Tag Archives: Rick Perry

Could TX elect a lesbian governor?

Posted on

Mayor Annise Parker polled 40 percent against Gov. Rick Perry’s 47 percent in a Public Policy Polling poll

Public Policy Polling’s latest indicates that Texans are ready for a change in the governor’s office. The polling outfit looked at everyone from one of the LGBT community’s staunchest opponents to a member of the LGBT community.

Of Republican Primary voters, 41 percent want Gov. Rick Perry to run for another term while 47 percent want someone else. Among Texans in general, 31 percent favor another Perry term while 61 percent don’t.

Attorney General Greg Abbott is the governor’s closest opponent and trails Perry by just 3 points. But Abbott doesn’t have good name recognition. Among voters who know him, he leads 55 to 33 percent. (Abbott is perhaps best know in the LGBT community for challenging two same-sex divorces.)

The poll shows that Democrats have a better chance to taking the governor’s mansion if Perry wins the Republican Primary.

Against three Democrats, Perry would get 47 percent of the vote, according to PPP. San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro polls 42 percent, State Sen. Wendy Davis would get 41 percent and Houston Mayor Annise Parker would get 40 percent.

Castro was a strong supporter of nondiscrimination in San Antonio. Davis ran for re-election last year with support from Equality Texas and Stonewall Democrats of Tarrant County. Parker, who is lesbian, is in her second term as mayor, making Houston the largest city with an LGBT person at the helm.

None of the Democrats has indicated whether they have interest in running for governor yet. Abbott has told supporters he plans to run.

The general election will be in November 2014.

—  David Taffet

Anti-gay TX officials mum on SCOTUS’ decision to take up marriage cases

Posted on
Perry.Rick

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who championed Texas’ constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, doesn’t seem overly concerned about the Supreme Court’s decision to take a case that has the potential to strike down the amendment.

Elected officials in Texas have been silent thus far about the U.S. Supreme Court’s announcement today that it will take up two same-sex marriage cases — one challenging California’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and the other challenging the Defense of Marriage Act’s prohibition on federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

If the high court were to issue a broad ruling declaring California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional, it could have implications for Texas’ amendment banning same-sex marriage. But strangely, as far as we can tell, the biggest supporters of the amendment — who include Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples and Attorney General Greg Abbott — haven’t said a word about today’s announcement, not even on Twitter.

Continue reading “Anti-gay TX officials mum on SCOTUS’ decision to take up marriage cases” »

—  John Wright

Obama hasn’t replied to TX secession petition, but Rep. Garnet Coleman has

Posted on

Garnet Coleman

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, a staunch LGBT ally who also happens to be African-American, sent out the below statement on Wednesday — complete with the image above — responding to a now-infamous petition we mentioned the other day calling for the White House to allow Texas to secede. Perhaps President Barack Obama should incorporate some of Coleman’s remarks into his own response to the petition. We’d especially recommend this paragraph:

The online petition, which currently has around 60,000 signatures and counting, is unfortunately not surprising. Ever since the election of this country’s first black president, there has been a surge of  rhetoric that had mostly lied dormant since the Civil War and subsequent Jim Crow era. After the election of President Obama, however, Governor Perry, whose hunting ranch was named “Niggerhead” until just recently, openly hinted at secession, and we spent much of last session talking about things like “states’ rights,” including a “Committee on State Sovereignty” and a House Resolution incorrectly asserting the state’s “rights under the Tenth Amendment.” This kind of rhetoric needs to end.

Read Coleman’s full statement below.

Continue reading “Obama hasn’t replied to TX secession petition, but Rep. Garnet Coleman has” »

—  John Wright

Oops: HuffPo killed story about Rick Perry gay rumors after lawsuit threat

Posted on

Brokeback Perry

Just as former Texas state Rep. Glenn Maxey alleged at the time, Huffington Post killed a story about allegations that Gov. Rick Perry is a closeted homosexual because the Perry campaign threatened the news website with a lawsuit. According to BuzzFeed, the Perry campaign said it would own “a big chunk of AOL” if the site published the story.

At the time, the Huffington Post claimed Maxey just had no evidence and dropped the story after sending a journalist to Texas to work with the former state representative.

Instead, Maxey published his evidence in a book, Head Figure Head: The Search for the Hidden Life of Rick Perry.

Perry hired scandal-fixer Lin Wood. Wood is an attorney who has represented a number of other people caught in scandals such as the parents of Jon-Benet Ramsey, Rep. Gary Condit (suspected in the disappearance of aide Chandra Levy) and security guard Richard Jewell (suspected in the Atlanta Olympics bombing).

Now, Texas Tribune reporter Jay Root has a new e-book out called Oops! about Perry’s failed presidential campaign, in which Root details the threat of the lawsuit.

Elsewhere in the book Root talks about how campaign aides blamed the governor’s disastrous “oops” moment on sleep apnea. Perry had not been sleeping and his sleep disorder had been undiagnosed for years. We’re not sure if they’re suggesting now that he’s sleeping better thanks to a CPAP machine, he’s a more coherent and better governor.

Regardless, none of this explains the similarities among sources’ descriptions of alleged sexual encounters with Perry detailed in Maxey’s book. Oops.

Nor does it explain the campaign’s decision to air the Brokeback Perry ad that rapidly became the most disliked video in YouTube history.

UPDATE: Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, contacted us to clarify that the story was not published because sources wouldn’t go on record fully before Perry’s campaign exploded.

“If they had gone on record, we would have run with the story,” Grim said.

—  David Taffet

Texas A&M fans live up to stereotypes with sexist, anti-gay signs

Posted on

The above image is from Saturday’s broadcast of ESPN’s College GameDay, which was in College Station for Texas A&M’s Southeastern Conference football debut against Florida. Full disclosure: I’m a Florida alum and a Gator fan, but even from an objective standpoint, could Aggie fans possibly do anything more to live up to stereotypes about conservative, redneck, homophobic, misogynistic Texas? I guess it’s hard when your most famous yell leader is Gov. Rick Perry, who has himself declared political war on gays and women, but aren’t young people supposed to be different on LGBT issues? Also, who won that game again? Oh yeah, my “Gay-tors”!!!

—  John Wright

A year after launching presidential campaign, Gov. Perry returns to Iowa

Posted on

Believe it or not, it was one year ago this past Saturday when Texas Gov. Rick Perry formally announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

As if to commemorate the anniversary, Perry was back in Iowa this weekend to stump for Mitt Romney and, as it turned out, Paul Ryan.

Perry even visited the Iowa State Fair, where the infamous photo above was taken at about this time last year. He later addressed the anti-gay Family Leader group, and it’s pretty clear Perry hasn’t learned any lessons from his presidential campaign, when his attempts at gay-baiting backfired so miserably.

From The Dallas Morning News:

Perry, who fell to Romney in the GOP presidential race, spent Saturday visiting voters at the Iowa State Fair and then speaking to a gathering of several hundred Christian conservatives at a summit sponsored by the Family Leader, a conservative group active in politics, at a megachurch west of Des Moines.

“There’s a war against religion. There’s a war against people of faith in this country,” Perry told the crowd at Point of Grace Church. “There is something wrong with America when our popular culture is afraid to offend atheists and all too ready to attack people of faith.”

Perry cited the administration’s embrace of gay marriage and the requirement that religiously affiliated employers provide birth control as part of their insurance coverage.

The Associated Press reports that Perry even took the opportunity to comment on the recent Chick-fil-A controversy:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says “political correctness has to stop,” citing the flap over Chick-fil-A and opposition to same-sex marriage as an example. …

He said that when Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy defended “the sanctity of marriage, the left went nuts.”

According to his prepared remarks, Perry continued: “When conservatives are offended by a corporate policy, we simply choose not to give them our business.”

He added that offended liberals “try to keep everyone else from giving them business.”

All I can say is that’s it too bad Chick-fil-A doesn’t sell corn dogs, because I see a great potential advertising campaign here: You have Gov. Perry sporting the Brokeback Mountain jacket he wore in that “Strong” ad, striking the above pose with a corn dog.

The slogan?

“Eat Mor Dik.”

—  John Wright

Public Policy Polling: Perry particularly unpopular

Posted on

Gov. Rick Perry in a parody of his "Brokeback" video

If a Public Policy Polling poll is correct, Rick Perry may be in his last term in office.

According to PPP, only 29 percent of Texas voters think Perry should run for governor again in 2014 and fewer still — just 19 percent — think he should run for president again.

The ever-resilient governor could still win another term in Austin, however. Of Republicans polled, 49 percent would like to see the governor run again.

With his campaign only suspended, Perry is still technically running for president and will appear on the Texas primary ballot. His campaign was marked by gaffes and insults and his “Brokeback” YouTube video remains one of the most “unliked” on the site.

The poll found that Texans think LBJ was the best of the Texas presidents with 39 percent. George W. Bush is next at 22 percent and his father gets 19 percent. That adds up to only 80 percent. Possibly the other 20 percent polled couldn’t stomach any of them.

Although George H.W. Bush was the least great Texas president, he has the highest favorability rating at 54 percent. People like him — out of office.

Kay Bailey Hutchison had an approval rating of 50 percent. Interesting she did so miserably in the race against the governor. Guess he wasn’t so unpopular before he ran for president.

—  David Taffet

Doc on “Corpus Christi” controversy to open

Posted on

A documentary about the 108 Productions’ run of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi will premiere on April 29.

An online petition by the right-wing Catholic site America Needs Fatima has drawn over 7,000 signatures to date calling on the Castro Theater in San Francisco to cancel the engagement. It calls Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption blasphemy.

In 2010, a student at Tartleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, planned to present a scene from the play as the final for his master’s level stage directing class. The presentation would not have been open to the public. However, an uproar about the presentation ended with its cancellation after pressure from the offices of Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who is now running for U.S. Senate.

That summer, 108 Productions brought the play to Cathedral of Hope in Dallas.

The play portrays Jesus as a gay man in Texas in the 1950s.

The opening of the movie will launch the I AM Love Campaign, whose mission is to change the story on religious bullying and homophobia, in all ages and walks of life, by first learning to love the self.

See a sneak preview below.

Continue reading “Doc on “Corpus Christi” controversy to open” »

—  David Taffet

Gov. Rick Perry brought down the house at the Gridiron Dinner, so why are we not laughing?

Posted on
Gov. Rick Perry

Gov. Rick Perry

Texas Gov. Rick Perry sure is popular in Washington among reporters after his appearance at the annual Gridiron Dinner. In fact, the governor did so well that reporters are fawning all over him and talking about how he revived his career and made everything OK.

He did have some great one-liners.

In what was probably not a self-conscious reference to Glen Maxey’s book alleging Perry is a closeted homosexual, one of the governor’s one-liners was: “I like Mitt Romney as much as one really good looking man can like another really good looking man under Texas law.”

Arianna Huffington’s favorite Perry line was, in a reference to the governor’s major at Texas A&M, “Animal husbandry is what Santorum thinks happens after gay marriage.”

But are great one-liners a reason to elect Perry president or re-elect him governor? The Dallas Morning News seems to think so.

The DMN called the Perry performance “star caliber” and asked whether this 10-minute speech could be the silver bullet that turns his national image around.

That’s something I’d expect from out-of-state media that don’t really cover Perry. The best part of Perry’s speech was that he wasn’t at home doing damage. Ask the 130,000 women who are going to lose their healthcare next month because Perry doesn’t want Planned Parenthood to provide the gynecological exams and mammograms they could not otherwise afford. Glad he got some laughs, but I doubt many of these women are laughing.

And did we ever figure out how to fund Texas public schools? I know we didn’t tap the Rainy Day Fund and certainly no taxes were raised. Yup, lots of laughs, and Perry’s a hit. Unfortunately, Texas school children will have to suffer. Interesting that it’s the gay paper with nary a school child among us that has to point those things out.

—  David Taffet

Planned Parenthood official urges WHP clients to schedule appointments before funding cutoff

Posted on

Cecile Richards

To exclude Planned Parenthood from receiving any state funds, Gov. Rick Perry says Texas will stop accepting federal money for the Women’s Health Program.

The federal government contributes 90 percent of the funding for the program for low-income women. The governor said he will replace that money — about $30 million — with existing state funds.

According to Kelly Hart, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of North Texas, although the rule goes into effect today, PPNT was told it will be reimbursed through April 30.

“So call and schedule to get your annual now while you can,” Hart said.

Planned Parenthood national President Cecile Richards was in Dallas last weekend for a protest against the cuts.

The program affected, the Women’s Health Program, is for women 18–45 who are not on Medicaid, but would be if they become pregnant. It covers about 130,000 women a year in Texas.

Hart said there would be a huge cost to the state if these women become pregnant and that Texas already spends more than $2 billion a year on Medicaid births.

Continue reading “Planned Parenthood official urges WHP clients to schedule appointments before funding cutoff” »

—  David Taffet