07.05.11
Profile of the extremist hiding in the grass
When anyone asks how extremists get elected you don’t have to look at marquee national cases.
A man named Randy Toman of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is a perfect subject for profile. As the man behind the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog, over the course of the last couple years he’s published his ravings and weird world view for all to see. DD blog has occasionally linked to these things.
Now Toman is running to be a member of the Bethlehem Area School District
school board.
Toman is a Tea Partier and if one believes what he sets to print on his blog, he despises public school education.
On a second blog devoted to advertising his candidacy, one can see — here — that he cannot proof-read his headlines.
Toman is an anti-union ex-union man and a fellow who supports right-to-work in Pennsylvania (a union-busting position). He has often bemoaned the lack of Biblical teaching in secular public education. Another of Toman’s favorite riffs: Eternal damnation awaits those who do not hold the same Biblical reverence and beliefs as he does.
“I have been up to my eye balls, in the primary and getting on the ballet [sic] for this November’s general election here in Bethlehem, Pa,” Toman writes in one post.
“We have come to a point in history were there is an increasing danger of there being a belief that there [sic] ‘No Hell’,” he raves in another.
Toman continues:
“How is it that I can be so sure; because if that axiom of “NO Hell??? is accepted by the masses of people the consequences will be such that God will have no choice but to lift His hand off of this society. Showing them there is a Hell and they will not only be living in one presently but they will be assured they will be going to one upon death.”
“It can not be deigned [sic] that prayer, God and any reference to the Christian Religion has been taken out of or should I say thrown out of all public school here in this country,” Toman writes in yet another recent post. “That statement can not be argued to the contrary, it is true and well established.”
“[The] so called ‘Christian’ of today has no clue as to what is taught in the Bible and what should be a fair Biblical taxation,” Toman states in another semi-coherent post, an argument against taxation.
This post, and others like it, in addition to the regular complaints that secular education abandons the teachings of the Bible, seem to be the basis for his animosity for public school education.
At the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog Toman also obsesses about gold and the Treasury’s printing of money. He regularly states beliefs, apparently gained from the reading of weird fringe extreme right newsletters, that hyperinflation will cause the dollar to become worthless. And — today — that the President should be impeached because his birth certificate is a forgery.
One could spend days wading through the insane mess that constitutes the thinking on display at the Lehigh Valley Conservative.
Ordinarily, no one would have to do this. That’s because Toman was formerly just another private citizen, entitled to his opinons, no matter how nuts.
But Toman is running for a position of political influence in the Bethlehem School District. And his views show him completely unfit to hold any public office in a reasonable society, let alone one in which his decisions might have some impact on the educational environment of children.
Yet Toman could gain such a seat in November.
How could it happen? Easy. No one in the local news media has even shown the slightest interest in covering the political race or the views of the candidates running for the school board. Bethlehem is served by two newspapers — the Allentown Morning Call (where I worked many years ago), and the Easton Express-Times.
You can search a long time and find only this brief piece, here, which doesn’t even begin to hint at what Randy Toman is all about.
And that’s how extremists win elections, even those very small. The local upholders of truth negligently decide it’s not worth their time to explain to the locals what the people behind the names on the ballot really believe in.