Jim Schutze, one of the few decent journalists left in Dallas has
a story in this week's Dallas Observer on our city's second Supreme Court nominee, Ms. Miers (our first being the only Supreme Court Justice from Texas, Tom Clark). Schutze talks to people involved in city politics in the 80's and 90's - choice bits below... (emphasis mine)
Just about everybody who served or worked with Harriet Miers during her brief political career in Dallas remembers her as a hard-working, fair-minded moderate. When the Dallas political spectrum is properly framed against the national matrix, that means many people elsewhere will view her as a right-wing Christian nut case.
Everything's relative.
[Liberal activist Lorlee Bartos] says that when Miers, a lawyer who worked for an old, ultraconservative Dallas firm, expressed uneasiness about seeking gay and lesbian endorsements, Bartos realized she and Miers needed to take time out from the campaign for a serious sit-down.
"She was honest with me," Bartos says. She says Miers told her she was very uneasy about seeking gay and lesbian endorsements. In the same conversation, Bartos says Miers told her she was opposed to abortion. She says Miers had supported abortion rights in her youth but had experienced a "born-again" religious awakening that caused her to change her mind.
Bartos says she persuaded Miers it would be a mistake not to show up for the candidate night at the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.
"She went, and she told them what they didn't want to hear."
The caucus confronted Miers with a list of test questions. Miers answered their questions honestly but did not seek their endorsement. It didn't take long for the caucus to decide that Miers definitely was not their friend.
Miers, an intensely private person, was also a member and served as counsel to Valley View Christian Church on Marsh Lane, a conservative Evangelical church that teaches that the only path to salvation is a born-again commitment to Jesus Christ.
After leaving the Dallas City Council, Miers' views on abortion did not remain strictly private. As president of the State Bar of Texas, Miers led an unsuccessful campaign to persuade the American Bar Association to drop its endorsement of Roe v. Wade.
Another mayoral candidate went on to talk about his favorable impression of Miers: "Number one, I don't think she is a right-winger. Number two, she comes from the real world."
[A colleague of Miers on the Dallas City Council] describes her as intensely private, playing her cards close to her vest and giving away nothing of her innermost makeup. "Part of the essence of who she is is that she keeps those things to herself. I have absolutely zero, nothing, no indication in all of those hundreds of hours, all of those thousands of agenda items and any other time I've been with her, to indicate there was any type of a prejudice about her or anything of that sort. I just never saw it."
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Dallas as a whole was far to the right of the rest of the nation. It was a city that seemed to have been passed over by much of the political change that swept the nation in the 1960s and '70s.
[...]
In that context, and with politics being the art of available alternatives, Harriet Miers looked good to many liberals. In fact, she danced just on the verge of progressivism.
[...]
Dallas is about to find out where all of that puts Miers and Dallas on the national political spectrum.
The rest of the world is waiting on pins and needles to find out the same thing.