Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
President Barack Obama, responding to claims that he wasn’t born in the United States. The widely discredited charges received new life following comments by potential presidential candidate and reality TV star Donal Trump.
I think that over the last two and a half years there’s been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short-term for Republicans. But [it] creates, I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the President was born where he says he was, in Hawaii. He– he doesn’t have horns…we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or– or birth certificates.
——————————————————————————
Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, citing a source for his claim that Dearborn, Mich., has been taken over by Sharia law.
I don’t know Dearborn, Michigan but I heard it on the radio. Isn’t that true?
——————————————————————————
The chorus from a song performed at a recent religious-right gala that drew right-wing politicians like former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert to the East Texas town of Lufkin.
One nation under God, there is no separation.
——————————————————————————
Texas Freedom Network board member Rev. Larry Bethune, in a Dallas Morning News religion blog, explaining why it’s important that religious institutions support public education.
Attacks on public education have historically been religious or racist in motivation. Both of these and the universal benefit of public education make education a religious issue of high importance. All would agree our public education system needs continual repair (as do all human institutions). The wise course is to fix it, not wreck it.
——————————————————————————
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., making what appear to be inaccurate remarks about same-sex marriage, in a speech during the latest installment of the Iowa Family Leader’s presidential lecture series.
In 5,000 years of recorded human history… neither in the east or in the west… has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5,000 years of recorded human history. That’s an astounding fact and it isn’t until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.
——————————————————————————
Former Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar, arguing (in separate quotes) that anti-gay Christians must change the language the public uses when talking about homosexuality and that the fight for gay rights has powerful supporters.
Liberty is not the ability to do whatever hedonistic ideas you have. Whoever’s defining the terms is going to win the argument . . . There are a lot of gay staffers in Congress. They work all hours and they don’t have family lives, but they do have veto power.
Mr. Bethune is a man of wisdom. I know there are many, many such persons of wisdom in this country. We desperately need to hear more from them, and less from knuckleheads like Bachmann.
This is the failure of our media.
We’ve got to insist on a more intelligent discourse in our public media.