ustxtxb_obs_2002_07_05_50_00015-00000_000.pdf

asked questions about pedophilia,” by delegates, one caucus member said. While it is a generally accepted fact that a considerable percentage of Catholic priests are gay, there is no correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia. Which is to say, you should expect to find roughly the same proportion of pedophiles in the ten percent of the U.S. population that is gay, research has found, as you would among the ninety percent who are heterosexual. CLOSING THE MANHOOD GAP Democratic Comptroller candidate and former UT football star Marty Akins has not gotten as much of the limelight as his supporters feel he deserves, so they must have been gratified when convention planners allowed him a full fifteen minutes for his multi-media onslaught on the delegates Saturday morning. Akins had not one but two introductions \(one from a former teammate, one the grainy video biography, which definitely benefited by being shown before Ron Kirk’s Madison Avenue job, and not after. The sound wasn’t the greatest on Marty’s version, but at one point his junior high football coach could be heard to reminisce about “Marty’s manhood” which, according to the notes of at least one reporter, the old man reported to be Akins’ “biggest asset” or something very similar. After the video came what sounded like two renditions of the UT fight song, but may have been one continuous playing interrupted in the middle for no apparent reason, after which Akins seized the podium like it was a tackling dummy and said, “I’m Marty Akins, and I’m back in the game.” The whole thing came to a climax with Marty tossing a genuine leather football to a couple of plants in the audience, followed by his crew loosing a slew of little plastic footballs, some of them propelled at formidable velocity, particularly con sidering the age of some of the delegates seated nearest the press table, and one of which is now on my desk. As Darrel Royal used to say: Outstanding effort. HIT A NERVE Our story about John Cornyn’s high school infatuation with seems to have hit a nerve. Tim Shorrock, who attended high school with Cornyn and wrote the piece, received a call from Cornyn campaign spokesman David Beckwith. He politely requested copies of Cornyn’s high school newspaper stories, which Shorrock had quoted. The campaign also called another high school classmate to confirm the story. During his farewell speech at the convention, Carlos Truan, the retiring dean of the state senate, mentioned the story as part of an extended list of reasons he is proud to be a Democrat. Truan’s speeches have been called a lot of things: unscripted, improvisational, postmodern, even, in their non-linear structure; what an honor to be included in one of his last. JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED In a final burst of activity before closing shop for the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a slew of decisions last month, the most widely publicized of which outlawed the death penalty for men tally retarded defendants. The Court also issued a decision in a case the Observer has closely followed over the years: Weslaco attorney Jennifer Harbury’s long quest for justice following the 1992 disappearance and subsequent murder of her husband, Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, whose nom de guerre was Comandante Everardo court ruled 9-0 that Harbury had not established a claim for denial of access to the courts. In 1996 Harbury filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Washington, D.C., against former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other high-level Clinton administration officials, charging that had it not been for the government’s pattern and practice of lying to her about her husband’s whereabouts in a clandestine Guatemalan prison, she might have been able to go to court to save his lifeby ordering the CIA to properly supervise the Guatemalan CIA assets who were torturing him. The narrow decision, written by Justice Souter, included a lengthy discussion of the right of access to courts and reverses the decision of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which had ruled in Harbury’s favor. The case now goes back to U.S. District Court Judge Colleen KollarKotelly for a decision on pending non-constitutional claims. Editorial, continued from page 3 Which raises another question: How will the Republicans respond? It’s not that they haven’t seen this coming for years. But their eleventh-hour overtures to Hispanics in Texas have been justifiably ridiculed, and their single best argumentWhat have the Dems done for you lately?will ring a little hollow if the governor is from Laredo next year. Which raises the disturbing specter, already rearing its ugly head in Phil Gramm’s farewell spleen-venting in Dallas, that the Texas R’s will go the Pete Wilson route. They may try, in other words, to stave off their eventual obsolescence for a few years more by making themselves the White People’s Party. Some would say, of course, that they are already doing that, and they’d be right. But look at the history of California in the 1990s, and you’ll see that racial politics can get a lot worse. How much worse? Let’s hope we don’t find out. N.B. 7/5/02 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 15