Flashback: Virginia Gov. Candidate Cuccinelli Investigated "Sextravaganza" (college safe sex event)
Controversial Virginia Republican lieutenant governor candidate E.W. Jackson, as I reported last week, began his career as a social conservative crusader as an anti-anti-AIDS activist in Boston, where he fought against public health initiatives that promoted condom use and sterilized needles. And Jackson's extreme views on such issues as LGBT rights ("If we need a gay rights bill, then we need an adulterers' rights bill, we need a cohabitators' rights bill, a pedophiles' rights bill, and a sadomasochists' rights bill"
and Islam (he's against it) have launched a flurry of stories on the potential impact of Jackson's extremism on Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican running for governor. Cuccinelli has tried to distance himself from Jackson, but he has a problem: his own past as a social conservative activist is not that different from Jackson's.
In 2005, for example, Cuccinelli, then a state senator, sent a volunteer to investigate a mostly-female planning meeting for an event to be held at George Mason University by "Pro-Choice Patriots," a student group, and dubbed the "Sextravaganza." This gathering was designed to promote healthy sexual activity—dispensing information on date rape, AIDS, and contraception. But Cuccinelli condemned the plan to hold such an event at a public school, warning that "Sextravaganza" would promote "every type of sexual promiscuity you can imagine."
"This whole thing is really just designed to push sex and sexual libertine behavior as far, fast and furiously as possible," he told the Washington Post at the time, adding, "Do we need to establish some statewide standards here? It's pathetic we even need to have this discussion, but apparently we do."
Cuccinelli, like Jackson, was a fierce fighter for what they called traditional family values. In 2004, the Washington Times reported that Cuccinelli was leading the fight against, in his words, "homosexuals and AIDS (education)."
full: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/ken-cuccinelli-sextravaganza-investigation
The George Mason event was discussed on DU back in 2005 here and here. The Washington Post story from Apr. 2005 that covered the fake controversy: "Lawmaker Decries GMU Health Fair, 'Moral Depravity'." Cuccinelli was at the time a state senator based in Fairfax, about 20 miles west of DC, home of GMU, and just a 5-minute drive on I-66 west of the I-495 Beltway.
The fact he sent a staffer to snoop in this event makes a name like "Cuccinelli" quite fitting...yes it is pronounced that way, try not to laugh.
