President Obama’s declaration Wednesday that he supports marriage equality for same-sex couples has religious-righters practically foaming at the mouth. Here are just a few of the comments from right-wing extremists in Texas. Dave Welch of the Houston Area Pastor Council says the president is an enemy of God: “When marriage is everything, marriage is nothing. [...]
Their failure to dictate which candidate will be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee this year doesn’t mean that religious-right leaders and activists aren’t shaping this year’s campaign. Just this week, for example, intense pressure from religious-right groups essentially forced openly gay political strategist Richard Grenell to resign from Mitt Romney’s campaign staff. A Republican adviser [...]
We got an email today from Texas State Board of Education candidate David Williams, a San Antonio Republican whose controversial Facebook post we reported about last week. We wrote that Williams had posted on the Facebook page of the Family Research Council — a group whose anti-gay rhetoric is so incendiary that the Southern Poverty [...]
Does David Dewhurst see electoral gold in politicizing Texas churches? The Texas lieutenant governor is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat Kay Bailey Hutchison is leaving after this year. On March 23 he will attend “a private briefing” with conservative pastors at a megachurch in south Houston. The right-wing Houston Area Pastor [...]
Religious-right activists in Houston have failed miserably in their efforts to undermine the city’s mayor, Annise Parker. They relentlessly attacked Parker during her successful mayoral election campaign in 2009 and re-election in 2011. In 2009, for example, they argued that the election of a lesbian mayor would lead to a “gay takeover” of City Hall [...]
How quickly they turn on you. Tom Leppert won his 2007 race for Dallas mayor after supporters attacked his main opponent for being gay. Now Leppert is under attack by his opponents in the race for a U.S. Senate seat for “celebrating gay pride” while he served as mayor. On Wednesday Leppert and other Republican [...]
Today Texas Gov. Rick Perry ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and threw his support behind former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Perry’s withdrawal from the race wasn’t a big surprise — his support in polls was very low after a series of embarrassing stumbles and gaffes over the past few [...]
Promoting fear and discrimination against gay people has long been a key political tactic on the right, and you can see in these quotes how that didn’t change much in 2011. At least overseas, that rhetoric perhaps fueled deadly anti-gay violence. Read other quotes from the far right in 2011 here. “Promoting special rights for [...]
“I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian. But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” The Texas Tribune reports that an “official familiar [...]
