Allen Says He Embraces His Jewish Ancestry – washingtonpost.com
“I was raised as a Christian and my mother was raised as a Christian,” Allen, 54, said. “And I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line’s Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed.”
If you’re 54 years old, and have to find out about some aspect of your family heritage from a magazine article, I don’t think you can claim to take great pride in that aspect. This is his grandfather he’s talking about. It’s obviously not something his family takes pride in. It’s pretty obvious to me that Allen is a racist. That doesn’t bother me so much. What bothers me is that he seems to think it’s okay to express his racist feelings, which is just mind-boggling. If he’s a racist, fine. That’s his problem. But when he continues to make remarks that demonstrate total insensitivity to different peoples of the world, I start to wonder if he should be involved in politics. There are plenty of non-caucasian and non-christian residents of Virginia, especially around DC, and I think they deserve a representative who doesn’t hate them. Or, at the very least, a representative who can acknowledge that other peoples have an equally valid claim to personhood as he does.
I don’t know much about his opponent (Although I voted for him in the primary) except for an offensive paper he wrote 20 years ago about women in the military. I’m inclined to forgive that in the absence of more recent examples of similar things.