Candidate's Last-Minute Claims Are Disputed

Shortly before Saturday's state Senate primary, a campaign flier appeared in 6,000 mailboxes in eastern Loudoun and western Fairfax counties that candidate John A. Andrews II thinks may have cost him the nomination.

The flier, sent out by Patricia Phillips, who went on to win the Republican nomination in Virginia's 33rd Senate District with 53 percent of the vote, compared the two candidates' views on key issues.

On a row labeled "conservative values," the flier said Phillips's conservative positions were well documented. But Andrews, it said, "is praised by Equality Virginia," a gay-rights lobbying group, "for his efforts on the Loudoun County School Board."

That is not true, said Andrews, a former School Board member who during the campaign billed himself as a moderate choice compared with Phillips.

Phillips said the statement in her flier stemmed from an editorial posted two years ago on the Web site of Equality Loudoun, a local gay-rights group. The editorial, which appeared in a local newspaper, had praised Andrews for his handling of a fracas over a Loudoun school play that touched on gay themes.

But David Weintraub, director of Equality Loudoun, which is not affiliated with Equality Virginia, said this week that his group's posting of the editorial was strictly informational and not meant as an expression of Equality Loudoun's opinion about Andrews.

According to news reports at the time of the controversy over the school play, Equality Loudoun was not altogether pleased with the outcome. The School Board approved a policy banning obscenity in school plays, a measure Weintraub said was overly vague.

One person who did praise the policy was Phillips, who was quoted in a Washington Post article June 6, 2005, as saying, "I was very pleased with how it turned out."

Phillips said this week that the item about the gay-rights group was a "minor point" in the flier, which also detailed her views on transportation and taxes. It was Andrews who has blown the issue out of proportion, she said.

Still, she stood by the statement.

"I think describing it as 'There was praise for John Andrews' to be an accurate representation," she said. "I guess I just felt that it was an accurate portrayal of what was on that Web site. I didn't connect the dots for anyone."

Weintraub disagreed.

"She attributed that article to us falsely," he said. "This was not just an error. She knew exactly what she was doing."