CARE BROWNSVILLE CONFRONTS WIGHTMAN, OUTS HIM

(The following article appeared in the Care Brownsville blogspot. After reviewing the material, we found that the articles quoted and the quotes from the Dallas Observer articles are factual. Wightman has called on local unionized teachers to demand the ouster of board president Catalina Garcia-Presas at Tuesday's meeting, making the subject of this article one of public interest. We reprint it with the group's permission. JMon)  

By www.carebrownsville.blogspot

Local blogger Bobby Wightman wants you to follow him and demand the resignation of Brownsville Independent School District board of trustees Catalina Presas-Garcia in Tuesday's meeting at the district offices.

In a posting on his scurrilous blog Brownsville Voice, Wightman urges "TEACHERS UNIONS MUST APPEAR TUESDAY NIGHT AND DEMAND PRESAS-GARCIA's REMOVAL."

Then, addressing the rank and file, he tells them that "If your union reps fail to appear and demand her removal then the teachers should demand the removal of their union reps."

Now, we all knows that overturning the democratic process and removing official elected by the people is a serious business. Overturning the democratic process - the foundation of our free society - is not done lightly.
Just who is this person who is asking you to grab your torches and pitchfork and join the mob?
Wightman is a recent arrival to Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley. Before he came here, he was a practicing attorney in Dallas.
On Jan. 11, 2002 the 298th District Court of Dallas County disbarred Wightman, then 44, of Dallas.
He was disbarred by the Supreme Court in March 2004. The Supreme Court found that:

"On Jan. 11, the 298th District Court of Dallas County disbarred Robert R. Wightman-Cervantes [#21443200], 44, of Dallas. The court found Wightman-Cervantes brought or defended a frivolous proceeding. The court also found Wightman-Cervantes took a position that unreasonably increased the costs or other burdens of a case and delayed the resolution of the case. Wightman-Cervantes, in representing a client, engaged in conduct engaged to disrupt a proceeding. Wightman-Cervantes was also found to have communicated with another party regarding a case when he knew that party was represented by counsel. The court also found Wightman-Cervantes made a statement that was either false or with reckless disregard to its truth regarding the qualifications or integrity of a judge. Wightman-Cervantes failed to timely respond to notice of the complaint from the grievance committee. He violated Rules 3.01, 3.02, 3.04(c)(2), (c)(3), and (c)(5), 3.05(a), 4.02(a), 4.04(a) and (b)(1), 8.02(a), and 8.04(a)(1) and (a)(8). He was ordered to pay $48,700.72 in attorney’s fees, which is subject to reduction."

Wightman's troubled track record starts sometime before that.
An article from the Dallas Observer indicates that, while in the U.S. Army, he was "transferred to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo for surveillance training, he grew ill and was hospitalized for a time with ulcerative colitis. He also became deeply depressed, but couldn't tell anyone why. "I thought I was betraying my government by lying that I wasn't gay," he says. "I couldn't tell them the truth without going to jail."
Although a previous Army mental exam found he had "no psychiatric disorder," his commanding officer at Goodfellow believed Wightman was malingering and ordered that he be evaluated at St. John's Hospital in San Angelo.

"The doctor who performed the evaluation, who Wightman-Cervantes says never examined him, offered this diagnosis in 1982: "It is my initial impression that the patient manifests a paranoid personality disorder." After reviewing his medical records, an Army psychiatrist determined that Wightman suffered from "atypical personality disorder (suspiciousness, self-dramatization, overreaction to minor events, angry outbursts, some grandiose ideation)."

On March 31, 1983, Wightman received an honorable discharge from the Army based on this psychiatric disorder, though he says the doctor attesting to his discharge never examined him either.
Starting in 1986, Wightman tried to change the diagnosis with the Veteran's Administration. He petitioned the military at least three times to reconsider his discharge, but the Army Discharge Review Board turned him down each time. In 1989, he filed a federal lawsuit against the secretary of the Army, attempting to change the grounds for his discharge again. But the trial judge dismissed the case, and Wightman's appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was equally unsuccessful.
In 1990, while still in law school, he also filed a lawsuit in a Houston federal court on his own behalf seeking to have the Texas sodomy statute declared unconstitutional. In an 18-page affidavit, which graphically details much of his sexual history, he summarizes the injury he has suffered as a result of the state's criminalizing homosexuality.
"Many gays fight the depression with sex. I have done that," he swears in his affidavit. "Many gays fight the depression with drugs. I have done that. Many gays fight the depression with fighting back. I've done that. For me, fighting back is a form of therapy. It gives me hope."
When the federal judge stayed the proceedings because a similar case had been filed in state court, Wightman-Cervantes fought back. He unsuccessfully appealed the decision to a three-judge panel for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Then he sued all four judges – his first taste of this tactic – claiming that because the federal judges dismissed his case and deferred to the state courts, their actions denied him, as a homosexual, access to the federal courts.
He lost.
But the tricks he picked up during those cases led him to develop his personal style of law.
"After an adverse ruling by (a) court, "he will file a recusal motion or a lawsuit against the judge, hoping to bait the judge into bias by branding him a "tyrant" or a "whore for the insurance companies" or a "defendant" in one of his lawsuits. The result is procedural gridlock, one recusal motion following another, one judge deciding whether another judge can be impartial. Rarely will a case get heard on its merits. Rarely does he win these procedural debacles.
Delay, abusive threats, frivolous filings – all are part of his vindictive campaign to terrorize the legal system."
The Texas State Bar hired Dallas family-law attorney Mike McCurley, to prosecute its case. On September 10, 1998, McCurley filed a "motion for a mental examination of Robert Wightman."
"All appropriate measures must be employed to assess Wightman's established pattern of aberrant behavior," McCurley wrote.
"Perhaps the most chilling evidence that Wightman has placed his mental condition into controversy are Wightman's own writings and utterances..."
Many people in Brownsville have become the victims of Wightman's tactics. A cursory glance at his website indicates that he has at one time or another called for the removal of a host of elected officials and openly blamed others for the suicides of young gays.
He has called Mayor Pat Ahumada a "worthless piece of ----," has called for Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos to resign, city manager Charlie Cabler the epitome of corruption, wanted Judge Migdalia Lopez censured by the Texas Judicial Commisison, wanted George Bush to fire Condoleezza Rice, said that Judge Gilberto Rosas should be fired by the district judges for being a two-bit bully, and has said that D.A. Armando Villalobos is corrupt and has committed "outight fraud."
Even the U.S. President doesn't fare well under Wightman.

In a posting on Mr. Obama, he said that like "the good half-breed self hating black that he is, would have made a great house servant, or the aid to the overseer holding the whip while the overseer tied the field slaves to the tree before a whipping. Yes, this house servant boy knows his place and knows how to keep the uppity Negroes in their place so as not to upset the politics of the big house."

Wightman's is a master at half-truths and innuendo. When he talks of Accion America president Carlos Quintanilla, he delights in branding him as a "convicted felon," while refusing to acknowledge the progressive social work that he has done on behalf of Hispanics, undocumented Mexicans, children, and that he led the campaign against the drug dealers making money on cheese heroin deaths of young people in the inner city.
Quintanilla, who was sought and invited by local parents of special needs children was also the subject of a Dallas Observer article, but the magazine came to a very different conclusion of his activities there than did Wightman.
Of his days in Chicago, Danny Solis, a Chicago city council member who recalls Quintanilla organizing civil disobedience campaigns there in the '80s to pressure government and local businesses to hire Latinos, described the activist as articulate, charismatic and effective, but also as "a bad enemy."
"He wasn't just radical for radical's sake. He got a lot of jobs for Hispanics in the city of Chicago; a lot of the people in the city now probably owe their jobs to him," Solis says. "He could be a very good ally, and he could be a very bad enemy. He's relentless; he'll go after you; he doesn't give up."
He was recognized as the face behind the struggle to overturn what he called racist policies against Mexican immigrants in Farmers Branch and won.
"Farmers Branch is just another battle in a long fight," he said.

And despite what Wightman might say about his business ventures, the Observer wrote that "In recent years, two of his business ventures involving Mexican vendors—one the Garibaldi Bazaar flea market off of Interstate 30, the other a proposed bus depot—ended with numerous parties suing one another. In the bazaar case, Quintanilla wound up with a settlement of more than $1 million.

A search under his name turns up five district court lawsuits in the past five years in which he was either plaintiff or defendant. In 2003, he sued the city of Dallas for $1 million, claiming officials killed a deal to turn the Bronco Bowl in Oak Cliff into a Mexican-style market because they didn't want a business catering to Hispanics. He ultimately dropped the lawsuit.

A year later, Quintanilla made headlines again when he complained that a routine $25,000 contract for production of a county brochure should have been awarded to a minority firm, and a shouting match between outgoing County Judge Margaret Keliher and County Commissioner John Wiley Price ensued.

Several months later, he complained in news reports that police unfairly singled him out after a summer fiesta at a market he owned in Irving drew noise complaints from neighbors.
Quintanilla concedes that he can be combative, but he counters that he's achieved results."I think if you look at my life, I've done good," he says. "I'm proud of myself, my family's proud of me, and most of all my community is proud of me. Unfortunately, lawsuits have become part of the game. Wightman makes his living harassing his victims until they get tired of him and pay him nuisance money to go away."
Voters in the BISD district – faced with a choice of voting for the candidates backed by Quintanilla and Wightman – chose to go with Enrique Escobedo, Luci Longoria, and Christia Saavedra instead of Wightman's picks of Ruben Cortez and Zayas.
But Wightman chooses to ignore the fact that the people have made their choice and continues his war on the new trustees.
Just how slimy and squalid is Mr. Wightman?
A few quotes from his blog advocating his sexual preferences will turn most people's stomachs. Here's a sampler:

"How do you know if your husband is gay?
Your husband always has a smile on his face after a prostate exam.
Your husband takes more than 2 minutes on the thrown (throne) - those forced contractions are the equivalent of you know what.
Your husband shaves his scrotum.
Your husband has been working out for three years, has gained no muscle, 20 pounds of fat, and loves to shower at the gym.
Your husband wears nylon net underwear

Haven't had enough? How about:

"Among younger men and women sex with members of the same gender does not mean you are gay - it means you are horny and want some. The nerve endings in the anus which give pleasure during sex, or the impact on the prostate are not any different between straight and gay men.
Trust me ladies once a man has been rimmed, he will want it all of the time. One day he will realize that going all the way with the anal intercourse is even better than the pleasure he gets from rimming. Will it make him gay? - no - it will make him liberated about his body."

And what does he think of the people of Brownsville? This:

"On the issue of bigotry, its openness in Brownsville rivals the days of lynchings in East Texas. It is not that there is more in Brownsville, it is that in Brownsville people wear their bigotry and homophobia as badges of honor. They rationalize it with some level of psychotic intellectualism learned in a school for members of the KKK or SS officers.

This is the person that wants you to follow him and have you remove our elected officials from office. This is the person who has given himself the self-appointed mission of removing Catalina Presas-Garcia from office after we, the voters, chose her to represent us. This is the person who refuses to acknowledge that Accion America and Mr. Quintanilla have done good work in our communities.

Is this someone who you would want to follow to decide the way we teach our children in our schools? We think not.