With a deck full of queens, it's impossible to draw a natural straight

One of the booths at the Texas Democratic Convention in Austin last weekend was manned by a group of recent University of Texas graduates who were selling their “Gay (Really Straight) Republican Hypocrite Playing Cards.”
The cards, which are also selling for $7.95 on the Web site http://gayrepublicancards.com, feature the likes of Sen. Larry Craig, preacher Ted Haggard and Florida Rep. Bob Allen. None of the 52 figures featured on the cards is from Texas.

Sanjay Bapat, one of the UT graduates, said he and his two buddies, Nathan Moore and Ryan Levey, came up with the idea for the cards in February. While Bapat, Moore and Levey are all Democrats, none of them is gay.
“We were just sitting around shooting the shit at a bar one day,” Bapat said. “The joke was, there’s enough of these guys to fill a deck of cards.”
The three showed off a pilot version of the cards at the Clinton-Obama debate in Austin earlier this year before hiring a professional graphic designer to produce them, Bapat said. They initially had 1,000 decks made, but they’ve already sold out. Bapat said they sold 600 to 700 decks at the Democratic Convention alone.
More cards are on the way, though, and Bapat is making a special offer for readers of this blog, otherwise known as Instant Tea-baggers. Bapat said that for everyone who orders a deck from the Web site and mentions Dallas Voice in the comments field, $1 of the proceeds will be donated to Equality Texas, the statewide LGBT equality group.

For more on the cards, e-mail widestance@gayrepublicancards.com. To view a sample of nine of the 52 cards, go here.