As Republicans are convening in Tampa this week, count on at least one participant from Rowan County to challenge the status quo.
Dr. Ada Fisher, a former member of the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education, is now in her second term as a Republican National Committeewoman. Before the convention began, the News & Observer of Raleigh profiled Fisher as an unconventional member of a party usually pigeonholed as white-bread and suburban. Fisher is a single mother with two adoptive sons. She’s black and a physician. She converted to Judaism, after growing up the daughter of a prominent Baptist preacher. And she’s Republican.
“I’m not a two-fer,” the News & Observer quoted her telling a luncheon of Cary Republican women. “I’m a four-fer, or maybe a five-fer.’’
But the differences go beyond demographics. Most of all, Fisher is an independent thinker.
An excerpt from her book, “Common Sense Conservative Prescriptions,” proves the point. Though the Republicans’ convention platform includes a plant opposing abortion, period, Fisher has this to say on the subject:
“Abortion as a cause or medical procedure is being held hostage to a movement. Is this really about the sanctity of life or the exercise of uterine control or an attempt to deny white women the right to terminate a pregnancy as the number of white babies diminishes in an increasingly browning world population? If those who purport to be anti-abortion believe so reverently in life, why do so many in their ranks refuse to expend resources for children already here? How can one be pro-life and support the death penalty?”
More conventionally, she calls herself a “constitutionalist” and opposes gun control, gay marriage, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Obama himself.
State GOP Chairman Robin Hayes summed her up perfectly: “She will speak the truth, as she sees it, to power very readily. And that is a good thing. She’s not always right, but never in doubt.”