the reason why so many attended the convention as first-time delegates, and it was his delegates to whom other candidates pandered.

For them to distance themselves from him now, as advised those brilliant political analysts from Emory & Henry and Virginia Commonwealth University in the June 6 news article ("GOP picks Allen, Farris, Gilmore"), would be a death knell for their campaign.

After all, the immoral minority and leftist special-interest groups have their own party and candidates they can count on to push their agenda. Republicans need to stand for principles, not compromise; for life, not death; for decency and morality, not perversion; for family values and conservatism, not debauchery and social experimentation.

DON ASSAID

ROANOKE

by CNB