Keith Fimian, the Republican candidate to replace fellow Republican Rep. Tom Davis in Virginia’s 11th congressional district, is facing attacks from the Democratic party for — deep breath now — belonging to a group that has a website that links to another group the head of which has said that wives and husbands should submit to each other. Whew.
Fimian is a member of
Legatus, an organization of Catholic businessmen. Like a lot of organizations, Legatus maintains a website that links to other sites that its members might find interesting. The American Life League, which opposes abortion with no exception for rape and incest, gets a link. So does e5men.org, which encourages men to live up to St. Paul’s admonition in his letter to the Ephesians (it’s in chapter 5, hence the site name) that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, an arm of the DNC, has been sending mailings to women in the district about Legatus. On the front side of one of them, a woman is pictured next to the words, “Someone’s going to tell me I’ve got to be more submissive to my husband?” The text of the other side:
Keith Fimian is an officer of an organization that promotes a group so extreme they encourage women to be more submissive.
It’s a disturbing fact. Congressional Candidate Keith Fimian is a member of a little known organization that promotes other groups fighting for a radical anti-woman agenda.
One of the groups they promote, e5 men, is so far out of the mainstream that they advocate for women to be more “submissive” to their husbands. What makes it even more disturbing is that Keith Fimian wants to represent you in Congress.
Keith Fimian’s Values Aren’t Our Values.
Other mailers hit Legatus for “promot[ing]” groups that are hostile to “constitutionally guaranteed rights of women” and “access to contraception for women.”
The Democratic candidate in the race, Gerald Connolly, also a Catholic, stands by these attacks. “Mr. Fimian’s views on social issues are relevant because he has pretended in this campaign to be a moderate in the mold of Tom Davis. Tom Davis is pro-choice. Tom Davis is pro-stem cell research. And Tom Davis certainly supports the availability of contraception in the United States. My opponent belongs to an organization that opposes these things. I assume when you belong to an organization, you subscribe to the tenets of this organization. If he wants to disavow the tenets of this organization, now's the time to do it.”
What Connolly is saying is untrue. Legatus does not take any position on abortion, stem-cell research, or contraception. None of the groups it “promotes” through weblinks wants to end the availability of contraception.
Fimian opposes abortion and embryo-destructive stem-cell research, and those issues are certainly fair game on the campaign trail. There is also an organization to which Fimian belongs that really does oppose abortion, some kinds of stem-cell research, and even contraception — although it does not advocate making contraception illegal. It is called the Catholic Church. But Connolly belongs to it too, and attacking it openly would take guts.
