Chesterton’s madman comes to Connecticut

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 09, 2026

Two things can be true at the same time. It’s possible, for instance, to believe that Pride Month is bad for society and to believe that the state should not execute persons who commit acts of sodomy.

That may strike you as so obvious a distinction that it hardly bears saying out loud. If so, you have not paid attention to politics in Connecticut. Elected officials in my state have been tripping over the distinction for a week now.

The proximate cause for the confusion is Jadon MacCormack, a 23-year-old Republican candidate for our state legislature who pushed back against bipartisan celebration of Pride Month by Connecticut’s political class with a June 2nd post wishing everyone a “Happy Straight Month.” The photo in Jadon’s post carries a conventionally conservative description of LGBT ideology as a threat to families.

But Jadon is not so conventional. In other public statements prior to his June 2nd post he said that people who commit acts of sodomy should be executed by the state. Jadon responded to the political firestorm that erupted over his social media history by quadrupling down, telling a popular local radio host that Connecticut should reinstitute the death penalty for sodomy (which had been abolished in 1821).

What is a Catholic to make of this? Although homosexual acts are objectively sinful, it does not follow that the state should execute those who commit them. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that human law should tolerate some moral evils because attempting to eradicate all vice can produce greater social harms. Criminal penalties should be proportionate and ordered to achievable public goods, not maximal punishment for every grave sin.

But Connecticut politicians are not exactly known for their Thomism. The Democratic Party is deeply committed to the LGBT agenda, on principle but also because it is a tremendous source of financial support and grassroots energy for them. There is no new demand from LGBT activists, no matter how insane, that will not be embraced and championed by the majority of Democrat elected officials in Connecticut.

The Republican Party in Connecticut is slightly better. They used to disdain social conservatism but the Democratic Party having gone mad created an opening on the Right. That is, the CT GOP, as blue blood socially liberal a Republican Party as there ever was, at least opposes the newer cause célèbres of the cultural left. “Men in women’s sports? Cutting off children’s genitals? Yes, social conservatives, we’ll work with you against that.”

But the CT GOP appears committed to the older attacks on the family that got us here in the first place, to the destruction of unborn human life and the redefinition of marriage. That is why I can understand the frustration of grassroots social conservatives who are upset over the Republican denunciations of Jadon. Here at last was someone, anyone, pushing back against the celebrations of Pride Month with which even Republicans were participating.

Nevertheless, expecting the CT GOP to stand by a candidate who is calling for the execution of homosexuals is a crazy expectation, and it is wrong to expect it of them. Jadon is not some Zoomer who went too far on social media. He is not sick or evil or mad. Rather, he is a madman in the sense described by Chesterton:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Jadon’s reason is guided by his apparent adherence to the New Independent Fundamental Baptist (NIFB) movement. The NIFB are KJV-onlyists who believe in the death penalty for homosexual acts, deny or minimize the Holocaust, consider the translators of other English Bibles to be damned, and so forth. When Jadon quadruples down on local talk radio he is being consistent with what he believes.

It’s just that what he believes is a disaster. Having him as a candidate for public office in Connecticut is a disaster. Having him as a standard bearer for Christian conservatism in Connecticut is a disaster.

Catholic polemics against Scriptura Sola practically write themselves in this matter. But Catholicism has been put on trial by LGBT forces in Connecticut too. Our Judiciary Committee famously made a “show trial” of the Catholic faith of my predecessor, Brian Brown, in 2007. Less famously, they tried the same thing with me in 2009. I handled it in a way that shut them down but never made the news.

In 25 years of fighting the anti-family agenda in Connecticut, I have not always agreed with friends and allies. I have disagreed at times with the policy arm of our state’s bishops, with my own archdiocese, with my own bishop, with other right-leaning groups, with conservatism’s flagship journal, with conservatives on the national level, with the Pope himself.

But never have I seen anything quite like Jadon. The Connecticut Republican Party is deeply flawed. But they were not wrong to seek another candidate for that seat.