Terry McAuliffe.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Journalist Michael Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as when a politician accidentally tells the truth. By that standard, Democrat Terry McAullife committed a gaffe in the Virginia gubernatorial debate on Tuesday night.

Challenged by Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin about his veto of a bill giving parents the right to demand alternatives to sexually explicit course materials, McAuliffe said, "I'm not going to let parents come into schools, take books out, and make their own decisions ... I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.