Right-wing assembly members refuse to allow open discussion of Lance Roberts's political claims

The right-wing majority on the Borough Assembly refused to allow another member to quote from the newsletters of right-wing politician Lance Roberts before voting 5-4 to place him on the nonpartisan assembly board of ethics.

Banning the public from hearing what Roberts writes is a disservice. A GVEA employee, he often calls those he disagrees with “socialists” and sometimes calls those he doesn’t like “traitors.” Last week he wrote that the community needs conservative candidates for the assembly who will “stand in the gap against the socialists.”

Assembly Presiding Officer Aaron Lojewski appointed Roberts, former City Council member Jim Clark, Pam Throop and former School Board Member Matt Sampson to the board, appointments that required confirmation by the assembly. Sampson will be an alternate on the board.

Lojewski was asked twice by Assembly Member Savannah Fletcher how many people applied to serve on the ethics board and if he recruited the four people to apply, but Lojewski ignored the question and did not reply.

That probably means Lojewski recruited Roberts and the rest. Lojewski should have had the courage to answer those questions.

Lojewski claimed Roberts would “fairly and impartially interpret the rules” and is an excellent nominee to consider ethics cases.

Lojewksi said he opposed the move by Assembly Member Mindy O’Neall to read some excerpts from Roberts’s newsletter because he said was worried about cherry picking by opponents to make Roberts look like something he is not.

There is no need to cherry pick comments by Roberts to make him appear to be something he is not. Roberts does not have what you would call a judicial temperament.

Roberts is one of the “most divisive people” in the borough, said Assembly Member David Guttenberg, which is a reasonable comment.

Lojewski, Tammie Wilson, Brett Rotermund, Barbara Haney and Jimi Cash voted for the four nominees, while Fletcher, O’Neall, Kristan Kelly and Guttenberg voted against confirmation.

Cash claimed it was “partisan” to question the ability of Roberts to be ethical and impartial.

Here are the comments that the borough assembly refused to have read into the record by O’Neall.

Just last week, Roberts opined that “God gave property rights, and government's role is to protect those (and other) rights. When government thinks it can steal your property rights, then they are putting themselves in God's place. Those who support the theft of your property rights are breaking more than the Eighth Commandment, they are trying to make a god out of government.”

“This year the Assembly election will be for three seats that are currently conservative, so it's critical we find some good candidates who are willing to stand in the gap against the socialists.”

In December, Roberts wrote, “Our conservative Assembly members scored their first victory. They removed the Fairbanks North Star Borough from the Alaska Municipal League (AML). The AML is a left-wing organization that is the ‘organization’ for all the municipalities in the State.”

“One thing still hanging out there is that the liberal court system is trying Rep. David Eastman for the crime of belonging to the Oathkeepers group, a group with only one principle, keep your oaths to defend the Constitution.”

Here is a brief sample of the many things that O’Neall could have mentioned about Roberts’s writing over the years.

During his time on the assembly, Roberts tried to ban the Fairbanks Co-Op Market from selling Ms. Magazine, claiming it contained “genocide-promoting stuff.”

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 is a “rebellion against God” and represents the desire of “women wanting power that they feel God should have given them,” Roberts claims.

Wearing a face mask to prevent the spread of disease is covering the image of God and therefore against God’s law, according to Roberts.

The Bible bans female pastors, according to Roberts, and the reason is that Adam came before Eve. God designed the female earlobe for earrings, but not the male earlobe.

He believes minimum wage laws are “theft and a breaking of God’s law,” that a Christian woman should not be “slaving herself out to another man” by working outside the home, that “The Bible’s pretty clear that women are not to be in authority over men” and one of the “major sins is being effeminate.”

In 2020, he wrote an email to legislators with the subject line “Cutting Alaskans Throats” because he objected to committee action on the budget. “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.

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