Aggies John Scroggs and Paul Robles exchanged commitment vows at Bryan's Messina Hof winery in 2003. Five years later, they legally married on the steps of San Francisco's ornate City Hall. Gay marriage motivated two Texas A&M academics, Clair Nixon and Jeff Puryear, to donate thousands of dollars to invalidate 18,000 same-sex nuptials perfomed in California, including Scroggs and Robles'.

Second in a Series.

The Century Oak‘s arching limbs form a natural grotto, a shaded refuge of tranquility on Texas A&M’s bustling campus of 48,000 students.  For generations, students proposed marriage under this hallowed canopy.  Thus, in April of 2002, it was only natural that John Scroggs would invite a very special fellow Aggie to accept perpetual commitment in this sacred place where so many of his classmates began their lives together.  In this story, however, cherished tradition takes a hard left turn.

Scroggs’ chosen life partner was another gay man, Paul Robles, also a student and fellow university employee.  Since Texas A&M’s inception in 1876, throughout its first nine decades as an all-male, military college, and after women were allowed to enroll in 1963, Aggieland love stories followed the traditional plot:  boy meets girl.  When John took his broken computer to Paul for repair in 1998, boy meets boy was still a hostile concept at a university that, in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, had fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid certification of a gay student organization.

In May of 2003, almost five years after they met and one year since they proposed, John and Paul exchanged commitment vows before their parents and one hundred invited guests at Messina Hof vineyards in Bryan. In the years that followed, they bought and sold their first house, and then purchased another—as they each continued to climb the professional ladder as A&M administrative employees.

Paul Robles his new mother-in-law, Rae Scroggs, celebrate the commitment ceremony of Paul and John on May 3, 2003.

When California’s Supreme Court invalidated Proposition 22 in May of last year, the couple saw an opportunity to elevate their relationship to the same level of legality that heterosexual couples enjoy.  Before Texas A&M history professor James Rosenheim, who had officiated some five years earlier, they stood on the interior staircase of San Francisco’s Beaux Arts-inspired City Hall during the early morning hours of August 26, 2008 and became legally wedded—if only by the laws of California.

As John and Paul spoke their marriage vows, a decade after they met, they were aware of millions of dollars being spent on both sides of an intense, emotional battle known as Proposition 8—a proposed constitutional amendment that would close California’s newly opened window for gay matrimony.  What John and Paul didn’t know was that, back in College Station, in a campus office and a laboratory less than one mile from the Century Oak where they proposed some six years earlier, fellow Texas Aggies were donating thousands of dollars to untie their legal bond.

The Struggle for Gay Rights in Aggieland:  A Lifetime Pursuit Begins in the 1970s.

John and Paul are not the only Aggies who face annulment of their marriage vows by the success of Proposition 8; they are merely the most public.  Nevertheless, their willingness to be completely “out” regarding their relationship is not the sole reason they appear in this column.  In many ways, their lifespan typifies the struggle for gay rights at their alma mater, an endeavor that began during their infancy and early childhood.

Paul Robles was born in 1975, in the midst of an historic era for social equality in Aggieland.

Texas A&M's LGBT students display their pride on one of America's most conservative campuses. Organizing wasn't always this easy.

That spring, Texas A&M’s College of Business graduated one of its first female students.  Merrill Mitchell Bonarrigo went on to co-found Messina Hof Winery in nearby Bryan, where Robles and Scroggs held their commitment ceremony in 2003.  Women had been attending classes at A&M sporadically since the early part of the twentieth century, and regularly since 1963, but the school’s first female graduates weren’t allowed to receive their diplomas at commencement ceremonies nor wear the vaunted Aggie Ring. Bonarrigo’s 1970s generation comprised the first female Aggie graduates of whom the school did not appear ashamed.

The mid-1970s also marked the beginning of an epic, decade-long fight for recognition of basic gay rights at Texas A&M.  Like the effort to admit women, it was a struggle against tradition at a university that seems to pride itself at remaining several paces behind prevailing societal change.

In April of 1976, a group of gay and lesbian Aggies petitioned for limited use of university facilities.  They called themselves Gay Student Services.  Wishing to protect the identity of some members, they did not pursue, at first, full university recognition as a student club.  They merely wanted to use campus facilities to meet, post notices on bulletin boards, and publicize their educational efforts in the student newspaper and campus radio station.

John Koldus:  No Agent of Change in Aggieland

They ran into a stone wall in the form of Texas A&M’s legendary Vice President of Student Services, John Koldus, for whom a building is named and about whom Old Ags still tell stories.  Koldus said no degree of partial university recognition was available and advised them to seek full certification as an official campus organization.  Then, he did everything in his power to deny that recognition.

Koldus reached into statue law and Aggie tradition to refuse certification of a gay student organization, a decision he announced one full year after that first meeting with the gay students.  Referring to state law prohibiting sodomy, Koldus decried efforts that would likely “incite, promote and result” in homosexual activity.  When the students maintained that theirs was not a sex club, but instead an educational and counseling organization, Koldus said teaching and guidance was the faculty’s job.  Later, before the courts, the university argued that GSS was a fraternal organization, and that Texas A&M had refused to recognize sororities and fraternities for 100 years.

Gay Student Services filed suit.  John Scroggs was seven years old when the federal district court received the case in 1977, which it summarily denied without explanation.  After the students appealed, the Fifth Circuit Count of Appeals vacated the dismissal and remanded the case back to the trial court.  Again, this time in 1982, the trial court ruled in favor of Texas A&M.  For a second time, the students sought redress before the appeals court in New Orleans.

As Vice President of Student Services, John Koldus fought an unsuccessful decade-long battle to avoid recognizing a gay student organization at Texas A&M. Fifteen years after his retirement, his division supports a comprehensive outreach program for GLBT Aggies.

In 1984, when Paul Robles was in the third grade, the Fifth Circuit again reversed the trial court, remanding the case with instructions ordering Texas A&M to recognize a gay student organization.  Simply put, the appellate court ruled that plaintiffs had been denied their First Amendment rights of free speech and association.

So definitive was the appeals court’s decision that the State of Texas refused to represent Koldus and the university in its final appeal to the Supreme Court.  Texas A&M hired a private lawyer, whose petition described the gay students’ demands as “morally repulsive” and “illegal,” and said the plaintiffs “seriously threaten the health of the community.”  So tradition-bound was Texas A&M that it stubbornly pursued the appeal despite the fact that several other federal courts of appeal had, by that time, ordered the recognition of homosexual student organizations.

On April 2, 1985, when John Scroggs was a high school freshman in Corpus Christi, the news came down from Washington, D. C.:  The United States Supreme Court rejected Texas A&M’s appeal without comment.

Today, within Koldus’ former organization, the Division of Student Affairs, a GLBT Resource Center operates with full university funding.  Its web site refers Aggies to a myriad of resources, including a link for parents whose gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered children attend Texas A&M.   A speakers bureau offers spokespersons to classes and residence hall associations.  A GLBT Professional Network serves as both a supplement and an alternative to the highly regarded Aggie Network, in which Aggies help other Aggies prosper professionally.

In 1993, John Koldus retired after 20 years of service to Texas A&M.  For the Aggie mainstream, he was one of the most beloved student advocates; for Aggieland’s queer students, an unrelenting foe.  As Koldus left the university, gay and gay-friendly faculty, staff, and graduate students were forming an Allies organization, dedicated to mentoring young LGBT Aggies who encounter problems fitting into A&M’s conservative culture.  All over the campus, rainbow signs appeared on faculty office doors, signaling a gay-friendly safe harbor in an otherwise stormy environment.

For those GSS pioneers who fought official university homophobia in the 1970s and 80s, today’s presence of more than 600 Allies represents the ultimate triumph.  For Koldus, who once maintained that it was indeed the faculty’s job to counsel students—ostensibly to advise them against homosexual behavior—the fact that gay students were being mentored by gay and gay-friendly faculty and staff must be a bitter pill to swallow.

A Battle Won, the War Continues

Before this narrative leaves the 1970s and 80s, two relevant events of that epoch deserve mention.  As John Koldus was retiring late in the twentieth century, two more foes of Aggieland’s GLBT community were emerging.

In 1975, when Paul Robles was born and John Scroggs was five years of age, a young returned Mormon missionary graduated with a bachelor’s degree from church-sponsored Brigham Young University.   Clair Nixon, a third cousin of President Richard M. Nixon, began a path that would inseparably link his professional life to Texas A&M and set him on a collision course with John Scroggs and Paul Robles’ desire to be married as gay men.

Clair Nixon, top, and Jeff Puryear contributed a total of $4,000 to a PAC that filed suit to nullify John and Paul's marriage, and 18,000 other same-sex nuptials in California.

Shortly thereafter, Nixon enrolled in graduate school at Texas A&M.   He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics in 1980, and after a brief commercial farming stint in Idaho, returned to Aggieland to join the faculty of what later became the Mays Business College.  He steadily rose in not only academic rank, but also the hierarchy of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  By the turn of the twenty-first century, Nixon was both an acclaimed professor at A&M and a bishop (pastor) of his Mormon ward.

In the mid-1980s, just prior to the arrival of John Scroggs and Paul Robles as freshmen at Texas A&M, another fellow Aggie destined for life-long Texas A&M employment, and a clash with John and Paul’s marital ambitions, completed his student career.  Jeffrey Puryear earned his bachelor’s degree in horticulture in 1987, and shortly thereafter embarked upon a nondescript, modestly paying career as a lab worker in what is today the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, a merged product of the former Rangeland Ecology and Forest Science departments.

Nixon’s and Puryear’s careers diverged, both professionally and personally.  Nixon authored five books, became an associate college dean, and won an endowed professorship.  Puryear eschewed graduate studies and, at one point, endured a fifty percent pay cut after a family emergency forced a brief resignation from his duties.  Nevertheless, these two employees forged a common bond when personal and religious prejudice propelled their intrusion into the lives of Robles and Scroggs.

As John and Paul were being married in California in the summer of 2008, Clair and Jeff were preparing to writing checks, Nixon for $3,000 and Puryear for $1,000, to “Yes on 8,” a political action committee determined not only to pass a state constitutional amendment preventing future same-sex marriages, but also to annul those 18,000 gay marriages that had already taken place.

As time and its inevitable progress swept away one impeding generation, the progeny of Aggie conservatism has arisen to challenge Texas A&M’s twenty-first century quest for social equality.

Next:  Recent Aggieland LGBT history, as seen through the eyes of two gay Aggies who recently married in California.  A closer look at the subborn, conservative local opposition.

(A Note Regarding Sources: In addition to the many hyperlinked Intenet documents I used, I referred to Daniel R. Pinello’s Gay Rights and American Law (Cambridge, 2003), portions of which are available on-line through Google Books.  The picture of Jeffrey Puryear was provided by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences through a state open records request.  I interviewed John Scroggs and Paul Robles and they graciously provided several of the pictures used.  As I indicated previously, Clair Nixon and Jeff Puryear did not respond to email requests for information.)

January 20 was more than Inauguration Day.  It was the first day of the new semester in Aggieland.  Nevertheless, President Elsa Murano—who as a Hispanic woman is not the typical Texas A&M chief executive—hosted faculty and students in the Zone Club at Kyle Field.  It must have been a bitter pill for Aggie conservatives, who once threw eggs at a likeness of our President, to know the inauguration of a black president was broadcast into their “sacred” Kyle Field.

Clair Nixon, professor of accounting in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M, who has served as bishop of a local Mormon congregation, has ten children. Recently he donated $3,000 to oppose same-sex marriage in California, an action that threatens to delegitimize the marriage of two fellow Aggies, John Scroggs and Paul Robles.

Part one of a series.

Jeffrey Puryear and Clair Nixon form the Aggie archetype. Both earned degrees from Texas A&M and both returned to their alma mater to contribute to its academic mission. Each is devoted to his family, work, and church, owns his own house and pays taxes—conforming in every way to the image that Texas A&M markets regarding the solid citizenship and family devotion practiced by Aggies worldwide.

John Scroggs and Paul Robles are also Texas A&M former students who have remained in Aggieland as faithful university employees. Although younger and not as far advanced in their careers, they also own their own home and pay taxes, serve jury duty, vote in local elections, and donate to charity. Each has lived in College Station for almost 20 years. Their maroon blood runs thick.

Only one characteristic differentiates Scroggs and Robles from most Aggies. They are a gay couple, long-time companions who took advantage of a brief window of opportunity to be married legally in California this past summer. Although breaking up another Aggie’s marriage is definitely not an activity encouraged by the Aggie Code of Honor, it’s precisely what Puryear and Nixon—and arguably many conservative Aggies—would like to do to these one-time students, classmates and dedicated Texas A&M employees.

Is Homewrecking a New Aggie Tradition?

Jeffrey Puryear, B.S. ’78, will earn slightly more than twenty thousand dollars this year as a part-time laboratory associate for the University’s Department of Ecosystem Science and Management. That’s approximately half of what he made several years ago, when the need to care for an ailing mother caused him to resign his $40,248 position. Three months later, after she passed away, Texas A&M rehired Puryear–but at only half of his original salary, as the other funds had been allocated elsewhere. Despite this financial hardship, Puryear recently scraped together a one thousand dollar donation to Yes on 8, a political action committee opposed to gay marriage in California.

Clair Nixon, M.S. ’77, Ph.D. ’80, a professor of accounting in the Mays Business School, stands on the other side of Texas A&M’s salary structure. However, he also faces his share of financial challenges. As a temple recommend-holding member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nixon tithes ten percent of both his annual $157,137 salary and any ancillary income he earns through private consulting. A devout Mormon who has served as bishop of a local “ward” (congregation), Nixon takes seriously the Old Testament admonition to multiply and replenish the earth. He and his wife Laura have ten children.

Yet, when Mormon “prophet, seer, and revelator,” Thomas S. Monson, issued a mobilization order against the California Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage last spring, Dr. Nixon managed to find three thousand dollars to fund the same PAC that successfully urged 52% of Californians to deny gay marriage rights in the Nov. 4 election.

On Dec. 19, a California organization known as the “Protect Marriage Coalition” sued to invalidate the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in the state during the five months between the court’s invalidation in May of Proposition 22, passed by Californians in 2000 to ban gay marriage by law, and the electorate’s adoption of Proposition 8 in November, which made same-sex marriage unconstitutional. One of those endangered bonds is one performed on Aug. 26 in San Francisco’s historic city courthouse, officiated by Texas A&M history professor James Rosenheim, who joined John Scroggs and Paul Robles in legal matrimony.

The New Texas Philanthropy:  Keep Gay Californians from Marrying

Altogether, conservative Texans donated $1.35 million to keep marriage in California between “one man and one woman,” included Mormon Alan Stock, owner of some 350 Cinemark theaters. The Plano-based movie magnate gave $9,999 to Yes on 8, despite the fact that his cinemas are currently profiting from showing Milk, in which Sean Penn plays gay rights hero Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s legendary city supervisor and “Mayor of Castro Street,” who became America’s first openly gay elected official in the 1970s. Despite the theological objections that Stock’s LDS faith express toward homosexual behavior, his theater chain was one of the first in Texas to show Brokeback Mountain, a controversial film about two gay cowboy lovers.

Aggie Greg Coleman gave $10,000 to stop gay marriage.

Although Texas Aggies are known for their political, religious and social conservatism—and there’s no doubt regarding how a gay marriage referendum would in fare in Aggieland—relatively few Aggies stepped forward financially to deprive their gay and lesbian siblings of marriage rights.  Other than Nixon and Puryear, the only Texas-based major Aggie donor to Yes on 8 appears to have been Gregory Coleman of Cedar Park, an attorney in private practice who serves as vice-chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice.  Coleman, who earned his bachelor’s degree (’87) and MBA  (’89] from Texas A&M, donated $10,000 to Yes on 8.

Coleman established his conservative credentials as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after serving as Solicitor General of Texas.  He also clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  In this context, his contribution seems less personal and more of an effort to enhance his bona fieds for future political endeavors, or perhaps his candidacy for the next GOP president’s appointment to the federal judiciary.

Gregory Coleman, unlike Jeffrey Puryear and Clair Nixon, does not walk the Texas A&M campus daily nor does he have to look his gay and lesbian students in the eye.

Although much has been written about out-of-state donations to California’s newsworthy recent ballot measure, including the estimated $22 million donated in opposition to gay marriage by Mormons, stories about individual donors tend to concentrate on a few unfortunate Latter-day Saints whose piddling contributions in support of Prop. 8 brought down the wrath of the local gay community. For example, Marjorie Christofferson, a waitress at a landmark Los Angeles coffee shop, El Coyote, tearfully apologized for hurting the feelings of gay patrons, but refused to say she was sorry for making a $100 dollar donation to Yes on 8, which her local Mormon bishop had urged. Later, in order to fend off a boycott against the restaurant, Christofferson resigned her long-time waitress position.

These tales provoke sympathy for those whose donations are seen by many as not only an exercise of their First Amendment rights of free expression, but also of religious liberty. Few in the mainstream media, however, have delved into the sorrow experienced by gay couples who see their ability to be married in a civil ceremony, an important measure of their civil rights and as statement of their equality with their heterosexual counterparts, threatened by the passage of Prop. 8. That struggle unwinds far from California. As this account of Proposition 8 battles in Aggieland attests, it pits longtime Texas residents, and Maroon-blooded Aggies, against each other.

Next:  The early years of gay and lesbian history at Texas A&M unfold, framed within the lifetime of two gay Aggies who anchored their ten-year relationship by marrying in California.

(A note about sources:  I obtained salary information for Clair Nixon and Jeffery Puryear, as well as the details of Puryear’s resignation and rehiring as a lab associate, through a Texas Open Records Act request.  Scroggs and Robles have agreed to be interviewed for this series.  Nixon and Puryear have not responded to email requests for information.)

The former owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club split a doubleheader last weekend.

Aggies and Iraqis took to their feet in response to George W. Bush, but W.’s reception on the College Station leg of his presidential adoration tour proved more accommodating.  Less than 48 hours after an Aggie graduation convocation warmly “whooped” a failed president who would have been jeered on most American campuses, Iraqis marched in support of journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, whose two-shoe pitch at Sunday’s Baghdad press conference spoiled any Bush attempt to claim respect from a country he invaded six years ago.

Friday’s crowd at Reed Arena, filled with a disproportionate share of America’s “25 percenters” who think highly of the Bush presidency, heard a one-line reference to the 21 Aggies who have died in the War on Terror, a casualty total second only to West Point’s.  Otherwise, Bush devoted most of his wartime references to living veterans and non-Texans—an Oregonian who visited the White House on artificial legs as the result of battlefield injuries and a 61-year-old military surgeon, a man Bush’s age, from Nevada who serves in Iraq.

George W. Bush honored a family tradition by garnering adoration in Aggieland last Friday, but on Sunday in Baghdad an Iraqi journalist who covered the carnage in Fallujah expressed a different opinion.

Just as he named no Aggie who has spilled blood in Iraq, where all but one of those have died, Bush said nothing about the one million Iraqis who have perished in his war of choice.  In a speech filled with admiration for Aggie traditions, however, he did embrace the myth that a barking Reveille would cause the cancellation of class at Texas A&M.

” I wish she had been there for some of those press conferences,” he joked.  Little did Bush know that, less than two days later, he could have used A&M’s mascot when he met an Iraqi newsman whose views of the American president had been shaped, in part, by his coverage of the bloody battles for Fallujah.

Eighty days after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, a fire fight in Baghdad killed Jonathan Rozier, the first of 20 Aggies who would die in this unnecessary war. Five years will have passed when Bush addresses Texas A&M graduates Friday, but the dying continues and the commander-in-chief seems unrepentant.

Once again, Aggieland serves as a refuge for the Bush clan. Years after Pappy Bush located his presidential library here, Bush the Younger gives what could be the last college commencement speech of his presidency Friday. Texas A&M, once dubbed be the American university with the most nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, is one of the few civilian venues where Bush could expected to be received warmly by an academic convocation.

He needs us. His election-day approval rating stood at 25%, only one point higher than Richard Nixon at the depths of Watergate. Some 78% percent of Americans lack confidence in the economy, according to Gallup. Seven years after the 9/11 terrorists struck, the war in Afghanistan looks more bleak than ever, and despite some military success in Iraq, that adventure remains unpopular with the American public.

The campus where a student group threw raw eggs at a likeness of Barack Obama several weeks before the election seems perfectly tailored for a president who sexed up intelligence to justify invading Iraq, authorized kidnapping and torture after promising compassionate conservatism, and turned a balanced budget into a financial black hole. In the waning days of perhaps the most unsuccessful presidency in America’s history, President Bush found a university where he’s still admired.

What will Bush tell Aggie graduates?

With the national press fixated on President-elect Obama’s incoming administration, and the scandal involving the governor who tried to sell a senate seat to the highest bidder, don’t expect a large media contingent in College Station Friday. Texas A&M would provide an ideal venue for a farewell address containing some hard-learned and chastened words of wisdom, and a sympathetic audience. But attendees shouldn’t hope for the equivalent of Eisenhower’s admonition regarding the military-industrial complex nor, unfortunately, a mia culpa.

It’s not in George W. Bush’s character to apologize, not now, probably not ever.

Bush at LSU: Don't succumb to "moral relativism."

For a template of what he could say, I turned to his commencement speech four years ago at LSU.  Don’t recall that one?  Bush passed up daughter Jenna’s graduation from the University of Texas, where the young miscreant was better known for under-age drinking than scholarship, for the politically friendlier environs of Baton Rouge.

So what can we expect, according to this pattern?  First, he’ll make a joke about a local watering hole.  In Tigerland, that was The Chimes; in Aggieland, one can expect a reference to the Dixie Chicken.  He will follow with a self-deprecating statement about his “C”-student status in college.  That drew boos at Yale but will be received understandably here.

Then he will praise the parents in attendance.  In Baton Rouge, he paid homage to mothers. Here expect him to laud the fathers who have to pay the skyrocketing deregulated tuition which his defense secretary, Robert Gates, lobbied for and instituted during his tenure as Texas A&M’s president.

Then, incredibly, this paragon of virtue will urge graduates to remember the moral lessons taught by their parents. In Baton Rouge four years ago, Bush admonished students not to ascribe to  “moral relativism,” characteristic right-wing Christian parlance that argues against against using one’s God-given intelligence to adapt traditional ethical values to today’s changing world.

At the time of the LSU speech, adherence to such an admonition could have meant discarding unused human embryos instead of using them to cure maladies ranging from paralysis to Alzheimer’s.  As the Bush administration prepares to leave office, avoidance of moral relativism means a last-minute rule to protect religiously motivated pharmacists for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills.

(Paradoxically, over the past eight years, Bush has seemed oblivious to charges of relativism when it comes to justifying warrantless wire-tapping, water-boarding, or suspension of that 12th century legal right, Habeas Corpus. But such things hardly ever come up in college commencement addresses, at least not at right-wing universities.)

Then he will play the war card, one more time.

Finally, noting Texas A&M’s record for producing military officers, Bush will praise the patriotism of Aggies who fought and bled on the battlefield, as he did in Baton Rouge regarding Tigers who wore our country’s colors. He will note that Texas A&M stands second only to the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in the number of its graduates killed in the “war on terror.” To date, some 19 Aggies have fallen in Iraq, one at Ft. Hood on his way to Iraq, and one more in Afghanistan.

Completely disregarding the subterfuge used to justify the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and the diversion of attention from the war in Afghanistan, Bush will take credit for taking down Saddam Hussein and turning Iraq into a land ready for Jeffersonian democracy. At LSU four years ago, when our troops in Iraq were in the middle of a rip-roaring insurgency, he said:

We have an historic opportunity, the establishment of a peaceful and democratic Iraq at the heart of the Middle East, which will remove a danger, strike a blow against terrorism, and make America and the world more secure. We will complete the mission for which so many have served and sacrificed. And the world can be certain we will defend the freedom and security of this nation, whatever it takes.

Friday he will note the diminished levels of violence in Iraq, after we’ve lost more than 4,000 soldiers, hinting that the mission is finally within sight of being accomplished. Then Aggies will rise to give him a standing ovation.

What should President Bush say?

If I were President Bush, I would talk about Jonathan Rozier, Class of ’01.

Army First Lieutenant Rozier and his dismounted tank platoon were guarding a building in Baghdad in July of 2003, just three months after the United States invaded to make Iraq safe for democracy and western oil companies. His unit came under small arms and rocket-propelled grenade attack.

Jonathan probably hadn’t paid much attention to the debate over whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Nor did he care if the Iraqi leader had forged an alliance with Osama bid Laden. He left those issues to be decided by civilians and his superiors at the top of the military chain of command.

Jonathan with Jessica, and with Justin

Jonathan was newly married. He had a child. He spoke to his wife by telephone the night before he became Aggieland’s first casualty of the war on terror.

I didn’t know Jonathan, his wife Jessica, nor his son Justin. But I knew his mother Barbara. She and I attended high school together in New Orleans. We dated a few times. Many years later, when Jonathan wore the hand-crafted leather boots of a Corps of Cadets senior at Texas A&M, and after I had moved to College Station, I enjoyed a reunion with Jonathan’s grandmother Gwen and his Aunt Vera. We met in the MSC flag room for a hour’s chat before they were scheduled to join Jonathan and his fiancee for dinner. Gwen had been the no-nonsense registrar and office manager at our Southern Baptist school, and Vera had been the typing a shorthand teacher that every student loved and respected.

That’s the last contact I had with the family until that fateful day, several years later, when I saw television coverage of Barbara and Jessica, mother and widow, being handed that triangular, folded American flag, the blue union and white stars reflecting a nation’s gratitude in their tear-stained faces.

All of this has been repeated, 19 more times in the case of Aggies, and 4,209 times with regard to our nation’s sons and daughters, because a headstrong president rushed hell-bent into a war he wanted to fight, not one he had to fight. If Jonathan had been killed in Afghanistan, which shielded our attackers when Iraq didn’t, would I feel differently? Perhaps, probably so. I know that for Barbara, Jessica, and Justin, the loss would be the same.

But that’s why I’d like President Bush to drop all talk of fighting a war on terror Friday, and just talk about Jonathan, the first Aggie killed in Iraq—or about 1st Lieutenant Timmothy W. Cunningham—who on April 23 of this year became the latest Aggie killed in Iraq. Or, he could pick out any Aggie who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I’d rather our president talk about fallen Aggies, of whom he knows little, than about moral relativism, of which he unfortunately is a talented practitioner.

No Aggie Ring, but a Set of Senior Boots

When Robert Gates left Texas A&M for the Pentagon several years ago, at Pappy Bush’s behest to pull incompetent W.’s chestnuts out of the Iraq War fires, a debate raged on Aggie web forums:  Should possibly the greatest president in Texas A&M history be awarded the vaunted Aggie Ring?  Eventually, common sense prevailed and Gates assumed his position among A&M’s storied leaders, beside Earl Rudder and Sullivan Ross, but without the sacred ring one must earn through the student experience.  Instead, the Corps of Cadets that Gates joined on early-morning runs awarded him a pair of custom-made senior boots—which is no small honor for a non-student in Aggieland.

The rave reviews of the Gates administration stand in stark contrast to the enmity heaped upon his predecessor, Ray Bowen, and the lukewarm reception afford his successor, Elsa Murano.  Yet, his administration was not perfect, despite the Teflon coating that remains two years after he vacated the eighth floor of Rudder Tower.  With Gates’ willingness to stay on as Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama, not every Aggie’s choice for president, is it now time to seek a more critical examination of his four years as A&M’s president?  Will his willingness to serve a hated Democrat open the door to a critical review of his administration as our university’s leader?

It’s hard to find a serious critic of Robert Gates’ presidential administration at Texas A&M.  Indeed, Gates increased funding for academics, repaired faculty-administration rifts, and forged a warm relationship with just about every segment of the Aggie community.  He dodged the tricky question of affirmative action by rejecting quotas but aggressively recruiting minorities, to include increasing minority scholarships, while ending legacy admission preferences.  He increased faculty numbers, built buildings, and moved A&M’s athletic department into the 21st century by hiring the school’s first professional athletic director.

Phil Gramm, President of Texas A&M?

Most Aggies won’t admit it, but the biggest contribution Gates made to Texas A&M may have been trumping his most serious rival for the presidency back in 2002, former Senator Phil Gramm.  When the unpopular Ray Bowen resigned under pressure, his lack of supervision of the ill-fated Bonfire tradition being only the tip of the iceberg that sank his presidency, right-wing Aggies got behind the former A&M economics professor—much to the chagrin of the faculty, which despised Gramm’s divisive politics as much as it disrespected his shoddy academic scholarship.  The main fund-raising bodies for both the academic and athletic sides of the university, the Association of Former Students and the Twelfth-Man Foundation, endorsed Gramm’s candidacy for president.  It became a contest between the right-wing and moderate Republicans in the Aggie power structure.  The latter won when Bush the Elder—whose presidential library on campus gives him unusual influence for a non-A&M graduate—intervened by pushing his former CIA director through the Board of Regents.

Six years later, even the most bedrock conservative in Aggieland seems not to begrudge the fact that Senator Phil didn’t get the job.  Gates’ capable administration, combined with his chameleon-like ability to appear sympathetic to every Maroon viewpoint (although he wasn’t), leads some to wonder where Texas A&M will eventually build the statue dedicated to its 30th president.  That Aggie conservatives remain agog over Gates’ tenure belies the fact this this “agent of change” may have changed A&M in ways that Old Ags will eventually rue.  That the university’s small progressive community made its peace with this partisan Republican (he and his wife donated $4,000 to W.’s 2004 reelection) hardly means Gates’ tenure should be considered an example of reform.  Let’s examine some of the question marks.

Tuition Deregulation

For years, the Texas legislature mandated that tuition could rise by only $2 per semester hour each year.  Although state universities periodically circumvented that restriction with increased fees, public colleges were once one of the state’s greatest bargains.  For generations, Aggies from the hardscrabble farm and ranch communities viewed Texas A&M as their one chance to climb the economic ladder.

A Hero to the Corps; A Hindrance to Cash-Strapped Students?

When Robert Gates became A&M’s president in August of 2002, statutory undergraduate tuition cost $44 per semester hour.  US News once ranked A&M as one of its best values in education.  Then Texas governor Rick Perry, an Aggie, projected a $9.9 billion state budget deficit and warned public agencies to plan for cuts.  This was the opening that University of Texas president Larry Faulkner had sought for several years, and he found a willing ally in Robert Gates, a market-minded Republican who appreciated the goldmine that unrestricted tuition increases would provide for Texas A&M.

The state budget deficit never swelled to the level of Perry’s prediction, but tuition skyrocketed.  In the first two years of deregulation, total undergraduate tuition increased by 75 percent.  By the end of Gates’ term as president in 2006, Texas A&M was charging its undergraduates $145.70 per semester hour.  Combined with continued growth in non-tuition fee additions, the average cost of a public university education rose above the national average.  In the 1980s, Texas state universities billed their in-state students the lowest tuition rates in the nation.  By this year, our state ranks 19th among the most expensive, charging more than any other state in the southwest or west.

Elsa Murano: Mitigating the Damage?

After a year under interim president Ed Davis, in came Else Murano, Aggieland’s first female and Hispanic president (although, as a Cuban-American, a safe Republican).  As one of her first acts, she halved the university’s planned annual tuition increase, and later announced a program by which students from families earning less than $60,000 per year would pay no tuition if they maintained their grades.

Nevertheless, Aggieland’s love affair with “no tuition hike I didn’t like” Gates remains strong, although his decisions on this issue have probably changed forever the kind of student who matriculates in College Station.  Now, instead of that up-from-poverty farm or ranch kid, rural students who drive those fully depreciated diesel pickup trucks to school are probably the children of rich farmers, bedrock social conservatives who make sure their congressman continues to favor agricultural subsidies.  More the likely, today’s Aggie comes from towns whose names used to be synonymous with agriculture (e.g., Farmer’s Branch)—which a generation ago became subdivided exurbs of Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio.

Meanwhile, Aggie traditionalists complain that these kids leave the football games early!

Football and Athletics

When Bob Gates arrived in Aggieland, he billed himself an “agent of change.”  As his first major decision, he changed the football coach, no small matter in this den of pigskin madness.  Out went the legendary R. C. Slocum, who won more games than any predecessor (123-47-2), went to 11 bowl games, never had a losing season, and beat the hated but athletically superior University of Texas half the time duirng his 14 seasons as head coach.  Unfortunately, during a final season that saw the Aggies defeat No.1-ranked Oklahoma, Slocum’s team finished 6-6, providing the “agent of change” the opportunity to bring in Dennis Franchione for a cool $2 million per year, twice what the university ever paid its most winning coach.

Franchione flopped.  After five unspectacular seasons, inducing a scandal in his last, Coach Fran collected a$2 million severance package and gave way to a Slocum protege, Mike Sherman, who finished 4-8 last season and lost to the Horns by 40 points.

R. C. and Fran: The Icon and the Flop

Under “Dollar Bill” Byrne, whom Gates hired as Aggie athletic director after nudging out long-serving predecessor Wally Groff, A&M has enjoyed unparalleled success in other, albeit lesser sports.  Last year, the Aggies won a record eight Big-12 Conference championships.  Under coaches hired by Byrne, previously morbid men’s and women’s basketball programs have made repeat appearances in the NCAA tournament.  The declining baseball team reversed course and has fallen just short of the College World Series for two consecutive seasons.

Such success has had its price.  Texas A&M’s football ticket prices skyrocketed to second in the Big-12 behind Texas, and Aggie students pay more than T-Sips for their tickets.  Nowadays, Aggie traditionalists complain that the student section isn’t always filled.  This crowd won’t settle for kissing on first downs!

Racism and Race Relations

When Betty Unterberger, Texas A&M’s first female professor, came to work in 1968, she confronted student attitudes that were very different from those at Cal-Irvine, where she previously taught.  Many of her American history students, some of whom had descended from slave holders, thought blacks had been happy to be enslaved and fortunate to be given the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

Blackface Video Embarrassed Gates

When Robert Gates arrived in Aggieland some three decades later, the vestiges of racism still lingered.  First, Gates had to explain a student organization’s “Affirmative Action Bake Sale,” at which minority students were given preferential prices for cookies, ostensibly to express white outrage at programs that gave historically discriminated against ethnic groups an opportunity to catch up in college admissions and employment. Then, just before he left to succeed the failed Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, Aggie racism once again drew national attention, this time when students released a blackface video on YouTube.

In the interim, Gates had to decide how to deal with a Supreme Court decision that occurred shortly after he became president, a ruling on a University of Michigan case that allowed limited use of affirmative action in college admissions.  Undoubtedly to placate the conservative donor base, Gates took A&M in a different direction than the state’s other flagship campus, the University of Texas.  While the Longhorn admissions office embraced the restored freedom to use limited racial preferences, the Aggies eschewed race-based admissions and instead tried enhanced minority recruiting and scholarship offers.  Nevertheless, Gates found himself defending his decision from Aggies who thought the additional financial aid to minorities would come at the expense of elevated tuition for white students.

A Black Aggie Football Player Put a Stop to This

His successor, Else Murano, recently responded to adverse publicity generated by an Aggie group that threw eggs at a caricature of Barack Obama.  A black Aggie football player stepped into the line of fire to prevent the spectacle from continuing.  Murano chose an open letter to students, which admitted that such protests were within the scope of the students’ constitutional rights but called on students to behave with discretion.  Even such a muted admonition drew criticism from the most right-wing of Aggie pundits.  When the local newspaper criticized the egg throwers, letters to the editor and on-line commentators defended the studetns.

Robert Gates cannot be blamed for the fact that Texas A&M remains a bastion of conservatism for white elites who seem to regard the degradation of majority privilege as a loss of rights.  However, in order to get along with well-healed donors who clung to the old Southern way of life, Gates undoubtedly made many compromises that will influence how history evaluates his presidency.  The young Ags who pull stunts like this grow up in old Aggie families, where their attitudes are formed.  Gates did damage control, but nothing substantial to change this aspect of Aggie culture.

Traditions

Robert Gates was part of the Aggie family, as Director of the George Bush School of Public Affairs, on that fateful morning in November of 1999, when Aggie Bonfire fell, killing 12 students and seriously injuring 27 more.  He observed Ray Bowen’s struggles to come to terms with the future of the tradition, which had existed since 1909, and his predecessor’s gut-wrenching decision not to continue it in the final year of the Bowen presidency.

Aggie Bonfire Continues to Burn Off Campus, Out of Control of Administrators

When Gates took command of Texas A&M in 2002, he seemed determined to reevaluate Aggie Bonfire and make a final decision on its future.  But lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s office and the TAMU System intervened, convincing Gates to maintain the status quo while the families of the victims litigated.  Gates made a few minor adjustments to appease Bonfire advocates, such as lifting the moratorium on sales of Bonfire memorabilia, but on the major issue of whether the tradition would live, he demurred.

It was a tremendous missed opportunity.  If Gates had decided to bring Bonfire back to campus, which some believe he could have done despite the objection of the state’s lawyers, it would have been a stroke that would have electrified the Aggie family like no event since Jackie Sherrill’s 12th Man Kickoff Team in the 1980s.  It probably would have earned Gates that statue on campus.

Meanwhile, the lines hardened.  A group of determined students and alumni consolidated a series of off-campus bonfires into the organization that has now successfully burned Student Bonfire for seven consecutive years.  Three years ago, they ran afoul of Brazos County authorities with regard to a county-wide burn ban during drought conditions.  However, the last three off-campus Bonfires, held in neighboring Robertson County, have transpired without a hitch. Alcohol and horseplay seem to have vanished in the absence of university supervision, and the new stack is professionally engineered.

If Texas A&M were to try to reclaim the tradition, it would face opposition from both sides of issue, from Aggies and community institutions who think that immature college students building multi-story bonfires is too dangerous an undertaking, to those who continue to build the off-campus Bonfire and wish to do so without meddling university supervision.

On potentially the most emotional issue of his university presidency, Robert Gates punted.

"Racehorse" Haynes

I’m writing while sitting in the courthouse gallery on Monday morning, at the punishment phase of P. David Romei’s felony trial.  Saturday night the jury convicted the former Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Brazos Valley on two of the three counts of theft and misappropriation of public and private funds.  Today the jury decides if David will go on probation or serve as many as ten years in prison.

1. As my two previous posts note, I think the case against David was overwhelming.  That the jury deliberated for more than 30 hours over two and one-half days bespeaks the caliber of our citizenry that answers a jury summons.  That they acquitted him on one charge while convicting him on two—while reducing one felony charge to a misdemeanor—shows the careful, deliberate way in which they approached their duties.  One of the newspaper articles said a fraction of those summoned showed up, and that extras had to be diverted from the leftover jury candidates from another trial.  It looks like the best members of the potential jury pool took their civic duty seriously.

Nevertheless, another portion of our citizenry doesn’t seem to appreciate the sacrifice.  Some of the anonymous internet comments about the jury demonstrates why I’m glad those people stayed on the sidelines:

Hour and a half until a free lunch, too. I’m betting the verdict comes after that.  I have a feeling there are a few jurors who realize they can milk this for all it’s worth.  — Dean Travers, Texags.com

People not smart enough to get out of jury duty probably like all the freebies they can get!  — 91_Aggie, Texags.com

2. These kinds of comments reflect the artificial socialization of the web, where everybody hides behind a nom de plume, and nobody comes face to face with disapproving grimace.  But they also demonstrate the degree of enmity Dr. Romei created over the years.  To put it bluntly, he pissed a lot of people off with his hard-driving, sometimes abrasive manner.  Some relish seeing him knocked down. That’s not to diminish the seriousness of his transgressions.  I agree with the verdict.

Dick Birdwell

3. There’s another factor in this community that engenders resentment against people like Dr. Romei.  Although this is a university town, it’s a right-wing one.  A lot of small government conservatives resent what amounts to their property tax money going to “frivolous” activities such as the arts.  One vociferous opponent is a former city council member, Dick Birdwell, a noted letters-to-the-editor advocate for conservative causes.  That Romei has been convicted serves as vindication, not only with regard to his conservative philosophy, but also against rival city council politicians who supported the arts.  It’s interesting that one of the few Romei supporters consistently in the courtroom gallery was Robert Wareing, a former city councilman known for his advocacy of Arts Council projects.

4. This trial put two good legal teams on display.  If I were unfortunate enough to be charged with a crime, I’d hate to be prosecuted by Bill Turner but would feel fortunate to have a defense attorney like Richard “Racehorse” Haynes.  Earlier in his career, Haynes became legendary for courthouse antics, such as when he once tried to nail one of his hands to the defense table.  His deportment is more restrained these days.  Part of that may be his advanced age, another the fact that the defense has been slogging uphill throughout this trial.  As I said, the evidence presented seemed one-sided in favor of the prosecution.

Bill Turner proves, if you’re hard-nosed enough as a prosecutor, you can continue to be elected as a Democrat in this body cavity of the red-state beast.  It must be terribly frustrating to local Republicans that they can’t manage to unseat Turner and fellow Democrat Chet Edwards, whose support of Texas A&M and veterans’ issues keeps him employed as the congressman who represents both College Station and the Crawford Ranch.

By the way, Racehorse is now a member of the Brazos County Bar Association.  Shortly after Judge Smith dismissed the jurors for lunch, a representative of the local bar offered him a complimentary membership.  Judge Smith, in a departure from his stern countenance while court is in session, joked that the dues waiver was probably the only reason the Houston attorney agreed to join.  Haynes is no pauper, having received at least a $1 million fee for defending T. Cullen Davis.  He has been known for his creative fee arrangements, such as taking title to a defendant’s pickup truck.

Steve Fullhart, KBTX

5. Steve Fullhart, a reporter and weekend news anchor for KBTX in Bryan, became the unsung hero of this trial for his up-to-the-second blog reports on his station’s website.  He endured all but the last day of the trial standing up, running the news camera part time and typing into an I-Phone the crisp sentences that kept trial watchers from afar in touch with Brazos County justice.  With all of this workload, he found time to moderate the incoming comments to his blog, ostensibly weeding out some of the more worthless and vitriolic that plague forums such as Texags.com and the Eagle’s readers’ comment section.

6. As I listen to the testimony today, there’s one obvious goal by the defense: Convince the jury to grant probation and keep David out of jail.  Romei is now a convicted felon.  He lost his job with Texas A&M when he was indicted.  He has been unemployed for two years.  He faces no legitimate prospects for future employment using his Ph.D.  He sold his house.  He’s down to two months remaining in COBRA insurance coverage, for which he must pay all of the premiums–including the portion normally paid by an employer.  If put on probation, he’d have difficulty living somewhere else where he’s unknown, as he will have to report to his probation officer at least monthly, and could be bound by other restrictions.  In addition to a fine, the judge would undoubtedly obligate him to pay restitution, and there’s always the possibility of a civil suit from the Arts Council.  In other words, even if set free he would have to live without favorable employment prospects in a community where he is considered a pariah, pay fines, restitution, and probation fees under penalty of imprisonment for default, and somehow provide for his medical needs without insurance.  At least, prison would furnish him three hots and a cot, and a health clinic.  Suffice it to say he will be adequately punished whatever the jury decides.

Update:  Turner asked for 10 years imprisonment, but the jury decided on two years probation, plus a $5,750 fine and the possibility of restitution that will be decided by the judge.  I’ll bet Dick Birdwell and a bunch of anonymous Texags.com posters are miffed!  That these fiscal conservatives would have locked him up at taxpayers’ expense for a non-violent crime that is unlikely to be repeated serves as a prime example of the contradictory nature of right-wing thinking.

I couldn’t help but make a fleeting comparison between Romei and another luminary who seemed so out of place in this community.  I could close my eyes and imagine Coach Fran, a wine sipper in a beer-guzzling town, being cross-examined by football inquisitors.  Both Romei and Franchione were outsiders who assumed lofty positions in Aggieland, and who never quite fit in.  That’s where the reference ends.  Dennis endured a minor scandal that brushed up against NCAA regulations, and some go so far as to say he released student medical information in violation of federal law.  All of which would have been forgiven if he had won more games.  He left A&M with a $2 million severance and may coach again at some place where he fits better.  David brought a lot of art to the Brazos Valley, but arrogance and poor judgment will most assuredly ruin his professional future, more than likely cost him a felony conviction, and probably send him to prison.

In the opening round, Turner asked Romei how many years he had been affiliated with 501 (c) (3) charities.  Fifteen, he answered.  Having cast serious doubt upon David’s ignorance defense, the prosecutor then methodically ripped into the defendant’s practice of “laundering” contribution money by writing a personal check and then seeking reimbursement from the Arts Council.  Didn’t he know gifts to politicians could endanger the Council’s tax-exempt status?  Why “deceive” donors and taxpayers by masking the source of donations to charitable organizations?  Why cook the books by assigning monthly cost overruns in one budget line item to another–even if the audited, year-end budget corrected the figures?

Then it got worse.  Romei stated under direct examination that he never balanced his checkbook, but Turner produced a register that showed a balancing adjustment.  Then he threw the knockout punch.  Referring to a personal contribution to the A&M Foundation that Romei “forgot” to mail, but for which he received reimbursement, Turner produced bank statements that showed the deposit kept Romei’s account in the black and prevented overdrafts.  “You needed that money, didn’t you?” Turner asked.

Part of Turner’s strategy was to damn Romei in the eyes of the jury by depicting the defendant as lofty, condescending, and dismissive of the taxpayers who had funded the Arts Council through grants from the city.  David didn’t help himself with series of bizarre denials and transparent attempts at self-deprecation.  At one point, when confronted with the charge that he used an Arts Council purchases to buy gasoline at local retail outlets, David said he didn’t know the meaning of the term:  “convenience store.”  Likewise, to his own lawyer on direct examination, he claimed to be ignorant of what “self-aggrandizement” meant.  When he told Turner, after a blistering exchange, “I’m not smart enough to understand that,” Turner shot back:  “But you’re a doctor!”

I talked to David for a few minutes between breaks.  He’s obviously physically ill and disspirited, despite his feisty demeanor on the stand.  He consulted infrequently with this lawyers.  He had one female friend in the gallery; everybody else kept their distance, as if he were contaminated.  He much older and considerably more frail than the sharp, engaging graduate student with whom I shared a seminar table almost a decade ago. I wish him the best, although I’m afraid things are going to get worse before they get better.

One thing is for sure.  I’ll take care not to violate the law in Brazos County.  I’d rather be shaking hands with Bill Turner at a Democratic campaign rally than have him prosecute me.

When I was a kid growing up in Louisiana, no public building, bridge, highway or any other taxpayer-funded project could bear the name of a living person.  Why?  Louisiana masons over the years made a killing chiseling off  the names of politicians and public officials who had taken up residence in state or federal penal institutions.

Those services could be needed in College Station soon.  P. David Romei, former executive director of the Arts Council of the Brazos Valley and a graduate school classmate of mine, went on trial this week for embezzling public and commission funds.  If convicted, he could be directing prison art and dramatic productions for the next decade.  Meanwhile, every day local citizens drive by the multimillion dollar Arts Center, emboldened with his name in sliver letters on black marble.  I wonder what that would cost to modify?

Don’t hold your breath.  Regardless of the outcome of David’s trial, Texas won’t adopt such a law soon.  There are two reasons.  First, look Texas A&M’s academic buildings.  Were they named after great scientists, humanitarians, and educators?  Hardly.  Heep, Glasscock, Zachry, and Mays gave a lot of money to have their names engraved into posterity, and there are many more buildings up for naming for the right price.

Secondly, Texans would never admit the need for such a law.  Grandiose attitudes still permeate this state’s ruling classes, and they’d much rather hire that occasional mason to remove the name of a fallen colleague than admit that a true picture of a Texan’s character can be best be viewed when he resides on the other side of the grass.

They said who would be violent on election night?

Five minutes after I returned home from the election night celebration with the Brazos County Democrats, as I was tuning the television to Barack Obama’s victory speech, three shots rang out.  Gunmen fired into my dining room window, while my wife and 6-year-old daughter sat the table doing homework.  They then smashed the rear window of my wife’s Durango before they sped off to the roar of a diesel engine.

I guess a segment of the fine law-and-order crowd in our Republican-dominated community couldn’t put up with the disappointment of losing an election, nor the presence among them of partisan Democrats who actually supported the idea of a black man becoming president.  Perhaps that was too much to bear for the progeny of slave owners.  So, they endangered my family’s life in order to release their violent inhibitions.

As chance would have it, the College Station police officer who responded was a African-American man.  He assured us they had used a pellet gun, not a rifle, and informed us that there had been a spate of non-lethal election evening violence.  We weren’t the only victims.  That was of scant comfort to my young daughter, who didn’t want to sleep in her room that night because its large window looked out on the street.

I recall the politically astute Texags posters, babbling Limbaugh-Hanity-Coulter-speak, had predicted riots in black cities and neighborhoods nationwide should Senator Obama lose the election.  Instead, the only violence occurred in god-fearing Aggieland.  Just eight years ago, Democrats were tagged with the title of sore losers for contesting a 537-vote margin in Florida.  Funny, though, I never heard of Sore-Losermen wielding a gun to work out their frustrations.

Update: Since this incident, it has come to light that a local thug has been shooting out the windows of cars all over town.  He hit us again exactly one week after the election, blowing out the same back windshield of my wife’s Durango that had recently been repaired.  Nevertheless, the policeman who took the report told me that our Obama for President signs probably attracted the three shots through our dining room window.  His M.O. has been to shoot out the windows of vans and SUVs.