Sharron Angle Left Far-Right Third Party For Electoral Expedience, Members Say | TPMDC
That was a heady time for the reborn party. A 1992 Los Angeles Times article (via Nexis) describes Hansen at a political rally wearing a Stetson hat and bearing a sign that read, “If Guns Are Outlawed, How Can We Shoot the Liberals?” His rhetoric would not be out of place at a 2010 tea party.
“Don’t give up your guns, folks,” he told a crowd. “That’s all we’ve got to protect us against the advance of socialism. America is in a survival phase.”
Angle’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.But a campaign spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, which first noticed Angle’s membership in the party, that she had been a Republican before she was an Independent American member. She re-registered with the GOP in 1997.
Lynn Chapman, the chair of the Independent American Party in Washoe County, where Angle lives, tells TPM that she remembers Angle leaving the party “because she was going to be running for assembly and she knew that — at that point in time the party was still growing very slowly — she had a better chance of getting into the assembly if she was a Republican.”
During the period that Angle was a member, the party bought a red, white, and blue 16-page advertising insert in several Nevada newspapers to promote an effort to add a clause to the state constitution stating that “objection to homosexuality is a liberty and right of conscience and shall not be considered discrimination relating to civil rights,” according to a 1994 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The so-called Minority Status and Child Protection Act would have explicitly allowed discrimination against gay people in jobs and housing.