Slammed as a bigot, Smith running for mayor in Michigan's 4th-largest city

Paul Smith and his wife/council candidate, Moira, at a 2009 tea party rally.

By Chad Selweski
 Deadline Detroit

Michigan’s fourth-largest city, Sterling Heights, could soon be led by a new mayor who’s associated with homophobic and racist remarks and once displayed a poster of a bloodied, beheaded President Barack Obama that drew the attention of the Secret Service.

Mayoral candidate Paul Smith and a half dozen of his political allies, who routinely raise the ire of city officials by making inflammatory statements, are running as a loosely knit slate of candidates seeking to seize control of the seven-member city council in the upcoming November election.

Smith, a former councilman who served from 2011-13, faced repeated calls for his resignation in 2012 when a video surfaced that showed him at a tea party rally in Troy in 2009 carrying a protest sign featuring an illustration of Obama impaled through the skull by a spear.

Other hand-made posters Smith and his wife Moira -- a council candidate --  held up at the event included one depicting then-governor Jennifer Granholm hanging from a noose and U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi with bullet holes in her face.  The Pelosi placard denounced illegal immigrants as “wetbacks” and gays as “f –gs.” Regarding Obama:  “He changed America into Uganda.”

Paul Smith

In Sterling Heights, a diverse bedroom community of nearly 132,000 people, residents are accustomed to seeing their town appear on lists of the safest and “most livable” cities in America. But the tranquility ends at the entrance to city hall.
In the city council chambers, Smith and his fellow gadflies routinely disrupt the meetings as they loudly denounce council members. Their claims range from corruption in the police department to “tyranny” emanating from City Hall to organized spying on city residents by DTE through the use of so-called “smart meters.”

This group’s one victory came several months ago when they successfully pressured the council to abruptly rescind an ordinance spelling out rights for gays in the city.
“This is preferential treatment, and I wonder why we need preferential treatment for this LGBT agenda,” council candidate Jackie Ryan said to applause at one 2014 public forum. “They … (the LGBT community) have been around for a long time and I don’t see where there has been discrimination against them.”

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