Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Texas state Sen. Bob Deuell, R-Greenville, on the vitriol of some abortion opponents last session preventing the state from pursuing good policy decisions on women’s health care.
A lot of people really felt they got snookered by some of the people in the pro-life movement about that family planning issue.
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Gov. Rick Perry, equating the Boy Scouts’ anti-gay policies to the stand against slavery.
[Texas Gov. Sam Houston] made a powerful decision that cost him his governorship. He was against slavery, and he stood up and very passionately said ‘Texas does not need to leave the union over this issue of slavery.’ But that’s the type of principled leadership, that’s the type of courage that I hope people across the country [will show] on this issue of scouts and keeping the Boy Scouts the organization that it is today.
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Rev. Mark Greiner, a Presbyterian pastor quoted in a column on Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay members.
I find it perplexing the way the ‘moral values’ phrase is used. Concern for the environment, concern for workers’ rights: those are moral values. But the phrase ends up being limited to matters of human sexuality, as if Jesus was primarily concerned with what people did with their reproductive parts. It’s crazy-making.
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Rodney Fleck, one of a group of Santa Clauses who gathered at the state Capitol in support of the “Merry Christmas” bill.
We hope we have some clout.
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Gary Brown, head of the Idaho-based group Reach America, which features teens saying they will build “an army” commanded by Christ.
There is a lot of bullying directed at Christian kids in public schools and the culture at large. So many teenagers are being ostracized for being a Christian.
It is too bad that the Christian fundamentalist and conservative evangelical children get caught in the cross fire created by the hatreds of their parents—and it is hatred. They believe that hatred of evil is a virtue. The trouble is that they believe that all people on Earth, except for they themselves, are evil. They have lost all ability to see the evil within themselves, and that will be their undoing in the end.