By Ronald K. Rigby, Alexandria
(Stock photo) 

To the editor:

After hearing Ken Cuccinelli’s recent response to President Barack Obama’s weekly address, I want to correct the record. Facts matter and a person seeking office as governor of this great commonwealth should recognize the facts.
On Saturday, Cuccinelli announced he believed “Obamacare is unconstitutional.” Here are the facts.

Cuccinelli was the first attorney general to challenge the law — minutes after the president signed the Affordable Care Act — but lost in court. The U. S. Supreme Court later considered the law and found it to be constitutional. Determining the constitutionality of a law is left to the Supreme Court (per the Constitution), not any state’s attorney general.

Cuccinelli is well known as a Tea Party favorite, a group that advocated shutting down the federal government, disproportionately impacting federal workers and the military in Virginia as well as severely damaging our economy. When Sen. Ted Cruz came to the commonwealth to speak at the Virginia Family Foundation event, Cuccinelli did not denounce his actions. As a retired federal worker, I am disturbed that Cuccinelli would not stand up against Cruz.

Cuccinelli used his position as attorney general to pursue an extreme social agenda that has included reducing women’s access to birth control, reinstating Virginia’s sodomy laws — long declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — and challenging a state university’s research on climate change and the environment. His running mates — E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain — share his extreme social views.

For these reasons, I am supporting Terry McAuliffe for governor, Ralph Northam for lieutenant governor and Mark Herring for attorney general. For the sake of our commonwealth, all of its residents and its future, we can’t afford to be held hostage by the ideologically driven Republican threesome when it comes to social issues or the economy.

We must all vote this year. We must vote a straight Democratic ticket November 5.