There’s a debate breaking out about whether Christine O’Donnell’s victory in the GOP Senate primary in Delaware yesterday is good for Democrats. She’s so nutty, the yes thinking goes, that surely all those pro-Mike Castle moderate Republicans and independents won’t vote for her, and the Democrats win a crucial Senate seat.
For a lot of people O’Donnell’s views on masturbation and lust (documented in detail at TPM) are not only comical, but cause enough not to vote for her. Signs of prehistoric thinking and all that. And speaking of prehistoric thinking, O’Donnell has subscribed to anti-evolutionary views (h/t Brad Plumer). More evidence, but she has a lot in common with about half of the American public.
As I reported this morning, in 1995, as a spokesperson for Concerned Women for America, O’Donnell asserted that women serving in combat damages national security, and believed that sex discrimination by taxpayer-funded institutions was constitutional. That might come as a huge surprise — and affront — to women serving in our military.
Democrats shouldn’t overplay the masturbation bit. I understand the, shall we say, urge to do it. O’Donnell has proved herself to be a sexual puritan, but the masturbation clip shouldn’t be re-told with too much glee about discovering “the crazy.”
But does she still think women serving in Iraq or Afghanistan endanger our national security? That seems like, uh, fertile ground for determining just how far her views on sex and sexuality go.
