Rudolph Bush of the Morning News says failed city council candidate Richard Sheridan, whose work you’re no doubt familiar with, was down at City Hall today passing out an anti-gay flier:
I’m not going to post the flier. But I’ll describe it. It was a distortion of a recent Dallas Voice front page showing the faces of three openly gay council candidates, Vernon Franko, Leland Burk and Herschel Weisfeld.
Sheridan had X’d through each of their faces and scrawled 6s on their foreheads.
“God’s voice was heard in Dallas Saturday. No openly gay LGBT City Councilmember!!” he wrote, in reference to the fact that all three lost their races. (Franko and Weisfeld ran against Adam Medrano in District 2)
Sheridan failed to write that his own bid for council came up a little short too. In fact, he managed to get 28 votes in District 13. That’s 28 votes out of 10,350 votes cast in the district. Burk lost to Jennifer Staubach Gates, but he got 3,584 votes for his effort. Or, to put it another way, Burk got 128 times the votes that Sheridan did.
Former city councilman Craig Holcomb was on hand and received one of the fliers. He addressed the council, saying that he felt obligated to speak so that Sheridan would know that the thoughts he was expressing, were “not acceptable.”
Somehow that became a discussion about limiting the rights of anyone to address the council, perhaps permitting a person to speak only once a month during the open microphone portion of the meeting. I’m not sure why they decided to consider that measure, since (from Bush’s account) it doesn’t seem that Sheridan himself spoke at the meeting.
As ugly as are the ideas that Sheridan wrote on that flier, and left in his voicemail to Dan, I get nervous whenever officials begin to decide what thoughts are and aren’t acceptable in an open public forum.
