Ever heard of Scott Taylor?
No, me either. But my phone rang this evening with an unfamiliar number and I ignored it, only to hear a message from...Mike Huckabee?
Yup, Mike Huckabee had a recording for li’l ol’ me, promoting the Oregon Freedom Rally on Saturday at the Oregon Convention Center. (I’m guessing the former owner of our phone number was a conservative, but Mike really should update his phone lists; we’ll have had that number for ten years in July.) Naturally, I have to teach our cat the infield fly rule and can’t make it (plus, it costs 35 bucks to get in!), but listened to the message anyway.
The rally’s sponsored by the Oregon Liberty Alliance, an umbrella group consisting of such folks as Oregon Right to Life, the Taxpayer Association of Oregon, and the Oregon Family Council (which spent big money on the 2004 initiative to ban marriage equality in Oregon). Huckabee’s the lead speaker, of course (losing a couple of presidential bids does have its privileges), and the other speakers include Star Parker (prominently listed as the winner of the 2016 CPAC Ronald Reagan Award for conservative grassroots work), Dennis Richardson, and...Scott Taylor?
Actually, Taylor was listed before Richardson, which is surprising. Richardson is the new Secretary of State, the first Republican elected statewide since 2002. He managed to win by looking moderate and not talking about his conservative beliefs very much. (There may have also been some complacency in that our Democratic legislature would keep him from doing anything really stupid; with automatic voter registration, for example, it would be hard for him to limit who’s on the registration rolls.) He clearly wants to be governor (he ran in 2014 and lost), and is probably hoping I’m the only one who notices that he’s at a rally with a bunch of social conservatives besides the attendees. Social conservatism doesn’t play well in Oregon; the last time Oregon had a Republican governor, the World Wide Web didn’t exist and East Germany did.
No, Scott Taylor isn’t from Oregon. Nor from Washington either. I had to look him up and found he’s the new congressman from...the 2nd District of Virginia? The main city in the district is Virginia Beach, which is a city on the other coast of the United States from Oregon, a short 2966 mile drive away from the convention center. Strange that they couldn’t find a member of Congress from someplace slightly closer.
Stranger still is that Taylor, not all that long ago, supported banning discrimination based on sexual orientation...in fact, barely a year ago he voted for such a bill in the Virginia legislature (it failed to pass). But that was then and this is now, and he’s recently backed Trump’s attempt at a Muslim ban and may be trying to ingratiate himself with the dominant right wing of the party by hanging out with Huckabee.
So why do so in Oregon? Perhaps, like many a Republican these days, he may be hoping that by meeting conservative obligations in an obscure corner of the country, he can find a receptive audience and please social conservatives without raising the anger of constituents closer by. If he’s hoping for that, perhaps he should ask his fellow Virginia congressman Dave Brat how that strategy worked for him.