Houston Mayor Annise Parker cheered Barack Obama’s announcement that he supports marriage equality Wednesday.
Parker, the first openly gay mayor of a major American city, received a call from top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett about the news, Talking Points Memo reported.
She cheered Obama’s announcement in a tweet:
Wow! I was wrong. Call from White House. The President has stepped up and stated his support for recognizing relationships…like mine!-a
— Annise Parker (@anniseparker) May 9, 2012
In February in an appearance on Michelangelo Signorile’s SiriusXM radio program, Parker criticized the president’s reticence to support same-sex marriage, Signorile noted at the Huffington Post. Parker had said that Obama’s position on marriage equality, “needs to evolve a little bit faster and is not clearly where I think he ought to be.”
Several Texas Republicans were not cheered by the announcement, however. Perry spokeswoman Catherine Frazier chalked up Obama’s shift to “election-year politics.” “Governor Perry’s unwavering commitment is to the sanctity of marriage, defined as a union between one man and one woman,” she said.
U.S. Senator John Cornyn faulted the president for shifting the conversation away from issues Americans are care about: “There appears to be a plan to try to distract Americans from the thing they care most about, which is too many people out of work and the sad state of the economy, and the runaway and reckless spending going on here in Washington,” Cornyn told Politico.
