In light of TABC report, raid at Fort Worth gay bar looks uglier

In light of TABC report, raid at Fort Worth gay bar looks uglier | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Columnist Jacquielynn Floyd | Dallas-Fort Worth News

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission allows that its agents committed more than a half-dozen potentially fireable offenses during the June raid on a Cowtown gay bar – and the agency hasn't even addressed the part about how one patron got his noggin busted.

This is not looking good for anybody who still maintains that the joint TABC-Fort Worth police operation was all about protecting and serving.

Instead, the findings to date lend credence to the unhappy suspicion that a bunch of geeked-up lawmen thought it might be good fun to roust a bunch of gay people.

Maybe I'm wrong. I tend to react with initial skepticism when people claim to have been targeted because they're minorities or gay or immigrants or what-have-you. Hey, it's 2009!

But then somebody comes along and pulls off something so stupid, so backward and so inexplicably hateful that I'm reminded of the comparative advantage of being an ordinary, straight, nondescript white person in our society.

Because I just don't see a "bar check" being conducted in this manner at, say, a Chili's in Plano. I don't envision six cops, two TABC agents in nonregulation "state police" uniforms and a paddy wagon showing up at Billy Miner's in Sundance Square to make sure the liquor license is in order.

That's one answer to the plaintive "what's-the-big- deal" question some people keep asking about continued coverage of this story.

And the other answer is that there's something odd and disturbing about the official version of events submitted by the Fort Worth police officers at the scene.

Yes, I mean the creepy "groping" allegation. The police report says the young club patron who suffered a brain injury that night, Chad Gibson, deliberately "groped" or "slapped" an officer's private parts – and that later, Gibson fell forward in a drunken stupor and cracked his skull.

This version directly refutes witnesses who claim that neither Gibson nor anybody else "groped" any cops that night, and that Gibson was hurt when several officers slammed him down without provocation.

Fort Worth's rather slow-moving investigation into its own officers' actions is ongoing and incomplete, so it's anybody's guess which version will be borne out.....

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