5th District race offers a clear choice

By The Daily Progress Staff

Published: August 26, 2008

Voters in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District must choose between two strong candidates. One, the incumbent, panders to our baser instincts, while the other appeals to our better nature.

To solve our nation’s real problems, we all need to rise above base fears blaming easy scapegoats for our problems. Hating the “other” among us and making anti-immigration rhetoric the cornerstone of a campaign ignores real problems.

On the problem of illegal immigration, the current representative’s position regarding children born in the United States to immigrant parents ignores an important fact. It is not our national immigration “policy” that makes such children citizens — it is the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the same amendment that gave us a couple of other “policies” Virgil Goode apparently would like us to ignore out of fear: the due process and equal protection clauses.

Contrary to Goode’s denial, health care is one of those real problems we need to address for our common good. Our health care system does not work for our twentysomething children who can no longer be covered under their parents’ plans but who cannot find work providing affordable benefits. That system does not work for our non-senior citizens who need hearing aids, which cost thousands of dollars and are not covered under anyone’s health care plan. It does not work for families struggling to make sense of impossibly complex coverage limitations in increasingly expensive plans. Our health care system no longer works for retirees who lose health care benefits they were promised, just because their former employer becomes unprofitable or, worse, goes out of business. It does not work for small-business people who cannot afford to provide benefits for their employees even though they want to do what’s right. These people are not uninsured illegal immigrants. They are our children, our parents and our neighbors. 

Tom Perriello may not yet have the solutions to all our problems, but he understands that we really have them and he wants us to think of them as “our” problems to be overcome together rather than blaming everything on illegal immigrants. As an Eagle Scout, he appeals to our better nature, and his call to work together on the “common good for the Commonwealth” resonates with me. Everyone can respond to that call by voting for Tom Perriello on Nov. 4.

Ronald D. Wiley Jr.
Charlottesville