A genuine politician of faith
My memories of Tim Kaine from high school are of a skinny Irish Catholic kid with wavy dark hair – very smart, outgoing, confident.
He was a National Merit Semifinalist and Student Body president. He sang in the school choir, worked on the student newspaper, was even a cheerleader our senior year.
In a class of 200 high achievers at that all-boys college-prep school in Kansas City, Mo., Kaine stood out as one who would be among the cream.
Tim and I didn’t hang out a lot together, but we took a bunch of the same classes. Because of the alphabetic proximity of our last names, we frequently lined up or sat next to each other. I thought he was a nice guy.
Even though we both got into Georgetown University, Tim enrolled at the University of Missouri instead, and our ways parted.
I’ve kept up with his political career in Virginia sporadically over the past two decades, as he rose from Richmond councilman to Richmond mayor to Virginia lieutenant governor to Virginia governor to now Virginia’s junior senator in Congress. In 2008, he was on Barack Obama’s short list of possible running mate’s.
Friday, I spent 15 minutes with Tim – the first either one of us has seen the other since our high-school graduation in 1976 – when he stopped outside of Greenwood at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church as part of the congressional civil rights tour.
Tim, as far as I can tell, is still a good guy. He’s eloquent, sincere and religious.
That latter adjective gets misapplied a lot to politicians. I’m often skeptical of those in elected office who talk about their faith, because it seems they use it more to pander than to carry out the will of the God who they say motivates them.
In Tim’s case, though, I believe it’s genuine.
He talks about the year he spent doing missionary work in Honduras as particularly formative. He was in Harvard Law School at the time, fumbling with where his life was going, and took a break to serve as the principal at the Jesuit school in that poor Latin American country. Our high school, which was also a Jesuit institution, raised money every year for the mission there, and Tim was in the group that delivered the check in 1974. Even then, he thought he might like to return some day.
Not only did the year in Honduras make Tim fluent in Spanish, but it revived his faith life, from which he had drifted while in college. “I was a spiritual person, but I kind of lost sight of why communal worship was important,” he said. “But when I saw the challenges of folks in Honduras and how they relied on communal worship – the songs and the stories – to get them through adversity, it convinced me I could use a little bit of that.”
He went back and finished law school, then relocated to Virginia, the home state of his wife, Anne. He practiced civil rights law, specializing in housing discrimination cases.
Racial reconciliation in what was the capital of the Confederacy became a major interest of the couple’s. Anne’s father, Linwood Holton, was the Republican governor of Virginia who integrated its schools in the early 1970s and then, said Tim, “got frozen out of politics forever after” in apparent retaliation.
Holton enrolled Anne and her three siblings in the majority-black inner-city schools to which they were assigned under a federal court-mandated plan. There is a famous photo of Holton escorting Anne’s older sister to the nearly all-black high school in downtown Richmond.
“There were photographs of white governors trying to block kids from coming to the schools and colleges,” Tim said. “There is only one photo of a white governor walking his white kid into basically what was an all-black school.”
The Kaines have been attending St. Elizabeth’s, a mostly black Catholic church, for more than 30 years. During the early stages of the 2008 presidential race, Tim became the first governor outside Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois to endorse the man who would become this nation’s first African-American president.
Squaring Tim’s faith and his politics has not been without its rough spots. He said he is personally opposed to both capital punishment and abortion, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sacredness of all human life. He let, however, several executions proceed while he was governor and is opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand.
On the death penalty, he said that he pledged as governor to carry out the laws of the state, even if he didn’t agree with all of them. As for abortion, he said the answer to bringing its incidence down is not through criminalizing the procedure but through access to health care, education and contraception. That approach is working, he claims. “Right now abortion is at its lowest in about 25 years. And it’s happening under a president who people say is like the most pro-choice president.”
Even while those answers sound convincing, Tim himself is not sure he’s 100 percent right on either issue. “It’s not like you grapple with them and you solve them. You grapple with them and you continue to grapple with them.”
Tim isn’t preachy about his faith but uses it as the standard by which he judges himself and expects to be judged.
“Do you use your faith to basically say, ‘Here’s what I believe and I’ve got to put laws in place to make everybody do that’? Or do I keep my faith completely to myself?
"I’m trying to go somewhere in the middle, where I use my faith and I explain it and describe it, so that people will know what motivates me and then they’ll have some yardstick to judge me by.”
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