Ah, here's a photo from the past! Well, no, actually it isn't here. It's in the latest number of The Texas Observer. It is captioned Ann Richards swearing in Glen Maxey in 1991. It is by Alan Pogue. He's always everywhere in Austin.
How appropriate. When I wrote a letter to This Week in Texas with which Maxey disagreed, he wrote back that I was not even registered to vote. Immediately after I replied with my registration certificate number, my voter registration was canceled by Bill Foster, a Maxey crony who worked in the Travis County Tax Assessor office.
Peas in a pod, they were, Ann Richards and Glen Maxey. Somehow there is not a photo of Ann Richards signing the Texas (Anti-)Sodomy statute into law. I imagine Maxey was not far in the background, smiling.
The law is still on the books of course. For the moment it is an unconstitutional dead letter. But if Bush gets another Supreme Court appointment — not entirely unlikely — it may be law again.
You see, there is money to be made writing snarky books about the Bushes. And then there are black-tie dinners to attend with the Bushes. You only have to watch US House Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, running in the other direction the first time a resolution to stop the war comes up to realize: There is no such thing as a so-called Progressive who really means it. And so you see that picture "Ann Richards swearing in Glen Maxey" in The Texas Observer. They both, in their own ways, cut the ground from under the human rights movement in Texas. And that does not bother anyone. (Well, except me.) They were just playing a game.
