«YES, I LOVE TEXAS»

Some local news stories go nationwide and cause a national alarm, and some simply go nationwide and then sink underwater unnoticed. But on the very rare occasion, a news story goes nationwide and is received with a double take and a "come again?".That's what happened when Houston became the biggest city in the US last week to elect an openly gay mayor, Annise Parker. Yes, that would be Houston, Texas – the largest city in a state that's assumed worldwide to be nothing but a hot bed of gun-toting, Bible-thumping rightwing reactionaries. Obviously, it's time for the rest of the world to start taking a more complex view, and start thinking of Texas as more than the home of George W Bush. The election inadvertently revealed the dirty little secret that native (and liberal) Texans like myself have known and been trying to publicise for a long time, which is that Texas is far from a conservative monolith. On the contrary; not only do all the major cities in Texas vote consistently for Democrats, but some rural areas on the Texas-Mexican border have been marginal to consistently "blue" for some time now.

The Guardian
Dec 15 2009