James Talarico is the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas this year. He is raising money hand over fist, will enjoy Beto O’Rourke-style adulation from most of the “news” media, and now faces an exceptionally flawed Republican opponent in the general election. The GOP, desperate to hold this seat, will spend the next several months defining Talarico, accurately, as a radical leftist. He looks and speaks like a youth pastor, but his substantive views and voting record would fit comfortably on, say, the Seattle City Council. The opening general election salvo, or “silo,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might call it, from Talarico’s Republican rival seeks to introduce the leftist to a Texas audience.
The Democrat’s assertion that “God is nonbinary,” which many Christians view as a deliberate twisting of a scriptural passage that refers to human beings under Christ, not to God Himself, has drawn significant attention, prompting a politically timed and motivated quasi-retreat this week. In a friendly interview with CBS, Talarico appeared to concede that he “missed the mark” with the comment, complaining that it’s not fair for his opponents to clip “cringey” remarks from the peak-woke era as representative of his worldview. The trouble seems to be that cringey wokeness very much defines Talarico, as illustrated in the ad above. There’s a lot more where that came from, including a sermon in which he touted “abortion care” for “trans community” from the pulpit.
On the “God is nonbinary” quip, specifically, it’s not credible for Talarico to chalk that up to rhetorical excesses from the distant past. Why? Because he doubled down on it, indignantly and self-righteously, just last month. Here’s the timeline: