Believe it or not, it was one year ago this past Saturday when Texas Gov. Rick Perry formally announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
As if to commemorate the anniversary, Perry was back in Iowa this weekend to stump for Mitt Romney and, as it turned out, Paul Ryan.
Perry even visited the Iowa State Fair, where the infamous photo above was taken at about this time last year. He later addressed the anti-gay Family Leader group, and it’s pretty clear Perry hasn’t learned any lessons from his presidential campaign, when his attempts at gay-baiting backfired so miserably.
From The Dallas Morning News:
Perry, who fell to Romney in the GOP presidential race, spent Saturday visiting voters at the Iowa State Fair and then speaking to a gathering of several hundred Christian conservatives at a summit sponsored by the Family Leader, a conservative group active in politics, at a megachurch west of Des Moines.
“There’s a war against religion. There’s a war against people of faith in this country,” Perry told the crowd at Point of Grace Church. “There is something wrong with America when our popular culture is afraid to offend atheists and all too ready to attack people of faith.”
Perry cited the administration’s embrace of gay marriage and the requirement that religiously affiliated employers provide birth control as part of their insurance coverage.
The Associated Press reports that Perry even took the opportunity to comment on the recent Chick-fil-A controversy:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry says “political correctness has to stop,” citing the flap over Chick-fil-A and opposition to same-sex marriage as an example. …
He said that when Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy defended “the sanctity of marriage, the left went nuts.”
According to his prepared remarks, Perry continued: “When conservatives are offended by a corporate policy, we simply choose not to give them our business.”
He added that offended liberals “try to keep everyone else from giving them business.”
All I can say is that’s it too bad Chick-fil-A doesn’t sell corn dogs, because I see a great potential advertising campaign here: You have Gov. Perry sporting the Brokeback Mountain jacket he wore in that “Strong” ad, striking the above pose with a corn dog.
The slogan?
“Eat Mor Dik.”