Editorial: Thanks for leaving, Dan Patrick – and don’t come back

He came. He railed. He left.

Goodbye, Dan Patrick. Good riddance. Please don’t drop by the next time you’re in the neighborhood.

The tea party-sponsored lieutenant governor, who parlayed his notoriety as radio talk-show host into a career in politics, apparently believes that shooting off his mouth to no good end is a job requirement for a public official. No, Dan, that’s the radio gig where you get paid to pollute the airwaves with verbal cheap shots and brain-dead opinions. As a high-ranking officeholder in state government, you’re paid – by your bosses, the taxpayers – to discuss serious issues in a responsible and informative manner.

Responsible? Informative? Patrick doesn’t know the meaning of the words. Instead, he rolls into Fort Worth with a trick bag full of mindless blather and misleading malarkey designed to inflame the masses and advance his personal political agenda. Running for governor already, Danny boy?

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The self-promoting charlatan’s invasion of Fort Worth was prompted by his alleged indignation – some who heard his local press conference Tuesday called it “fake outrage” – about the Fort Worth Independent School District’s new guidelines for dealing with transgender students. The guidelines, predictably, included a policy on the use of school restrooms by students – transgender and otherwise – a currently hot topic on, ahem, talk radio, not to mention social media, mainstream media and assorted political campaigns. Patrick, predictably, latched onto that relatively small portion of the policy and turned it into a cause celebre, demanding the resignation of FWISD Superintendent Kent Scribner for having the audacity to sign off on the guidelines in his capacity as chief administrator of the school system.

“Every parent, especially those of young girls, should be outraged,” Patrick declared with characteristically hyperbolic fervor. He didn’t bother to elaborate as to just exactly what young girls have to fear from a set of guidelines that were thoughtfully and laboriously constructed by school officials with an eye toward protecting all students in the district, regardless of sex or gender identity.

But details, in this case and most others, are of no interest to Dan Patrick. His goal is political legerdemain – luring the public into a state of political uproar that will endear him to his followers and win him news coverage from the gullible media.

And it worked. His press conference was carried live on local TV and Fort Worth acolytes such as Pastor Ted Kitchens invoked Patrick’s name and peerless wisdom in urging church members to swarm Tuesday’s school board meeting in protest of the transgender guidelines.

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“These new guidelines would threaten the safety and privacy of children in all Fort Worth schools by opening little girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to boys,” Kitchens proclaimed in an emailed “Special ! Alert.”

Totally untrue, as it happens, but if the lieutenant governor of Texas doesn’t care about the truth, why should a local clergyman worry about it?

The guidelines approved by Scribner and three other top-level school officials will certainly be the subject of considerable debate and quite likely legal challenges. In any case, the question of legal protection for transgender students and adults alike will almost certainly be contested and ultimately resolved in the court system. The federal government has sued the state of North Carolina – and vice versa – over a transgender bathroom policy enacted by the Legislature and signed by the governor. Like the controversial issue of gay marriage, the question of transgender equality may eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Fort Worth is a city that has traditionally sought common ground among warring parties when disagreements arise over public policy. The school district’s transgender policy was not on the agenda at Tuesday’s school board meeting but the public comment segment of the meeting produced heated if not passionate debate, both pro and con.

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That was the appropriate time and place for such a debate – Fort Worth people hashing out a Fort Worth problem in an official setting. As opposed to, say, a self-serving press conference orchestrated by a grandstanding Houston politician parachuting in from the state Capitol.

We’ll close with this assessment of Patrick’s performance by Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, as reported by The Texas Tribune:

“Last I checked our children are stuck in overcrowded classrooms, the school finance system is broken, the STAAR test is a mess, pre-k needs to be expanded statewide, and our teachers need a raise, but Tea Party Lt. Gov. Patrick has nothing better to do than police the potties.”

Amen to that.