There are many threads, too many, in fact to present in a real story format without simply copying and pasting this excellent piece in the Texas Tribune. Neither their headline or ours really can truly capture the breadth and depth of the stunning anti-LGBTQ hypocrisy and outright fascism of the Harris County, Texas GOP’s former leader. So here’s our best shot at laying this all out:
Paul Presler is a 92 year-old retired justice of the Texas 14th Circuit Court of Appeals, who was George HW Bush’s pick to lead the Office of Government Ethics in 1989 but withdrew due to… ethics issues. In his religious life, Pressler was instrumental in leading the Southern Baptist Convention’s hard right turn in the 1980s as a power broker and later in 2002 Vice President of the denomination, including the 1979 election of hardcore homophobe Anita Bryant as president of the SBC.
Surprise, Pressler likes boys, and in 2017 was accused of sexually molesting a teenager for years in a lawsuit that’s still ongoing. His law partner is former Harris County, Texas GOP chair Jared Woodfill, a hardcore homophobe whose resume includes helping to defeat an LGBTQ rights ordinance in Houston, representing 117 Houston Methodist Hospital workers who were fired after refusing to get vaccinated for COVID, and defending the crazy asshole conservative activist who paid a former police captain to nearly kill an innocent HVAC repairman they thought was driving around in a truck full of fake ballots in the weeks before the 2020 election. Yeah.
Anyway, Woodfill recently gave a sworn deposition in the case, telling the plaintiff’s attorneys that he had known about Pressler’s predatory behavior since 2004 – while Pressler was working at Woddfill’s firm. It gets even better: “Rather than pay him a salary, Woodfill testified, the firm provided Pressler a string of employees to serve as personal assistants, most of them young men who typically worked out of his River Oaks mansion,” the Tribune writes with a bit of underemphasis.
In 2016, just a year before the lawsuit was filed by a former member of a Baptist youth group led by Pressler, Woodfill received an email from a 25 year-old lawyer who was disturbed after a lunch with Pressler, saying Old Man Pressler had told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and invited the young lawyer to go skinny-dipping at his secluded ranch.
Woodfill was shocked and indignant, replying “This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of,” even though he did in fact know full well at the time that his law partner’s ranch was the Neverland type.
In conclusion, libs are groomers.