Republican State Rep. Linda Harper-Brown of Irving will stop using a car owned by a company that her legislative committee regulates and that does millions of dollars in business with the state, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Harper-Brown blames her current ethics troubles on her opponent, but the campaign for Democrat Loretta Haldenwang specifically refused to comment or make an issue of the violations when contacted by Dallas Voice last week.

State Rep. Linda Harper-Brown

Harper-Brown said she’s done nothing wrong, but Russell Langley, speaking for the Texas Democratic Party, noted that she can’t un-drive the car.
But here’s the real issue, and it boils down to heterosexual hypocrisy.
Harper-Brown doesn’t believe there’s an ethics violation because her husband received two cars from the company as payment for accounting work. Ordinarily, that would be an obvious abuse of power, but she and her husband signed a prenuptial agreement.
Apparently, Harper-Brown wants to take advantage of heterosexual special rights, but wants to pick and choose among them. She can include her husband on her state-funded insurance policy. She has automatic visitation rights if he’s hospitalized. And she’d receive his Social Security benefits if he were to pass away.
And, without argument from anyone, she would get everything that belonged to him. The list of heterosexual marriage rights numbers more than 1,000.
But a prenuptial agreement, as far as she’s concerned, limits her ethical responsibilities. Gifts that he received from clients have nothing to do with her, even if she’s driving the gift that was meant for him. With a prenup, according to her, a gift of two cars to a married man doesn’t suggest that one of those cars was meant for the wife.
Maybe she and her husband would have been better off if they never married and just spent several thousand dollars completing all the paperwork and filing all the agreements and affidavits that same-sex couples must navigate. Then, she could have avoided the responsibilities of marriage and benefitted from the lack of any real protection that those documents provide.
It’s funny that while gays and lesbians fight for marriage equality, a straight Republican state representative isn’t so happy with some of the responsibilities that come with it.