Are Perry's opinions really so newsworthy?

As I've mentioned a time or two, I have Google News alerts set up on a number of things. I find it very convenient, especially on some items that tends to have news posted only on rare occasions. For example the David Coppedge lawsuit. Months can go by without a single item of news. It would be so easy to miss it, so I have an alert set up. What an alert means is that you can get a link to stories about the topic in your mailbox. The downside of the alerts is many of the articles might have the keywords you are interested in, but be on entirely different subjects. The other problem is sometimes the same story is reported from a number of links, so you might get many hits on the same subject.

The Associated Press ran a short article on Texas Gov Rick Perry in which he supports a Federal Marriage Amendment -- in other words a Constitutional amendment mandating marriage is between a man and a woman only. "Perry backs a constitutional limit on gay marriage" Funny how this was also the article where he said social issues should be decided state by state. Isn't this a social issue?

OK, he also made a few evolutionary comments:

• "There are clear indications from our people who have amazing intellectual capability that this didn't happen by accident and a creator put this in place," Perry said.
• "Now, what was his time frame and how did he create the earth that we know? I'm not going to tell you that I've got the answers to that," Perry said.
  
• "I believe that we were created by this all-powerful supreme being and how we got to today versus what we look like thousands of years ago, I think there's enough holes in the theory of evolution to, you know, say there are some holes in that theory."

Hmmm, OK, my first point is does any of this come as a surprise? Perry has clearly been well ensconced with the conservative right. It's the constituency who has elected him 3 times to the governorship of Texas. He's the one who has appointed three extremely conservative School Board heads, two of whom failed to get confirmed by the legislature. He's also the one who allowed Chris Comer to be fired for doing her job! So anyone who read this little article should have just shrugged their shoulders and gone on to another section of the paper. In fact you really didn't need to read past the headline.

My second point is interesting, maybe only to me, but early in the article says:

"But Perry told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that a presidential campaign would concentrate on jobs, not evolution or gay marriage."

However when you look at his jobs comments and his anti-evolution comments, where did he spend more time? It wasn't on the jobs! Maybe because he was playing to the audience in South Carolina or maybe because he knows who his core audience is, he can't lay off the social issues. One of my concerns is that he focuses so much on the social issues might be because he has nothing on any other issues! Now that's scary.