Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Via Lone Star Q:
Mere months before Jonathan Saenz became president of the anti-gay group Texas Values, his wife left him for another woman, according to Hays County district court records obtained by Lone Star Q. The revelation could help explain Saenz’s seemingly abrupt transformation from socially conservative lobbyist to homophobic firebrand. Saenz, a devout Catholic, has been a right-wing operative in Texas for many years — working on abortion and religious liberty cases as a staff attorney for the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute as far back as 2005. However, it wasn’t until recently that Saenz emerged as one of the state’s best-known — and most extreme — anti-LGBT voices. Court records indicate that Saenz’s ex-wife, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz, is a member of the LGBT community who was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Saenz in August 2011. In early 2012, with their divorce still pending, Saenz would take the helm of Texas Values after the organization spun off from the Liberty Legal Institute, where he’d risen to chief lobbyist.
According to the above-linked report, Saenz successfully petitioned a court to bar his ex-wife’s girlfriend from being in the presence of his children. That order was apparently dropped when the divorce was finalized over a year later. He also reportedly tried to have his ex-wife jailed for refusing to undergo a psychological evaluation by a doctor who also evaluates sex offenders for the state of Texas. (Tipped by JMG reader Mike)
PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: In addition to spearheading the drive to repeal Houston’s LGBT rights ordinance, Saenz has declared that gay activists want Christians thrown into concentration camps. In June, Tony Perkins praised Saenz for his work on the Texas GOP party plank with endorses ex-gay torture. His Twitter feed is nonstop Christianist bloviation about gay people.