I am a native of Haywood County, born in the old county hospital on North Main Street, brought up on the Test Farm just outside the city limits, educated in the public schools of the County and in the First Methodist Church of Waynesville. I am an underemployed (but still tax paying) Christian, husband, father, pastor, educator, editor, and writer who loves his region, his state, and his country and desires to see them restored to ordered freedom and real prosperity. I have lived in Texas, Maryland, and Alabama, but three years ago I returned here to this place where I started and which I hope never again to leave – at least not until I am called to a higher, and the only better, place.

My political history begins in Haywood County. I was raised to be a good Democrat of the New Deal/ Fair Deal/ New Frontier/ Great Society, anti-communist, moderately liberal sort. My Junior High School civics teacher was none other than Haywood County’s “Mr. Democrat,” Sam J. Queen (the father of Joe Sam Queen), so my civics class was in many ways an exercise in further indoctrination with that party’s line. My first political experience was going door-to-door for George McGovern. I voted for Jimmy Carter – twice.

I guess this just goes to show you that no one’s hopeless, and that it is not a bad thing altogether for a man to spend the years of his young adulthood in the Republic of Texas, where the “Yellow-dog Democrat” was an endangered species and the “country club Republican” had little influence. Being away from the tribal politics of my native sod enabled me to watch, to evaluate, to be inspired by, and at last to join with the conservative philosophy of those two great leaders of the rebirth of the conservative vision in western civilization – Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – who together with Pope John Paul the Great brought down the Iron Curtain and freed millions.

I began to wonder why there was such a contrast between the political habits of my native region and the human values in which I had been raised, and which were held by the vast majority of our people. I was troubled that this area inhabited largely by hardworking, decent, thrifty and God-fearing people kept sending to Raleigh and to Washington members of a party that increasingly committed to economic plunder, licentiousness, laziness, and the insatiable pursuit of power for its own sake.

Eventually, I came back. Perhaps it was to help restore the integrity between the people of this region and their elected government. God - and you, the people - will be the judge of that.