Tag Archives: Texas Anti-Gay Politicians

Bye FeLEGEcia: A 2015 Texas Legislative Wrap-Up

Ok everyone sing it with me…

Ding Dong The Lege is Dead!  

Which Ole Lege?  The TEXAS Lege!  

Ding Dong The Texas Lege is DEAD!!

Though I guess it’s up to your point of view on just how wicked it turned out to be.

We’ll turn to Ross Ramsey of The Texas Tribune to give a proper summation…

It was clear after the 2014 elections that Texas voters were sending a conservative political cohort to Austin. It turned out that the officeholders they elected had different ideas about what that meant, and that this group — no real surprise here — could alternately quarrel and cooperate about as well as most of its predecessors.

In the process, issues that might have seemed black and white during the elections were rendered in shades of gray during the session.

It started right out of the gate: On the first day of the legislative session, a group of advocates for legalized open carry of handguns blustered into the Capitol to talk to members. They were so obnoxious about it that their bill — one of the virtual certainties coming out of the elections — didn’t pass until the final weekend 20 weeks later.

Before the session, even Democrats like Wendy Davis were in favor of open carry. After the over-enthusiastic supporters were done, even the sure bets were shaky. It finally did pass, however, along with legislation that will allow licensed Texans to carry concealed handguns on some parts of the campuses of state colleges and universities.

The $209.4 billion state budget, often a source of deep rancor and infighting, turned out to be relatively easy to put together. It helped that the year began with $17 billion uncommitted in the comptroller’s forecast of available money. The people who write political bumper stickers hate it when the superlative is “responsible,” but that word is already popping up in the news releases coming from the state’s leaders.

Of course it’s important to note that the fudge-it budget does nothing to address the state’s growing healthcare needs, still sold many schoolchildren short on their education, and barely took a bite out of the rapid declination of Texas road infrastructure.  If you’re looking for a source to classify this state budget as “responsible”, you’re not going to find it on Texas Leftist.  Choosing not to set fire to house is very different from taking steps to prevent fires from happening.

It’s fair to say that local control got torched.  The Legislature successfully eroded power from the citizens of Denton, and allowed fracking to resume in the city after banning the ability of municipalities to ban any form of extraction.  The unprecedented overreach had a special tier of irony given how most of the elected Republicans at the Capitol have built their careers on protests against sweeping big government action.

Congratulations Denton… If Governor Greg “Grab It” Abbott has his way, your votes will get swept under the rug.

Even with this terrifying result, it could have been much worse, given some of the other bills that were filed to obliterate municipal and county powers.  So as the court battles play out with Frack Free Denton, the issue of local control now comes in to question for future legislative sessions.

This is the bad news, but there were some highlights.  Texas Democrats proved an incredible force to protect much of policy that families across the state depend on.  They successfully defended an assault on in-state tuition, supported infrastructure investment, and defeated dozens of TEA-CON bills that would have eradicated local protections for LGBT citizens.  Of course on that last point, it’s important to note that a broad coalition within the state supports LGBT equality, so it’s far from a partisan cause.  One huge highlight of the 2015 session?  We now have a sense for just how broad that support is, and how successfully they can gather up resources.

So yeah… the things we learned in the 2015 Texas Legislative Session:

1) Don’t count your chickens before they’re fracked.

2) College Professors might think twice before failing their students, especially the ones packin’ heat.

3) The only Medicaid Expansion Texas can hope for is expanded lines at the E.R.

Bye FeLEGEcia… see you in 2017.  

 

 

Texas’ Top Anti-Gay Lobbyist Possibly Motivated by Personal Vendetta

Texas is known for being a Conservative state, but recent moves against the LGBT community have seemed to defy Conservative principles, and look more like open discrimination.  There may be a common connection for why GOP lawmakers are ramping up the hate rhetoric.  Here’s the story from Lone Star Q

Mere months before Jonathan Saenz became president of the anti-gay group Texas Values, his wife left him for another woman, according to Hays County district court records obtained by Lone Star Q.

The revelation could help explain Saenz’s seemingly abrupt transformation from socially conservative lobbyist to homophobic firebrand.

Saenz, a devout Catholic, has been a right-wing operative in Texas for many years — working on abortion and religious liberty cases as a staff attorney for the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute as far back as 2005.

However, it wasn’t until recently that Saenz emerged as one of the state’s best-known — and most extreme — anti-LGBT voices.

Court records indicate that Saenz’s ex-wife […] is a member of the LGBT community who was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Saenz in August 2011.

In early 2012, with their divorce still pending, Saenz would take the helm of Texas Values after the organization spun off from the Liberty Legal Institute, where he’d risen to chief lobbyist.

With Saenz as president, Texas Values has led the charge against not only same-sex marriage, but also passage of LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in San Antonio and Houston. In fighting the ordinances, Saenz has often repeated the debunked right-wing myth that sexual predators would use the laws to prey on women and children in bathrooms.

Saenz helped push an amendment to the 2014 Texas GOP platform endorsing the discredited practice of gay conversion therapy. In media interviews, Saenz has stated that same-sex marriagewill lead to polygamy and people marrying their stepchildren, and suggested that gay activists want to put Christians in concentration camps. Last week, Texas Values filed an amicus curiae brief calling on a federal appeals court to overturn a district judge’s decision striking down the state’s marriage bans.

The information obtained by Lone Star Q is public record, as any divorce decree would be.  John Wright, the author of the article and editor of Lone Star Q, has received criticism for revealing such personal details about Saenz’s family, especially in regard to the naming of the activist’s wife, and the former couple’s children.  Though I salute the work done by Wright on this story, I too believe that it is never acceptable to involve innocent family members in the matter, as they cannot and should not be held responsible for actions solely attributed to Mr. Saenz.  Texas Leftist has chosen to redact names where appropriate.

But for the issue at hand, this research is proving an important piece to understand the possible motivations behind Saenz’s work, and the drastic turn he and his Texas Values organization have taken against Texans. If someone’s personal event causes such a behavioral shift that it leads them to persecute an entire community, that community then has the right to defend itself by exposing knowledge of said events.  His personal vendetta, no matter how painful, cannot be used to harm people who have done nothing wrong.

And harm is what is being caused here.   The very same untruths that Jonathan Saenz fights for are the ones used to justify discrimination, bullying, gay bashing, and a whole host of other atrocities.  Texas is too great a state to continue to openly and proudly sanction these hate-filled beliefs. Hopefully this November, Texans will realize that they don’t have to listen to Jonathan Saenz, and instead choose to vote for politicians that stand on the side of equality.