State Rep. Bryan Slaton with his wife and son in a screen cap taken from his campaign website, BryanSlaton.com.
UPDATE: Right-wing state Rep. Brian Slaton has resigned from his seat in the Texas House rather than waiting for his colleagues to vote on whether or not he should be expelled. His decision comes just two days after the House General Investigating Committee recommended he be expelled from the Legislature for having an inappropriate relationship with a 19-year-old female intern.
With his resignation, Gov. Greg Abbott will have to call a special election to replace Slaton as the representative for House District 2, but that election cannot happen before the legislative session ends on Memorial Day, the Texas Tribune reports.
ORIGINAL POST: The Texas House General Investigating Committee is recommending that state Rep. Bryan Slaton — the Republican who helped kick off the wave of anti-drag queen bills introduced in Texas because drag queens groom children — be expelled from the Legislature for having an inappropriate relationship with a House intern under the age of 21, according to a breaking news report from The Texas Tribune.
The recommendation comes after a Capitol employee filed a complaint in April alleging that Slaton, a married 45-year-old former youth pastor, had invited a young woman on his staff to his Austin condo late on a Friday night in March, provided her with alcohol and then had sex with her.
(Providing alcohol to some under the legal drinking age is a crime in Texas, by the way.)
Republican Rep. Andrew Murr, chairman of the House General Investigating Committee, speaking on the House floor said “expelling Slaton was necessary to protect the ‘dignity and integrity’ of the Legislature, the Tribune reports.
Slaton has refused to comment but after the complaint was filed last month, his attorney issued a statement calling the allegations “outrageous” and “false.”
Slaton, who is from Mineola, Texas, and is in his second term representing the 2nd District, announced in June 2022 that he intended to file a bill in the 87th Texas Legislature (the current session) to bar minors from attending any kind of drag show. He made the announcement after a right-wing group calling itself Protect Texas Children showed up in Oak Lawn on June 4 to harass families attending a family-friendly drag show held early that afternoon at the Cedar Springs bar Mr. Misster.
The show, held as part of Dallas Pride weekend festivities, took place before the bar opened for normal business. Slaton declared in a press release, “The events of this past weekend were horrifying and show a disturbing trend in which perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.”
Slaton’s horror at children seeing a drag show came 12 days after a gunman carrying a semi-automatic assault-style rifled slaughtered 19 fourth-graders and two fourth-grade teachers in Uvalde, Texas. The same week he declared that drag queens were a danger to children, Slaton told the Greenville Herald-Banner he didn’t “think we know enough right now” about the Uvalde mass murder for Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session to address gun laws, and that “So far I haven’t heard anything that makes me think we need to change the gun laws.”
(By that point, we already knew that an 18-year-old with a history of mental health problems was able to legally purchase two high-powered assault-style rifles and that he had used one of them to murder 19 children and two adults. We also knew that 223 people had been killed in mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022 by the time of the Uvalde massacre, according to the Gun Violence Archive.)
Slaton is married and has a son. He works for his cousin’s financial services company in Royse City. He has a double-major degree in youth ministry/speech communications from Ouchita Baptist University and a masters of divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He spent 13 years as a youth and family minister, according to his profile on the Texas House website.
On his campaign website, Slaton describes himself as a “bold and brave Christian-Conservative,” and pledges to “stand up to Government abuse, constant overstepping and the over all burden it places on the taxpayer” and to “advance liberty and our way of life against the establishment in Austin.”
— Tammye Nash
