Rep. Jessica Farrar

Mother Jones magazine has an excellent piece up today about efforts to remove Texas’ unconstitutional “homosexual conduct” law from the books.

Unlike other recent stories about the issue, the Mother Jones article notes that the Texas GOP platform opposes the legalization of sodomy. The story also points out that Republican Gov. Rick Perry voiced support for the “homosexual conduct” law in 2002 — “I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books,” he said — and again in his new book Fed Up.

If you’ll remember, GOP State Rep. Wayne Christian recently told an Austin newspaper that the Legislature simply doesn’t have time to deal with the issue this session. But the Mother Jones story notes that when it comes to removing other unconstitutional laws from the books, that hasn’t been a issue:

“Texas has actually done a pretty good job revising its laws and cleaning stuff up,” explains Charles Spain, a Houston municipal court judge and former chairman of the LGBT law section for the State Bar of Texas. In 2009, the legislature passed an omnibus bill formally repealing more than three-dozen bills that had been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But the homosexuality statute was pointedly not included in that package.

As good as all this stuff is, the best part of the MJ article is the below quote from State Rep. Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, the author of one of the bills to remove the “homosexual conduct” law from the books. Farrar acknowledges that even though the bills have had committee hearings, they’re unlikely to go any further because of the GOP supermajority in the House.

“Their silence is deafening,” Farrar says of House Republicans. “It’s killing us. It’s just as bad as if they were vocal.”