Daniel Hernandez Jr. is currently a member of the Sunnyside Unified School District school board in Tucson, Arizona. A year and a half ago, however, he was in a Tucson parking lot administering quick first aid to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one of nineteen victims of the January 2011 mass shooting. You would think that helping to save lives in the midst of a mass shooting would, at the very least, prove that you were a "real man," whatever that term is supposed to mean, but no. No,
you would be wrong.
A source in the district sends us two flyers that Hernandez’s opponents are reportedly handing out to parents dropping their children off at schools in the district. […]
The first attacks Hernandez for being openly gay, imploring, “Put a REAL Man on the Sunnyside Board...Daniel Hernandez is LGBT...We need someone who will support Sports and cares about our kids. We don’t need someone who hates our values.”
The second flyer attacks Hernandez’s work on behalf of gun violence prevention in the wake of the Giffords shooting, claiming (punctuation and spelling are a direct quote), “Daniel Hernandez cares about only one things taking your guns away”:
The manager of the recall effort says golly gee, he has no idea who could be sending out illiterate, hateful flyers against school board members. The recall itself is
retaliation for another recall effort against school board supporters of the school superintendent, who is also coincidentally the brother of the manager of the recall effort and holy
hell, I see Arizona politics remains as ridiculous as ever.
Well, at least it's official. There's absolutely nothing gay Americans can do to convince certain very creepy folks that they are indeed actual, decent people. If saving lives during one of America's many mass shooting incidents doesn't do it, and if being a cop or other first responder at the scene of a terrorist attack doesn't do it, and if joining the military and saving the asses of your fellow soldiers one or 20 times doesn't do it then nothing will. Nope, there will always be certain people willing to put out anonymous flyers saying you hate America. Luckily, we don't have to even pretend to take those people seriously, because anonymously distributing flyers condemning a local hero does not sound like "real man" material to me.
Oh, and I'm going to go on record as someone who thinks that using bad grammar on a goddamn flyer condemning your local school board members ought to be punishable by being slapped across the face with a 50-pound bag of used textbooks. Talk about being an embarrassment to the community.