CORRECTION: Scott Stevens ran once for office under the Republican banner in Warren, in 2002, in a bid for a state House seat. He lost in an overwhelming landslide by a 67-30 percent margin.
 
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What is Warren, a solidly Democratic, blue-collar town,
doing with a right-wing-Republican on its city council? And why is he a shoo-in
for re-election on Tuesday?

Scott Stevens, the council secretary, faces only token
opposition on Election Day for an at-large seat in Michigan’s third-largest city.
Yet, he has revealed himself over the past several months on Facebook to harbor
some far-right views that certainly don’t fit the political sentiments of most
of the city’s electorate.

Beyond a penchant for quoting Fox News and radio commentator
Laura Ingraham, Stevens cites caustic conservative websites to make his
political points.

Earlier this year, he referred his Facebook readers to stories
on RighWingNews.com and LibertyFirst News.com, the latter of which bears the
motto, “Not Fair. Not Balanced. Just Truth.” A sample headline from today’s
home page: “Kid
Gets Ass Beat After Attempting to Sucker Kick During a Fair Fight
.”

This past
summer he posted a story about Black Lives Matter protesters scuffling with
police. He referred to the protesters in two words: “Turds all.”

Increasingly known for his prickly demeanor on Facebook,
Stevens engaged in a days-long Facebook fight on religious grounds in July with
a local minister while defending ultraconservative evangelical claims voiced by
the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of iconic preacher Billy Graham. The issue was the
younger Graham’s view, denounced by the minister, that Muslims have no place in
the United States unless they rebuke their “false religion.”

The councilman called the local minister, the Rev. Bill
Barnwell, “erratic” and unable to deliver a good vs. evil sermon to his Royal
Oak congregation, given his viewpoint. Barnwell, a Warren resident, fired back
by noting that “self-appointed theologian” Stevens had also posted on his
Facebook page an inaccurate news story claiming that the U.S. military embraced
bizarre new doctrines by legalizing bestiality among the armed forces.

Barnwell compared Stevens’ commentary to the member of the Republican
National Committee from Michigan, Dave Agema of Grandville, who is widely criticized
as Islamophobic and homophobic.

It should be noted that Barnwell’s wife, Lorie, is running
against one of Stevens’ political allies, incumbent city Treasurer Carolyn
Kurkowski Moceri, in Tuesday’s hottest race in Warren.   

Stevens works as an administrator for the city of Southfield,
another heavily Democratic community, and his only run for partisan office,
as a Republican, resulted in a disastrous loss. 

The bottom line: Warren has remained staunchly Democratic,
except for a brief stint of minimal GOP success in the 1990s, for more than six
decades. In recent years, what city voters haven’t realized is that they have a
Republican councilman who would be more at home in some Southern Red State than
in his hometown of Warren.