Gay Candidate Loses Dallas Mayoral Election

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/Reuters: Gay Candidate Loses Dallas Mayoral Election
By REUTERS
Published: June 16, 2007

DALLAS (Reuters) - An openly gay candidate lost his bid on Saturday to become mayor of Dallas in a race that attracted wide attention because of his sexual orientation.

Councilman Ed Oakley lost to businessman Tom Leppert, who took 58 percent of the vote to Oakley's 42 percent, according to official returns. Oakley had the endorsement of the Democratic Party, while Leppert ran a nonpartisan campaign.

A victory by Oakley would have made him the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a Washington-based gay rights group....

One conservative group mounted a phone campaign against Oakley, mostly on the grounds of his sexual orientation, while gay rights groups cheered his candidacy.

His candidacy in the runoff election helped dispel the image of Dallas as an archconservative oil city in the heart of the U.S. Bible belt. The ninth-most populous U.S. city has about 1.2 million residents....

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-dallas-mayor-election.html

[xultar]

1. Bummer. I hope he keeps running until he gets it.

[goddess40]

2. There are two groups that it is okay to openly hate - gay's and atheists

some might add Muslim's to this group but I'm not so sure they at least would fall under the protection of freedom of religion.

[fudge stripe cookays]

3. This was a case of the lesser of two evils....

Oakley just barely qualifies as a Democrat, despite being gay.

He's a big fan of tearing down old apartments to build fancy new ones. He claims it's to "deter crime", but in many cases, it's just because he feels like they are eyesores. Never mind that leaves those poor people nowhere to live.

He was also involved in a dispute several weeks ago involving a business that had been around since the 1950s. He was trying to hoodwink the owner into giving up his land to get rid of the business because he was making deals with others over it.

I haven't been a super fan of current mayor Laura Miller since she got in, but she has been standing up for the little guy in these cases. Both were reported in the Dallas Observer by Jim Schutze the last couple weeks.