Cecil Bothwell

Cecil Bothwell (born 16 October 1950) is an American politician, writer, artist, musician and builder. Bothwell was elected to the Asheville, North Carolina city council in 2009 and reelected in 2013, but lost in the 2017 primary, coming in 7th out of 12 candidates.

In 2011, Bothwell announced he would challenge U.S. Representative Heath Shuler in the Democratic primary for North Carolina's 11th congressional district in the 2012 U.S. House of Representatives election. On May 8, 2012, he lost the Democratic primary to Hayden Rogers by a margin of 55–30 percent.

Early life and career Bothwell was born in 1950 in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Winter Park High School lived in several states and held several jobs in the area of Asheville, North Carolina. Bothwell moved to Buncombe County, North Carolina in 1981 to work in construction with an emphasis on environmental building.

Following Bothwell's loss in the 2017 election, Joel Burgess, reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times, wrote a retrospective on his years shaping the Asheville political scene.

Local politics In 2008, Bothwell ran unsuccessfully for the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, and ran for the Asheville, North Carolina city council in 2009, winning the most votes in the October 6 primary election. He stated that he favored the public financing of elections and would support its implementation as a city council member. Fliers mailed to voters before the election criticized Bothwell for his nontheism. Following the election, opponents of Bothwell, including H. K. Edgerton, a former president of the Asheville NAACP, challenged his election because the Constitution of North Carolina does not allow for atheists to hold public office in the state. The Supreme Court of the United States held in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) that such provisions violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Bothwell began his service with an affirmation of the oath of office.

Consequent to the well-publicized challenge to his investiture in office, Bothwell was named the most Courageous Elected Official of 2010 by the American Atheists. He became a frequent speaker at humanist, secular and atheist conferences across the U.S., speaking in dozens of cities in 12 states and Washington D.C. in ensuing years.

In 2011, he announced his intent to challenge blue dog Congressman Heath Shuler in the 2012 Democratic primary. When Shuler declined to run for reelection under the new Republican-drawn redistricted maps, Bothwell stayed in the race, coming in second in a three-way primary behind Schuler's chief of staff, Hayden Rogers, who in turn, was defeated by Mark Meadows in the general election.

Bothwell was reelected to city council in 2013.

On June 19, 2014, Bothwell was pulled over after a state highway patrol officer noticed he was driving a car with no license plate, The arresting officer denied he knew who was in the vehicle before it was pulled over and claimed Bothwell was cooperative. This might be considered a surprising rebuke, given that Bothwell had been tapped as the #1 local politician in the local weekly Mountain Xpress reader poll in 7 of the 8 years he served on Council, falling to #2 in 2017. Bothwell's successor, Indian-American businessman Vijay Kapoor, was sworn into office on December 7, 2017.