Texas Gov. Rick Perry was barraged with sexually explicit questions at Dartmouth University on Sunday by students who oppose his stances on homosexuality and gay marriage.
Senior Emily Sellers, for example, asked the likely 2016 presidential candidate whether he would submit to anal sex in exchange for $102 million in campaign contributions, the college’s newspaper, The Dartmouth, reported.
Fellow Dartmouth student Timothy Messen accused Perry of comparing homosexuality to alcoholism.
The questions, which were prepared in advance by a sophomore named Ben Packer, reportedly did not go over well with other students who attended Perry’s talk.
“They were phrased in incredibly insulting ways, and I’m horrified,” said Dartmouth student and president of the College Republicans Michelle Knesbach. “We allow people to ask policy-driven questions, but when they’re phrased in an insulting manner, we try to avoid that, because it just detracts from the overall political discourse we can have on campus.”
The president of the school’s College Democrats, Spencer Blair, agreed, adding that the questions were insulting and a waste of time.
“I think it’s really disappointing that anyone would undermine a serious political event with sexually explicit questions, and neither I nor anyone from College Democrats would ever condone such behavior,” Blair said. “We appreciate Governor Perry visiting campus, as we encourage any sort of political engagement and discourse here at Dartmouth.”
But Packer, the student who drafted the questions ahead of Perry’s visit, sees it differently.
“This particular question occurring in the background of Perry’s moral opposition to anal sex, was motivated by the fact that if Perry has any moral boundaries that have not been carefully selected by a team of campaign managers to appeal to specific constituencies, he has almost certainly had to violate those moral boundaries for campaign contributions. You can see the irony, right?” Packer said in an email to Campus Reform.
The sophomore, however, lamented the fact that his “funny” questions were not well received and that some of his fellow Dartmouth students even booed.
“Since the event organizers knew what we were doing before it happened, they sort of controlled the lens through which the questions were viewed,” he said. “The questions — they’re funny, right? I think they’re funny. I think a lot of people think that they’re funny, but since the event had control over the framing of the questions, nobody in the audience laughed. They booed.”
He continued:
Perry spent most of his talk discussing the recent Nov. 4 midterm elections and the Republican Party’s many victories that night.
“None of this is really him, though. He is a figurehead,” Packer said.
“He practices his smile in front of focus groups. He has rehearsed his surface-level defense of states’ rights in the gay marriage debate (notice the similarity to slavery and Jim Crow) hundreds of times, and I personally was not interested in asking a question that would just have him give it again,” he added.
