Patricia Silva is not the only right-wing radical running for Borough Assembly in Fairbanks.

She is joined by extremist Lance Roberts, who during his previous stint on the assembly, tried to ban the Fairbanks Co-Op Market from selling Ms. Magazine, claiming it contained “genocide-promoting stuff.”

Roberts claimed he wasn’t doing this as an assembly member, but as a member of the co-op.

The reasonable candidate opposing Roberts in the assembly race is Kristan Kelly, a parent, educator and former journalist who has the judgment and temperament required to serve in local government.

Among other things, Roberts has long considered himself an expert on freedom of speech, religion, education, families, and the proper roles of men and women in society. Feminism, he says is a “rebellion against God.”

He said in 2014 during his campaign against the magazine that feminism was the “great heresy of the early 20th Century, and it has been wreaking havoc on our families ever since.”

“The passivity of men nowadays is why we’ve been losing the political battle also,” said Roberts.

Feminism represents the desire of “women wanting power that they feel God should have given them,” Roberts claims.

Roberts, who works as an engineer for the Golden Valley Electric Association, also fancies himself an authority on free enterprise, the Permanent Fund dividend, where women should work, marijuana, climate change, homosexuality and men’s hairstyles.

According to Roberts, a woman should be following the guidance of Proverbs 31, and not be “slaving herself out to another man.” She should “work for the family business,” he says.

Questioned about this absurd claim of slavery on social media a year ago, Roberts said that a job, such as his job at GVEA is “just a modern, more comfortable form of slavery, one with more options. You’re giving your labor to someone else. In this context, she is being put under the authority of a man other than her husband and now has two heads.”

Roberts has posted that he wants to “see men, women and the world the way God sees them.”

Hairstyles are not morally neutral, Roberts opined four years ago. “God gave explicit and implicit declarations on them.” Men should not look like women, he said, and “long hair is a shame for men.”

Roberts claims that 1 Corinthians 11:14, which says long hair is a disgrace, “tells us what God thinks about men’s hairstyles.”

“He said that long hair for man was shameful, so there is nothing any culture can say about it that’s different, without defying God and putting themselves in his place, just like the definition of marriage that he gave us,” said Roberts.

He also says that using marijuana is a form of idolatry.

“Those who are choosing to do mind-altering drugs are seeking to escape the reality God created. They are attempting to alter creation to one of their own choosing, or something different than what God has put in place. They are worshiping another God and are rebelling against the true God,” he says.

Women should not be preachers, according to Roberts, which is based on his view of “biblical manhood and womanhood.”

“If you use culture as your lens for interpreting scripture, then you’ve opened the door to the arguments for homosexuality and women preachers,” he said.

Roberts is not shy about saying God will punish those who don’t agree with Roberts. He is not above accusing others of being evil for holding different political views.

A year ago he wrote an email to legislators with the subject line “Cutting Alaskans Throats” because he objected to a committee action on the budget. He must have missed the one about casting the first stone.

“God will get the vengeance,” Roberts said on March 28, 2020.

“In the end, remember that God is in charge, and as I told the traitors in the legislature, God will have vengeance,” Roberts wrote in his newsletter, referring to Reps. Steve Thompson, Bart LeBon and Sens. Click Bishop and John Coghill, among others, as traitors.

Roberts has removed many items from social media accounts in which he expressed his extreme views, perhaps for political reasons. But the voters deserve to know what he really thinks.

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