Jessica Garrison and Luther Strange
(from Facebook)
Garrison put herself in the headlines recently by attacking our reporting on her extramarital affair with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange--and its proximity to her divorce from Tuscaloosa businessman and school-board member Lee Garrison. (Does any of that keep Jessica from touting her "family values"? Probably not.)
We've already shown that Garrison can take hypocrisy to extraordinary heights on the subject of Big Tobacco. After all, she griped in divorce papers that Lee Garrison and his new wife smoked around the Garrison's son--never mind that Jessica has proclaimed U.S. Judge and noted tobacco whore Bill Pryor as her professional mentor.
But Garrison takes hypocrisy to new levels in her PR-attack piece against Legal Schnauzer at the women's fashion site marieclaire.com. In this instance, Garrison proves to be mind-bogglingly two-faced on another hot-button political issue--gay rights.
Consider this from Garrison's marieclaire.com article:
By then, I was a Executive Director at RAGA, the Republican Attorney General's Association, in Washington, D.C. My job was to meet with corporations to promote working with Attorney Generals. One day, I went to a meeting with the Government Affairs director at Apple at a restaurant in Cupertino, California. When I arrived, he said, "I looked you up online so I could recognize you." My heart stopped beating. All I could think throughout the meeting was, 'This man thinks I slept with the Attorney General of Alabama.'
Garrison tells us--some might call it bragging--that she has the clout to get an audience with a top executive at Apple Inc., long considered one of the most innovative and progressive companies on the planet.
It's probably safe to say that Garrison did not inform her lunch companion that her mentor, Bill Pryor, founded RAGA, the outfit for which she now serves as executive director. Why might Garrison have kept that news under wraps? Well, Pryor is considered one of the most anti-gay political figures in modern American history--to the point that Pryor revealed during his confirmation hearings that he and his wife, Kristan W. Pryor, rescheduled a family vacation to Disney World when they discovered the Orlando, Florida, theme park had scheduled "Gay Days" festivities at the same time as their planned visit.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc.
Speaking of hypocrisy, Bill Pryor is a noted homophobe, even though nude photographs taken during his college days showed up in the 1990s at the gay-porn Web site badpuppy.com.Why would Jessica Garrison likely not tell an Apple executive about her ties--and RAGA's ties--to Bill Pryor? Well, Apple CEO Tim Cook is openly gay. In fact, Cook is the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to publicly identify as gay.
Ironically, Tim Cook has powerful ties to Alabama. He was born in Mobile (Bill Pryor's hometown) and grew up in Robertsdale, going on to earn a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University.
Jessica Garrison has built her career on a foundation of homophobia, but she seeks support from a company led by the nation's most famous gay corporate leader.
It takes some "brass ones" to attempt that. It also takes a heavy dose of hypocrisy--and Jessica Garrison, like many conservatives, has a major supply of that.