Oh, oh, oh -- now I get it. All this time former Mayor Tom Leppert sure seemed to be just a stinking hypocrite, a back-stabbing, forked-tongue phony who turned all anti-gay and old-time religious-y after leaving office and deciding to run for Senate as a Republican.
But no, ol' Tom isn't just some sleazy panderer, the sort of low-life who, as mayor, appeared in two Dallas gay pride parades, employed a gay chief of staff and sought political support from the LGBT community -- then came out against gay marriage or civil unions and sent out a tweet last year condemning the Obama administration's decision not to defend the homophobic "Defense of Marriage Act" in court.
Well, he did do all those things, but that doesn't mean he's a hypocrite. No, indeedy, because the Baptist-joining, gay-agenda-fighting Tom was always the real Tom. Turns out that when Leppert was meeting and parading with all those gay folk, he was just doing what Jesus would have done -- if Jesus were some sort of tin-horn politician.
Attacked over the weekend by his Republican Senate opponent Ted Cruz for being insufficiently anti-gay, Leppert explained that he was simply parading in Christ's footsteps. "Jesus engaged every single group when he was here on earth and I did too," Leppert said. "And what wasn't told is all the different times that I talked about my faith and went out there and every single person in this city understood exactly where I stood."
Sure, that makes sense.
When Leppert served on the board of Washington Mutual before it went belly up, he obviously was there -- like Jesus -- to condemn the corrupt money changers in the temple. And just like Jesus was willing to walk among the lepers, the lame, the blind and the whores, Tom was willing to march with the gay folk. Why, I bet that if there had been some livestock handy, Tom would have reached into those gays and cast the gay-itude right out, like Jesus did when he yanked the demons out of that possessed guy and cast them into pigs. Unfortunately there weren't any swine present at the gay pride parades.
Well, there was one there, but you can only ask your mayor to sacrifice so much.
In any case, we now knows that we were wrong. Tom Leppert is not two-faced. He's Christlike. That explains all the time he spent dividing up the city's bread among the Trinity River toll-road building crowd.
