Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993 TAG: 9308080030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Meet Mike Farris, the most controversial politician in Virginia today.
He quotes Thomas Jefferson. He calls for Virginia to return to Harry Byrd's system of "pay-as-you-go."
He also "thinks the public schools are forces for evil."
At least that's what the Democrats say about him - in this case, Roanoke Del. Chip Woodrum, who roused a breakfast of party faithful recently by warning that the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor is an extremist whose advocacy of home-schooling makes him "a traitor to the people of Virginia."
That goes a shade beyond conventional campaign rhetoric. But then Mike Farris is not a conventional candidate.
A thumbnail sketch of Farris - which is about all most voters have gotten so far - paints this 41-year-old Loudoun County lawyer as the point man for the Religious Right:
Evangelical Christian, ordained Baptist minister, former director of the Moral Majority in Washington state, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, a constitutional lawyer who has made a name for himself taking on the conservative side in well-publicized religious rights cases around the country.
On the basis of that background, Farris tapped into the network of home-schoolers around Virginia, turned out massive numbers of first-time participants and took the state Republican convention by storm.
And on the basis of that resume, Democrats are now targeting Farris as proof that the entire Republican ticket has listed dangerously to the right.
And yet . . . "When you talk with him one-on-one, he's not a crazy person," said Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton. "He doesn't have three heads."
Farris' emergence as a statewide candidate - he's challenging incumbent Democrat Don Beyer - may have confounded those who follow Virginia politics. But in the legal circles nationwide that focus on issues of censorship and religious freedoms, Farris is hardly a new name.
He's someone that the liberal group People for the American Way was "tracking" as far back as the early '80s. More than a decade ago, Farris was mentioned in an article in The New Republic magazine on the rise of the Religious Right. Yet that same story also called Farris "such a model of reasonableness that he stood the stereotype on its head."
Farris shambles into a room quietly, head down, looking a little like a lost puppy. Stage presence is not his strong suit. He's so soft-spoken he seems almost shy, an odd quality for an aspiring politician.
It's those very qualities, though, that help make Farris either the ideal "stealth candidate," carefully concealing his real views from public scrutiny, or, in the words of one Washington writer, a "Christian crossover" capable of expanding his base to "mainstream conservatives" who aren't strongly motivated by social issues.
Farris appears content to spend much of the campaign explaining why he thinks he's the latter and not the former, an intolerant zealot who would "destroy our public school system as we know it" - as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Sue Terry charged last week.
"People who may listen to the Democratic attack - the concern that raises in their head is, `Does this guy care about people who are different from himself?' and the answer is, `Yeah, I do,' " Farris said. "I've fought for a lot of people who are different from me, because I want rights for everybody. It is an unusual combination to find someone who is a consistent conservative yet a real strong advocate for the rights of everybody.
"The Democrats do better with a superficial analysis of Mike Farris; Mike Farris does better with an in-depth analysis of Mike Farris."
Farris was born in Arkansas, and grew up in Washington state, where his dad was a high school principal - a public school, Farris is quick to point out - and his mother runs a Christian bookstore. His father took him to school board meetings "from the time I was a little kid," and it was there that Farris got his introduction to politics.
"I always chose sides," Farris said. "I remember being strongly for Goldwater, strongly for Nixon. I was raised in a home where we talked about politics a lot. It wasn't just an adult interest; I was interested from the get-go."
As a lawyer in Spokane fresh from his bar exam, Farris made a name for himself from the get-go, as well.
If he weren't a conservative Christian, Farris might properly be called a hell-raiser. He forged a speciality as a constitutional lawyer, a niche he proudly says makes him "a lawyer against the government."
He got Spokane's parking-meter ordinance declared unconstitutional. He challenged the constitutionality of the extension Congress gave the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified. That case eventually wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, although by then the extension had expired and Farris' case was deemed moot. Nonetheless, he said, "that was the first case of national prominence I got involved in. I was only three years out of law school."
Yet Farris - true to his insistence that he's a "real strong advocate for the rights of everybody" - also represented a black woman in a high-profile racial discrimination suit against a suburban school system.
"The way she picked me to be her lawyer," Farris said, "is she saw me on TV espousing some conservative cause, and she said, `That's the guy I want; he's a fighter.'"
Despite his disarming manner, Farris is indeed a fighter. Journalists and "opposition researchers" have been busy combing through computer databases in search of everything Farris has ever said or written about his legal cases.
The most famous, so far, is his description of public schools as a "godless monstrosity," a quote he now admits went too far.
And then there's the so-called "Scopes II" trial, where Farris represented a group of Tennessee families who charged that their public school's reading textbooks offended their Christian beliefs.
When an appeals judge overturned Farris' initial victory, Farris declared, "It's time for every born-again Christian to take their children out of public schools - and the quicker, the better - to protest this decision."
Farris - who 10 years ago moved to Virginia and set up a non-profit group to defend the legal rights of home-schoolers - says he's chagrined by some of his intemperate remarks from his younger days. "A friend of mine in Washington state said I was like a trained Doberman pinscher. My standing joke is, `Some people say I'm untrained.'"
More seriously he said, "When I was 24, 25 years old, I was more feisty than I am now. Maturity is a real process. I still have real strong feelings, but I think I've learned to channel them better and able to work with people and not get personally upset."
That said, what, precisely, does Farris the candidate say about the public schools, the flashpoint for any discussion of his candidacy?
On one level, Farris doesn't say much different from any other Republican candidate nowadays. He's for school choice and local control; most Republicans are.
What sets Farris apart is the intensity with which he focuses on those issues - and how far he would take them.
Speaking to a group of business leaders in Roanoke last week on his first swing through Western Virginia since his nomination in June, Farris railed against state mandates to local school systems. No surprises there. But Farris also said he doesn't think the state should issue any mandates to local schools, that local schools should be free to teach whatever they want.
"I have a problem with that," one listener piped up. "What about consistency in the curriculum?"
"I hope we don't get consistency," Farris replied. "You have a consistency in the very broad sense - in the third grade, you study multiplication tables and a certain level of grammar - but to have a rote, regimented consistency of curriculum isn't appropriate. The needs of children in Farmville are different from what's good for a child in Alexandria . . . Education is not one-size-fits-all. We need to have a beautiful mosaic of educational opportunities." The standards, he said, "should be the standards of the free market."
But what about in rural areas, Farris was asked later, where there may be only one school in the entire county? What if the school decided it couldn't afford to teach foreign languages, or physics, or other subjects that students might need to enter college?
"It's unlikely those schools would do that," Farris said. "When they had greater freedom than they do now, back in the '50s and '60s, schools didn't do that. Schools, like parents, generally do what's right. Give 'em the chance to be responsible, and they're pretty responsible.
"There probably are schools that struggle with physics, but the technology is catching up. All you need is a satellite dish and have a downlink, and have three or four kids in a rural school get terrific physics instruction or terrific foreign language instruction."
After all, Farris said, "if schools didn't do the right thing, there's a political solution - as long as school boards are elected," another favorite issue.
On the campaign trail, Farris is more the lawyer than the preacher, carefully enunciating his conservative, strict-constructionist views on debt and business regulation and big government. (He opposes bonds, and thinks Virginia should return to paying cash for everything.)
But just when Farris' stump speech begins to sound like ordinary Republican fare, he'll segue into quoting the Declaration of Independence, and how America was founded on "the laws of nature and nature's God."
"We were not asking for a theocracy," Farris said, "but neither did they want a nation that rejected fundamental principles of right and wrong. That's what I believe in today, a nation that re-embraces fundamental principles of right and wrong."
Homosexuality, for instance, is wrong, Farris contends.
So just what would Farris do as lieutenant governor, a post that requires its occupant to do little but preside over the state Senate?
Attract attention, he says.
"I would use the office to try to promote three or four specific ideas," Farris said. "Returning local control to schools would be No. 1. Regulatory reform would be No 2. Legal reform would be No. 3. On the preventive side, I'd try to do everything I can to prevent Virginia from going into more debt.
"The way I'd do it would be grass-roots politics. I've done that for a long time. I'd go out and organize the finest grass-roots politics Virginia has ever seen. Because in every one of those issues, we're taking on the establishment, and if you're fighting an elite, you need a whole lot of people. But I think there are a lot of people who would want to see the system change."
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