Wes White: “Raymond Johnson was hired to collect petitions”

In the wake of last week’s piece about Republican 4th Circuit State Attorney candidate Wes White hiring two folks on opposite sides of the debate on Jacksonville Human Rights Ordinance Expansion to collect petitions, White wants to set the record straight.

Regarding one petition collector, Raymond Johnson, who enthusiastically advocates against codifying protections for LGBT people into Duval County law, White distanced himself from Johnson, to whom he gave $3,000 for a singular job.

“Raymond Johnson was hired to collect petitions. That was not an endorsement of his views. More specifically, I was following the lead and suggestion of another candidate who recommended him for that purpose and that purpose alone – nothing more and nothing less,” White said.

White also gave a realpolitik defense of hiring Reverend R.L. Gundy, who opposed HRO expansion in 2012, but who had the scales fall off his eyes around the time the Human Rights Campaign gave him $10,000 to help sell the issue to black pastors.

“As far as Gundy,” White contends, “we share a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ. But he (his company) was hired primarily to secure ballot petitions (in the African-American community) AND  parenthetically, to test the willingness of people to move over to the Republican Party.”

“By the way,” White adds, “I’m told that every dollar received by Gundy went to hiring John Q. Public, Jane Q. Public, and their kids, to work for the Wes White campaign in furthering a (my) conservative messaging that has traditionally been received with a jaundiced eye in certain quarters in the past.”

And regarding the HRO? Though White stops short of giving a full-scale endorsement to potential legislation, he notes that he believes “in the equal application and equal protection of the law – period, exclamation mark.”