Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a national organization that works to counter the effects of ex-gay counseling or reparative therapy promoted by many churches, on a Michigan bill that would allow counselors to refuse to help LGBT clients.
This would set a very dangerous precedent. If the Christian therapist can reject gay clients, why can’t a fundamentalist mail carrier elect not to deliver letters advertising concerts for the Gay Men’s Chorus?
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Dan Quinn, communications director for the Texas Freedom Network, on Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment of religious-right board member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, as chair of the State Board of Education.
Once again, he is putting politics ahead of the education of Texas students by installing an ideologue in the chairman’s seat. Just like the governor’s two previous appointees as chair, Ms. Cargill has worked since her election to the board to promote her own personal beliefs rather than facts and sound scholarship in our kids’ classrooms.
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Houston’s openly lesbian Mayor Annise Parker, using an anti-gay activist’s letter that attacks her sexual orientation to raise funds for her re-election campaign.
Your contribution will help me win re-election and show David Wilson and narrow-minded bigots everywhere that anti-gay attacks don’t work and have no place in a civilized society.
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Kansas Equality Coalition Chairman Thomas Witt, criticizing Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback for accepting an invitation to attend next month’s prayer and fasting event hosted by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the hate group the American Family Association.
There are a lot of people in this state that are outraged that our governor would attend an event hosted by a group that blames gays and lesbians for the Holocaust and for Hurricane Katrina.The AFA’s mission is to smear and vilify the LGBT community, we do not think it’s appropriate for our governor to go to something like this.
