What was E.W. Jackson’s first political battle you might ask?

Fighting AIDS prevention efforts.

Jackson, the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia, has quickly established himself as a uniquely polarizing politician. But when it comes to AIDS, Jackson has backed up his words with action. As an activist in Boston in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Jackson worked tirelessly to defeat programs designed to curb HIV transmissions and save lives. In his view, the only sure-fire way out of the AIDS crisis was abstinence; everything else simply encouraged the kind of immoral behavior he was against.

In 1987, as federal and local officials were first beginning to take preventative efforts, Jackson organized a group of 30 clergymen in opposition to a proposal from Boston’s superintendent of schools to place four public health clinics in city schools. He claimed any program that even mentioned condoms was promoting promiscuity. That same year, he held a candlelight vigil outside a local ABC affiliate, WCVB, demanding that the station pull sex education public-service advertisements that endorsed the use of condoms. As the Associated Press reported at the time, “Jackson said the commercial showed a 10- to 12-year-old girl saying, ‘I just learned to have safe sex.’” (The girl was actually either 16 or 17, according to the ad’s creator.)