When historians and political scientists look back on this election year from some future vantage point, they will be astounded at the enormous number of crackpots and nutcases who ran for elected office in the year 2010.
Latest case in point: Sharron Angle, the teabagger-backed candidate in Nevada who’s running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle is a candidate whose positions on some issues – such as her call to eliminate Social Security – are so extreme that she literally runs away when reporters try to ask her questions about these positions.
Bill Roberts, a Nevada newsman who once owned the Tonopah Times-Bonanza, wrote recently about an incident involving Angle in the 1990s when she was running for a school board seat. One of the local high school football teams, which was nicknamed the “Muckers,” wanted to break a losing streak by wearing black jerseys at its homecoming game. Angle and her colleagues protested that wearing such jerseys was satanic and should not be allowed.
Roberts recalled:
They argued against our charges wearing black on religious grounds. I cannot quote scripture as they did to justify their point but the gist of their argument was that black as a color was thoroughly evil, invoking the supernatural and especially the devil . . .
Angle may or may not have thought this a political statement. But she became a high profile advocate of a specific religious position during her very first campaign.
Whichever argument prevailed, school administrators caved in and prohibited the Muckers from wearing the black apparel . . . In the end, the Muckers wore traditional red and white for the homecoming game, which they won, avenging their previous loss to the Cougars. It also was a benchmark for two dozen young men as it was their only victory that season.
But they went away from the affair knowing Angle’s group used religious arguments to deprive them of their innocuous and youthful black jersey statement.
Administrators held onto the jerseys and refused to either turn them over to the athletes or to return the money they had paid.
Of course, if you carry Angle’s argument to its logical extreme, then country singer Johnny Cash (“the man in black”) was satanic, the Atlanta Falcons are satanic when they wear their black jerseys, and the University of Georgia was satanic when its football team wore black jerseys for the “blackout” game with Alabama in 2008. Not to mention every minister who wears black vestments for Sunday services.
