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Mailers sent late last week by an unknown group accuse a Republican state senate candidate of “coming out of the liberal closet” and being “openly homosexual” only days before voters head to the polls. The flyers, received Friday by Fairfax voters in Virginia’s 32nd state Senate district, blast Republican candidate Patrick Forrest as a “greater threat to the conservative agenda than a Democrat ever will be” because of his stances on homosexuality and immigration.
The return address on the flyers is “Our Heritage USA,” but no such group exists on the web or in election records published by the Virginia Public Access Project. The Lynchburg return address is an empty parking lot, according to Google Maps’ street view.
Forrest’s Democratic opponent, Sen. Janet Howell, quickly denounced the mailer.
“[The flyer’s] direct attacks and suggestive innuendo are tasteless, classless and utterly disrespectful. I am disgusted by this mailing; it has no place in this election. And, it has no place in politics and public service,” Howell wrote in a letter to Forrest.
Howell said she would report the mailer to the Virginia State Board of Elections.
Forrest, who is openly gay, accused Howell of highlighting his sexuality in order to discredit him with Republicans.
“This is part of an ongoing narrative that we’ve been trying to get folks to pay attention to,” he said. “This in my opinion is part of the dirty Chicago-style politics coming out of my opponent’s campaign. There are just too many coincidences to not be put together.”
Forrest pointed to a video that surfaced on the web earlier this year, which his campaign said showed a woman claiming to be a Howell volunteer revealing her strategy to tell voters that Forrest is gay.
Howell’s campaign denied the woman was a campaign volunteer.
“We do not talk to voters about Patrick Forrest, specifically we don’t talk about his sexuality. The only person talking about Patrick Forrest’s sexuality is Patrick Forrest, period,” Howell’s campaign manager, Nick Kowalski, said. “That’s not the kind of campaign Janet runs, and that’s not the kind of campaign I run.”
Official mailers from the Howell campaign sent out last week told voters that Forrest “stands with the Tea Party.”
Tuesday’s election could determine the direction of the Commonwealth for the next several years: if Republicans can win three more seats in the Senate, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell will have both houses of the legislature on his side going into the second half of his term.
