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MCD April 2015 Meeting

Thursday, April 23 at 7 pm at Los Jimadores in Bedford

Hi everyone!  Our April meeting is scheduled for this Thursday at Los Jimadores starting at 7 pm. As a reminder, if you’d like to eat with us in the banquet room, please arrive by 6:30. For our guest speaker this month, we have David Mack Henderson, president of Fairness Fort Worth, to provide us with information on the status of marriage equality in the state of Texas.  For a quick background on Mr. Henderson:

When David was elected UT Arlington’s mascot “Sam Maverick” in 1980 he was asked to resign because he was gay.  Not only did he say no, but David founded the Gay/Lesbian Association of UTA.  Only eleven years post-Stonewall, this was one of first school sanctioned GSA’s in the US.  At 34 years, the GSA@UTA is older than official pride celebrations in both Fort Worth and Dallas.
Henderson led a similar LGBT group after transferring to UNT and helped start a state-wide coalition for the growing number of campus groups.  In 1984 he joined the Board of the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance, managing daily operations at their fledgling community center. When the pandemic hit, was part of the original board creating the AIDS Resource Center, now the Resource Center.
David is a Realtor and tax accountant, with clients that have included one of the original same-sex plaintiff couples in the 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision first legalizing marriage equality.  Within hours of the 2009 Rainbow Lounge Raid he was part of the core group organizing a protest and two days later a founding member of Fairness Fort Worth, serving today as President.  In a few short years FFW has led Fort Worth from international outcry to a proactive new model of LGBT inclusion for mid-size cities throughout the US.
Henderson teaches LGBT diversity classes for the City of Fort Worth, Arlington police, FWISD counselors, Tarrant County College, TCU and others.  At the invitation of The White House he is currently working on LGBT inclusion as the Affordable Care Act is implemented.  An HIV positive stakeholder, Henderson also serves on the team allocating $5 mil in federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS funds annually for 38 counties in North Central Texas.

In other news and events, we were happy to see many like-minded Democrats at Kathleen Thompson’s fundraisert last week.  While not an official MCD event, the club board and many members were present to help Kathleen as the fights for Grapevine and Colleyville students and parents.  To learn more about Kathleen, please visit her campaign website at http://www.votekathleen.com.

As to other local elections, the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County has been holding a series of moderated candidate forums.  John Schleeter from our HEB City Group (https://www.facebook.com/MCDHEB) has been posting about the forums, and if you’d like to see the remaining events, please click here:  http://www.lwvtarrantcounty.org/Documents/April%202015%20Forums.pdf.

That’s all for this month.  See you at the meeting on Thursday, and be sure to go out and vote on May 9.

Democratically Yours,
Clancy Cummings
President, Mid-Cities Democrats