First, I pray I can lead as well as I write. Now I write.

It is late to be reaching out, but late is better than not at all, and the stakes are just too high. I write to request your assistance. I am, as you may or may not know, the Republican candidate for Mayor in Bridgeport.

My campaign is about G-d, Fatherhood and Family. It is about Truth. It is about liberal democratic values. It is about strengthening and restoring the great Republic left to us by our nation's founders.

As religious people, we understand that it is our Judaeo-Christian values that have brought us to this wonderous age: the sacrifice of this moment for future glory, the cleaving of man to his wife, their integration into a community, that community integrated in a nation with a great public purpose: to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

We further understand that while there would be no religion established by and for the state, this country was religious: &8220;These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.&8221; Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).

I deal now with two implications of this. We understand that there is a truth: our job is to seek and speak and defend that truth. We further understand that there is a G-d-given order. It begins with Adam and Eve, cloven from one, cleaving together, a partnership formed both to negotiate with and steer the world.

I assert that it is the denial of these fundamental points that causes so much of the suffering in this world. Whether it is Marx, Marcuse or Derrida, our state has actually taken on a religion, a self-abnegating ethic sounding in toxic patriarchies, simplistic oppressor-oppressed narratives (the binary Derrida derided?), the celebration of a narcissistic, hedonistic, one-person view of the world.

It is no wonder that we have become unmoored. Our children do not grow up. College men have become college kids. Or children are forced to grow up long before their time, raising themselves, often because their parents are also still children. We have been too-often trained by our government (shouldn't it be the other way around?) to look to it for our maintenance and support losing sight along the way that we can plot our own course. We are told to disbelieve what was once clear. A boy can be a girl, and vice-versa. History, tradition, your parents and their silly religion can go in the trash heap.

We start to angle for rights, but those are not negotiated against our duties. In short, we have given up the guidance that brought us hither. But it is not too late. You still stand in the breach, calling our youth back to duty, and therewith to a life of accomplishment and satisfaction.

Too many chase money, sex, and other temporary pleasures.

As is clear to us, partnership with another human in the right time and place and with G-d, always with G-d, brings a satisfaction far beyond sex and money, though we get more of those as well.

This is the basis of my campaign. It is time to get government out of the business of false religions and to return that to you.

My intent as mayor is to return government to its core function, providing security and administering and developing the public space, and to return to the shepherd his flock.

I am not asking for your endorsement, especially from the pulpit.

However, I can ask you to remind your parishioners that there is an election on Tuesday, and their vote matters. I can also ask you to ask them to look at the candidates. Who does best reflect their values? Who celebrates their power to create and be in this world? Who instead treats them as so many votes to be harvested only to be ignored afterwards?

If we want the shootings to end, if we want our boys to grow up to be strong men, partners, builders, then we must bring them back to our core values.

It starts here, now, with this election.