O'Donnell and Her Witchy Ways

  

Christine

So, who is this Christine O'Donnell lady stirring up the Tea Party? Is she some wicked witch hag from the East Coast or a cute, mild-mannered, sexy Bewitched Samantha? Just in time for Halloween, the Delaware election between Senate candidates Christine O'Donnell and Chris Coons promises to be a real thriller.

Christine is 41-years-old, single and Catholic (but in 2010 told The New York Times that she attends both Catholic and Protestant services). Her hometown is Wilmington, Delaware, and she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, with a degree in English and Communication.

O'Donnell has worked as an freelance marketing and media consultant. She appears regularly on Fox News Channel, CNN, C-SPAN, FNC’s O’Reilly Factor, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Entertainment Tonight, ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and many others. She has also provided daily political commentary on the 2008 Presidential primaries on CNN’s Glenn Beck, FNC’s Fox and Friends, The O’Reilly Factor and others. 

As part of her noted work, Christine O'Donnell provided consultation services with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and Natalia Tsarkova, the Vatican’s first female portrait painter. She has also provided consultation services to non-profit organizations such as the World Education and Development Fund, a charity that provides scholarships to children in poor communities throughout Latin America.

O'Donnell ran for the Republican Party nomination for the United States Senate election in Delaware in 2006, and was the party's nominee in the state's 2008 United States Senate election, losing to Joe Biden.

Now, O'Donnell has swept to an upset defeat of nine-term Congressman Mike Castle in the GOP primary. She has raised close to $1 million in campaign funds online and won a financial pledge from the National Republican Senatorial Committee of $42,000, the maximum allowed. Aides say the cash keeps coming in.

Politics and Such

Before gaining much attention in politics, O'Donnell had been best known for aggressively promoting conservative sexual morality, particularly for young women. She began her public quest to promote chastity shortly after completing her education at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

As she explained to the Wilmington News Journal in 2004, she did "things she regrets" in college, such as drinking to excess and becoming somewhat sexually promiscuous. Those regrets spurred her to promote chaste values, and to seek out a national forum to advance related policy aims such as abstinence education.

O'Donnell moved to Washington, D.C., after college, and she first worked for an anti-pornography group, then took jobs with the Republican National Committee and with Concerned Women for America, an anti-feminist group. She also founded a nonprofit group called the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth, to promote "righteous" values and sexual morality.

It was in connection with her work for the group that O'Donnell was featured in a 1996 MTV documentary, Sex in the '90s, to tout abstinence and speak out against masturbation. Then, O'Donnell outlined her conservative Christian beliefs including her opinion that masturbation is adultery. She told TV talk show host Phil Donahue in 2002 that "condoms will not protect you from AIDS." And, in a 2006 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor she said efforts to promote condom use are "anti-human." 

Christine O'Donnell allegedly has just been caught for the third time dishonestly inflating her academic achievements.

1.  She attended her university's commencement ceremony in 1993 but did not receive a degree. She said she had completed her work, but O'Donnell later explained her degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University was withheld due to unpaid tuition. In 1994, Fairleigh Dickinson University sued her for $4,823, winning a judgment for the entire amount according to court documents. The debt was paid in 2003. After O'Donnell completed a required course in the summer of 2010, Fairleigh Dickinson finally awarded her a bachelor's degree in English literature, with a concentration in communication.

2. Claims that she had taken graduate courses at Princeton also proved false.

3. O'Donnell's LinkedIn bio lists "University of Oxford" as a school she attended — but the course in question was offered by the Phoenix Institute, which just rented space from the elite British school. Pathetic.

In 2004, O'Donnell filed a gender discrimination complaint against Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a non-profit conservative educational organization, with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission saying that she had been demoted because the conservative philosophy of ISI dictated that women should be subordinated to men.She was fired, and then sued ISI in 2005 in federal court for $6.9 million for wrongful termination, claiming gender discrimination and that she had been fired in retaliation for filing the EEOC discrimination complaint.

She said ISI's actions caused her mental anguish and were a consequence of "ISI's conservative beliefs".She also claimed that she had lost future financial earning power because ISI's actions had delayed her education. ISI told the Delaware News Journal that she had been "terminated for operating a for-profit business."

During a 2006 debate, O'Donnell has said that the Peoples Republic of China is plotting to take over the United States, and claimed that she has classified information which supports this claim."Well, they misquoted  me at the time, I believe," she said when recently asked about the comment.

In a 2006 interview with the Wilmington News Journal, O'Donnell stated that homosexuals are psychologically defective and suffer from an “identity disorder.” O'Donnell stated, "People are created in God's image. Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors." Newer comments say O'Donnell once believed gays and lesbians have an "identity disorder," a prior position that put her squarely at odds with the American medical and psychological community, and popular opinion. The O'Donnell campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ABC News.

Between 2007 and 2009 the Federal Election Commission cited her eight times for failing to supply contributions reports on time. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleged that O'Donnell made false statements on Federal Elections Commission filings and illegally used more than $20,000 of her campaign funds as "her very own personal piggy bank" by claiming campaign expenses during a time when she had no official campaign.

In a November 2007 interview with Bill O'Reilly on the Fox network, O'Donnell expressed her concerns with cloning and stem-cell research: "They are -- they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment." It's possible that O'Donnell was misremembering a 2005 on scientists who successfully grew human brain cells within mice -- which is not the same as an actual functioning human brain, but a demonstration that human brain cells can be made from stem cells.

According to Politico (September 16, 2010), O’Donnell warned that allowing women to attend military academies "cripples the readiness of our defense." She stated, “By integrating women into particularly military institutes, it cripples the readiness of our defense.". She also argued that West Point “has had to lower their standards … in order for men and women to compete”

Saving the best for last, approximately eleven years ago Christine O'Donnell confessed to Bill Maher and his ABC audience that she'd dated a witch, "dabbled into witchcraft" and even gone on a midnight date involving blood on an altar. O'Donnell confesses, "I didn't join a coven, Let's get this straight.. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not makin' this stuff up. I know what they told me they do." O'Donnell, then described "one of my first dates with a witch." Reportedly, she and her date went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.

To close, the poor blogger also gets the hook: O'Donnell fears that bloggers are "dangerous." She said, “What makes bloggers good makes them dangerous. They don’t have to answer to anybody. They can give a local story attention, but they also can publish rumors with no accountability.” (Wilmington News-Journal, January 7 2007)