Meet the Delusional Anti-LGBT GOP Candidates Who Won Super Tuesday in Texas

“Obama has a soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties. That is how he paid for his drugs,” says one.

The Loon Star State certainly lived up to its reputation on Super Tuesday — and not just because GOP Sen. Ted Cruz won Texas’ Republican presidential primary.  

A state school board candidate who believes President Barack Obama once worked as a male prostitute advanced to a runoff, while an anti-Clinton conspiracist and author who claims President George H. W. Bush is a “homosexual pedophile” and killed President John F. Kennedy (or at least knows who did) was elected chair of the local Republican Party in Austin.  

Meanwhile, an openly gay Republican county clerk in East Texas was defeated by a candidate with an extensive criminal record, after local media declined to report on her rap sheet. And GOP congressional candidate Michael Bob Starr, who was attacked by opponents for participating in military LGBT Pride runs while commanding an Air Force base, finished in third place and out of the runoff in the race to replace U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer, according to preliminary results. 

Retired teacher Mary Lou Bruner, who recently doubled down on her claim that Obama “has a soft spot for homosexuals” because he spent years as a male prostitute in his 20s, captured 47,536 votes — the most among three candidates — in the race for the District 9 seat on the State Board of Education, which sets curriculum standards for public schools throughout Texas. 

She also believes it “is a goal of United Nation’s agenda 21 and the One World Order to reduce the population of the world by 2/3.”

And Robert Morrow, who’s said Bush, Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Marco Rubio are all gay, captured 54 percent of the vote in his bid to become the next GOP chair in Travis County. However, immediately after Morrow’s victory, the vice chair of the Travis County GOP vowed to prevent him from taking over. 

“We will explore every single option that exists, whether it be persuading him to resign, trying to force him to resign, constraining his power, removing his ability to spend money or resisting any attempt for him to access data or our social media account,” Matt Mackowiak told The Texas Tribune. “I’m treating this as a coup and as a hostile takeover.”

“Tell them they can go fuck themselves,” Morrow responded, before taking the Tribune‘s reporter to task for not saying the “N-word” when asking about his use of the racial slur on social media. 

Lamar County Clerk Russ Towers, who proudly issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, would have been the first gay Republican candidate elected to public office in Texas history, after being appointed to the position last year. However, Towers was narrowly defeated by Ruth Sisson, who ran on a platform of “family values” but has written 44 bad checks totaling over $2,000, in addition to allegations that she tried to stop her daughter from dating a black man. 

“I kind of lose faith in humanity that they would hire a thief over me, but what’s done is done,” Towers told me, calling the local media’s failure to report on Sisson’s rap sheet “unfair.”

In the West Texas congressional race, Lubbock Mayor Glen Robertson, who ran a disgusting ad accusing Starr of being supported by the “radical gay lobby” — which he said includes The New Civil Rights Movement — was the top vote-getter in Congressional District 19. Robertson advances to a runoff against Jodey Arrington, who narrowly edged out Starr for second place. 

Fortunately, the news was not all bad in Texas on Super Tuesday.

Pioneering LGBT state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, (D-El Paso), survived a challenge from an anti-gay candidate who’s under investigation for voter fraud. And Dave Wilson, a longtime anti-gay activist in Houston, captured just 12 percent of the vote in his bid to unseat Democratic state Rep. Jessica Farrar, a staunch LGBT ally. 

Moderate “establishment” Republicans also fended off tea party challengers in several key races for Texas House, which amounts to a major victory for the LGBT community heading into next year’s legislative session.

But in a sign of how bad things have become in some parts of the state, rabidly anti-LGBT state Rep. Debbie Riddle, who believes public education “comes from Moscow” and has warned about “terror babies” launching sleeper cells, was defeated by a candidate who painted her as too liberal.  

 

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr and a CC license