Mark Cole (politician)

Mark L. Cole (born June 6, 1958, in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American politician of the Republican Party. Since 2002 he has been a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. He currently represents the 88th district in the Virginia Piedmont, made up of parts of Fauquier, Spotsylvania and Stafford Counties, and the City of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Cole grew up in Monticello, Kentucky. He has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering technology from the Western Kentucky University, an associate degree in computer information systems from Germanna Community College and a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Mary Washington.

After graduation from Western Kentucky University in 1980, Cole entered the United States Navy and was commissioned as an officer. He served on USS Mississippi (CGN-40) as Ordnance Officer and Assistant Combat Systems Officer. He left active duty in 1985 but continued to serve in the United States Naval Reserve where he retired as a Commander in 2004.

After leaving the Navy in 1985, Cole was employed as a systems analyst and manager by Northrop Grumman supporting the Navy at Dahlgren, Virginia until 2012. In 2013 he was hired by Spotsylvania County, Virginia as deputy county administrator.

Cole was elected to the Spotsylvania County, Virginia Board of Supervisors in 1999, where he served until 2002 when he took office in the Virginia House of Delegates. He is the chairman of the House Privileges and Elections Committee and is a member of the House Finance and Education Committees.

Cole describes himself as a fiscal and social conservative that supports individual rights while opposing tax increases. He opposed Republican initiatives to raise taxes in 2007and 2013.

Cole was criticized in February 2010 for comments made by him about his sponsorship of a bill in the House of Delegates which would ban implantation of microchips into humans by their employers:

Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State said of this on MSNBC that "the sort of paranoid strain of thinking among these folks just—it advances to meet the new technology that we have."

In 2016 he sponsored House Bill 663 requiring public restrooms to be used according to a persons anatomical sex.