and we can only hope that there are more sane people in the 1st District than in the Sixth.
This is from a 1994 Strib article about him:
http://www.e-democracy.org/1994/other/Strib_profiles/QUIST_profile.htmlFirst, voters have heard a lot about Quist's reputation as a three-term legislator almost obsessed with sexual morality, including an undercover foray into a sex-oriented bookstore in Mankato, hours and hours of speeches on the House floor railing against homosexuality and pornography and sponsorship of a bill to require AIDS testing for all marriage license applicants.
He has not made a big deal out of those issues in his campaign, and explains that he got caught up in those issues, in part, because he was given grossly inflated estimates by the state about the spread of AIDS....
..."Religion has not been an issue in the least in my campaign," he said. But two minutes inside his headquarters at an Inver Grove Heights shopping mall suggested otherwise. His receptionist on a recent Monday morning was involved in a telephone conversation explaining how "church groups" could connect directly into the campaign.
And in his two books, "The Abortion Revolution" and "The Nails of the Cross," Quist has made statements suggesting that Christianity is at the very core of his political beliefs.
"If our nation would return to Christian ethical codes, the abortion revolution would come to an end and many of the other evils mentioned would be largely restrained as well," he wrote in "The Abortion Revolution." He also wrote that "no improper mixing of church and state occurs when Christian ethics are followed by the state."
and Fire Dog Lake has a more recent article about the 1st District race
http://firedoglake.com/2009/12/05/come-saturday-morning-the-clown-car-rides-again-in-mn-01/Allen Quist. First of the Republicans to officially declare, assuming you don’t count Frank McKinzie as a serious candidate (which you shouldn’t — and will somebody please tell Charlie Cook to check his MN-01 candidate list? Only two of the people on it are actual candidates). Antigay, antifeminist conservative Lutheran and failed candidate for governor, this guy is a longtime favorite of the Republican Party of Minnesota’s hard-right wing, which has come to have more power in the party as saner Republicans like former governor Arne Carlson (who Quist unsuccessfully challenged in the 1994 gubernatorial primary) have run away screaming from it.
Despite his checkered election history, Quist, along with his second wife Julie — who just happens to be Michele Bachmann’s district manager — are among the most powerful persons in the RPM, people who can make or break candidates by using their access to the Christian Right’s hearts, minds and wallets. As part of his candidacy for governor in 1998, Norm Coleman had to grovel on bended knee for their approval, and ditch his moderate-Republican persona in the process.
The staunchly anti-choice Quist is famous locally for being the man whose first wife Diane was killed while pregnant with their tenth child in a car accident in December 1986; he showed his undying love for her by a) pulling the six-and-a-half-month-old fetus’ body out of her womb and putting it in her arms so they could be displayed that way in the casket, and b) marrying his second wife Julie about six months later.
All of this, combined with his tendency to lose elections, apparently makes some local Republicans quite nervous, as Bluestem Prairie’s Sally Jo Sorensen discusses here and here. That nervousness leaves a big fat opening for other would-be Walz-defeaters to jump into the Clown Car...
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