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Edited on Tue Sep-14-04 02:37 PM by Bush_Eats_Beef
Pages 590-591, for those of you who are reading along.
:evilgrin:
Normalcy had long since disappeared from their household. In 1994 their eldest son, George Prescott Bush, had a fight with a former girlfriend and her father drove his SUV into their front yard. He was not arrested, because the girlfriend's parents did not press charges. The next year Noelle Bush, the governor's daughter, was arrested for shoplifting and paid a $305 fine. As she became more addicted to drugs, she received twelve traffic tickets in six years, including seven tickets for speeding and three for accidents. In October 2000, security guards in a Tallahassee mall parking lot caught sixteen-year-old John "Jebby" Bush with a seventeen-year-old-girl, both naked from the waist down except for Jebby's socks. A police report on the governor's son cited "sexual misconduct," but neither was charged with a crime.
"It could have been worse," his uncle George joked to an aide. "The girl could have been a boy." A few seconds later he added, "We might've picked up some gay votes with that one, huh?"
Such jokes made people wonder if George was genuinely committed to his ferocious public stands or if his proclamations were simply calculated for political gain. With an estimated 4 million gay voters in the United States, as opposed to 15 million conservatives, a cynical political could be expected to support the issues favored by the conservative majority. As a governor, George had taken a hard line against homosexuality. He said he supported the state's law against sodomy as a "symbolic gesture of traditional values." He opposed hate-crimes legislation that would have protected gays. He also opposed gay adoption and gay marriage. (As President, he came out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.) Yet he approached the former Texas state representative Glen Maxey, an openly gay Democrat, and tried to draw a line between his politics and personal feelings.
"He pulled me over really close, almost nose to nose, and said 'Glen, I like you as a person. I respect you as a human being. I want you to know that what I saw publicly about gay people doesn't apply to you."
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