The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia says that he is a Christian and has no reason to apologize for his history against of hate speech against LGBT people, liberals and abortion providers.
It was only after African-American minister E.W. Jackson won the nomination at the Virginia Republican Party Convention last week that many became aware of his history of saying gay people were "perverted" and "sick people psychologically."
"Homosexuality is a horrible sin, it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of," he said last year.
He has also called Democrats "slave masters" and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan."
"Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact," Jackson said in a 2012 interview.
On Tuesday, Jackson told reporters that he had no intention of apologizing.
"I say the things that I say because I’m a Christian, not because I hate anybody, but because I have religious values that matter to me," Jackson told reporters during a campaign event in Fredericksburg, according to The Washington Post. "Attacking me because I hold to those principles is attacking every church-going person, every family that’s living a traditional family life, everybody who believes that we all deserve the right to live."
"So I don’t have anything to rephrase or apologize for. I would just say people should not paint me as one-dimensional."