Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Mark Keough, the unopposed Republican nominee for the Texas House of Representatives seat in District 15 north of Houston, continuing the religious right’s insistence that there is no separation of church and state.
It sounds crazy, because you ask, ‘where is the separation of church and state?’ You tell me. Where is separation of church and state? It’s not there. Somebody is determining the values of this culture and they are determining the values of those who hold public office, that are determining the future of your children, grandchildren and you. If the people in this position, as pastors and as Christian leaders, refuse to say anything, who is going to determine the perspective by which everybody lives, breathes and acts? The secularists, the humanists, the socialists. These are not empty words. This is what’s taking place.
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Wendy Davis, Democratic candidate for governor, explaining to Jon Stewart the recent state of affairs in Texas, and why she sees the state turning blue.
What we’ve suffered from here for quite a while is two decades of Republican-led redistricting that have created very purely drawn Republican districts and a few very purely drawn Democratic ones. So all of the conversations in elections take place during primaries. It was one of the reasons I was so committed to this race, making sure we were going to force into a general election a real conversation about the things that really mattered to people — and invite Texans to decide whether this Republican-led Legislature truly is reflective of the things that they care about.
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Ron Natinsky, Republican candidate for Dallas County Judge, in a video that has surfaced from November in which he voices his hope for keeping voters represented by Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson from voting.
We don’t want to motivate her voters. What we want them to think is “There’s no reason. She doesn’t have an opponent. I don’t need to go to the polls. I’ll go spend my food stamp money at the grocery store, or whatever, you know, on Election Day.”
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Pope Francis, declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand.”
When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.
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Frank Turek, anti-gay activist, on the American Family Association’s radio broadcast “Today’s Issues,” comparing the issue of battling gay marriage to slavery during the Civil War.
It started in South Carolina with the Civil War, as you know, for the same kind of issue: states’ rights. Obviously the issue is different. I mean, slavery was different than obviously this. But, I mean, it was a states’ rights issue.
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Pat Robertson on “The 700 Club,” not so subtly suggesting that the legal battle around Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance could lead to destruction as seen in the biblical city of Gibeah.
Benjamin had been annihilated. They had killed all the women, they had killed a good portion of the fighting men, they burned a number of their cities, it was a complete mess. Why? Because they had defended these rapist homosexuals. Is that a message for Houston? For someplace else in America?
