Some very weird information has become public about two of the three candidates in the 59th District House of Delegates race, Ray Reed writes for the News & Advance. (The 59th Distict includes southwest Albemarle, up to the edge of Charlottesville, and runs south from there.) Republican candidate Matt Farriss has been repeatedly convicted of weapons and DUI violations, and was the subject of an emergency protective order after allegedly breaking into a woman’s home. Lynchburg newspaper The News & Advance has tried to get Farriss to explain the many incidents, but he won’t talk to them. Then there’s conservative independent candidate Linda Wall, who admitted in a 2006 deposition that, as a teacher in the 1970s, she’d had a sexual relationship with a (female) student, for which she lost her job. By way of defense, she says that she was smoking a lot of marijuana then. (Five years ago I wrote about her testimony before a state senate committee in opposition to a bill that would prohibit state government from discriminating against people in hiring practices based on their sexual orientation.)
The third candidate in the race is Connie Brennan, Democrat and long-time Nelson County Supervisor. She ran unsuccessfully for the same seat in 2007. Disclaimer: I’ve given money to her campaign, and she is a friend.
I made this additional disclaimer back in 2007, which I might as well repeat now:
the Linda Wall story is the 2nd-from-the-top article on the front page of the Huffington Post right now, FWIW. so it seems the story is getting National attention (at least from the percentage of the Nation that reads the Huffington Post.)