OPINION

Guest Column: Primary elections a good time

to weed out the bad candidates
By MIKE COLLINS
By MIKE COLLINS
Published 08/26/10

If you ever thought primary elections were not worth your time, think again. In addition
to selecting the candidates for general election, the primaries elect members of the
Republican and Democrat central committees.

So why should you care? By Maryland law, the central committees select replacements for state
legislators in case of vacancies. We replaced two delegates and one senator while I served on the
committee. In addition, they make recommendations to the governor for "Green Bag"
appointments to such bodies as the Board of Elections.

If you don't vote in the primary, you may not recognize your party, and wonder how you got all
the nutty candidates for office.

At present, there are three women running as a team for election to the Republican Central
Committee from District 30. Their platform is to elect three good, conservative Christian women.
They are Debbie Belcher, Ginny Meerman, and Joyce Thomann.

Belcher sent an e-mail last year soliciting funds for a group called the Christian Impact Alliance.
In it, Belcher indicated she wants to recruit candidates for office who have the "right relationship
with God," who will then "vote their Biblical perspectives."

Meerman recently sent a broadcast e-mail asking folks to vote for all three women because they
need good Christians to "vet" candidates for office. And of course, we all know Joyce "Obama is
Hitler" Thomann, who brought nationwide notoriety to Anne Arundel County Republicans last
summer.

They seem to be following a philosophy forwarded by the "Institute for the Constitution,"
founded by the leader of the Constitutionalist Party. I got my first glimpse into that thinking
when Belcher's brother, Del. Don Dwyer, told me America was founded on three documents: the
Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bible - and that anything the first two
cannot answer, the third can.

I am glad to have people of faith participate in political discourse. But if you've ever been told
you are not a real Christian, or as I have, that "All Catholics are pagan idolaters who will burn in
hell," you might understand my concern.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a
Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Yet we have three women
who are running on a platform of using positions on the central committee to impose a de facto
religious test for office holders. This does not just seem un-Constitutional; it seems downright
un-American.

Extremism has consequences. During the 2002 Beltway Sniper incident, Dwyer encouraged
Republicans to raffle a Bushmaster rifle to show support for the Second Amendment, raise
money and get attention. Saner people in the room prevailed. But some Second Amendment
stalwarts felt such bombast inspired a raft of new legislation that set gun rights back.

In a similar vein, Belcher and the self-appointed gate-keepers of Christian-political values may
provoke a backlash that sets the faith community even further, especially in state regulation of
parochial schools and home-schooling.

I expect I will be the target of abuse for writing this. Thomann, who describes herself as a
conservative who happens to be a Republican, routinely attacks those she disagrees with as
RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Being silent may be the easy way out, but I think it is
cowardly to be silent when you see wrong.

Whether it is raffling Bushmasters during a murder spree, comparing the president to Adolph
Hitler, or trying to establish religious tests for office holders, extremism coarsens our society and
degrades our nation.

We should support candidates who "summon the better angels of our nature," not pander to our
most base prejudices. We are better than that. There are more than 80 Republicans on the ballot
in Anne Arundel County, and most of them are terrific.

If you do not vote in the primary election Sept. 14, you have no right to complain about the bad
candidates in the general election, or when a central committee you did not care about appoints
your next delegate or senator.

The writer is a member of the Republican Central Committee representing

District 30.