Gay-Basher Eugene Delgaudio Isn’t Fond of Immigrants, Either

Loudon County, Va., Board Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio has already been widely called out for his furious attacks on LGBT people — most notably in 2010, when he referred to transgender people as “it” during a public meeting. That brought an official rebuke from five of his colleagues on the county governing board for his comments, given as head of the gay-bashing Public Advocate of America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group since last year.

What’s far less known is Delgaudio’s anti-immigrant vitriol. In recent years, Delgaudio has attacked immigrants in a number of extremist venues.

Most notably, and in his role as a county supervisor, Delgaudio in January 2009 participated in a press conference conducted by a group long listed by SPLC as a hate group — the Social Contract Press (SCP), run by avid white nationalists and fellow immigrant-bashers including Editor Wayne Lutton. Lutton has a long history of association with groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens (black people are a “retrograde species of humanity”) and the New Century Foundation (black people are plagued by “psychopathologies” unlike other races).

The press conference was held to announce the release of the SCP’s latest attack on immigrants, “The Twin Crises: Immigration and Infrastructure,” by Edwin Rubenstein, a long-time contributor to CSP, the white nationalist VDARE.com and the National Policy Institute, all listed by SPLC as hate groups. Delgaudio took the podium to lavishly praise Lutton and Rubenstein, whose presentation he called “brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.”

Delgaudio then launched into a monologue linking illegal immigrants to a variety of social ills, including high crime, foreclosures, zoning complaints, and overloading schools and the local food bank. His description of the problems allegedly created by undocumented immigrants then devolved into a real estate promotion for Sterling, Va., the heart of the area he represents on the Loudon Board of Supervisors.

Earlier, in December 2007, Delgaudio did a 25-minute interview on the TV show “Conservative Roundtable,” and its host, erstwhile presidential candidate Howard Phillips, who left more conventional right-wing politics to pursue extreme-right causes. (Phillips, who called Delgaudio a longtime friend during the show, created the Conservative Caucus, which was instrumental in encouraging the development of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. During the 1980s, a British paper reported that Phillips visited South Africa on “promotional tours” that were supposed to boost the morale of apartheid supporters. Phillips established the extremist U.S. Taxpayers’ Party in 1992, which, among other things, called for the death penalty for abortionists. It was renamed the Constitution Party in 1999.

Delgaudio discussed illegal immigration and actions that local officials could take to keep illegal aliens from draining social services in their communities. He also touched on the anti-immigrant resolution that he sponsored that passed in Loudoun County in 2007. “Lives are at stake,” Delgaudio told Phillips. “We have men and women coming here and taking their Third World values and they’re putting them into our society and we’re allowing slave-like conditions to exist among us.”

Earlier in 2007, he was quoted in the Washington Post, stating that Loudoun County needed help against the “hordes that are coming here and using up our services.” According to the U.S. Census, about 10% of Loudoun County’s population was Latino in 2005, up from 6% in 2000. Census data from 2011 indicates that roughly 12.6% of the county’s population is Latino, while nearly 73% is white.

And in 2008, Delgaudio took heat after he claimed during a radio interview that urbanization was not to be blamed for trash and zoning complaints in Loudoun. Rather, he said, it was due to immigrants: “This is a cesspool. People are coming from outside of this culture and they are dumping their crap on the streets of our town and our town is outraged that they don’t get with the program.”