Texas Governor Greg Abbott was in New York Tuesday to promote the Lone Star State, and he got more than he bargained for when one New Yorker approached him.

As he was boarding a flight home Tuesday evening, a man approached Abbott, shook his hand, and then proceeded to curse at him because of Abbott’s extremely vocal opposition to gay marriage. The man reportedly told Abbott:

“I hope you [expletive] go to hell because of your stance on gay marriage. I’m going to see you on the plane.”

As it turns out, the man would not see the Texas Governor on the plane as he was removed from the flight, given a hotel room for the evening, and rescheduled on a flight leaving Wednesday.

Abbott has repeatedly fought against same-sex marriage, first as Texas Attorney General and now as Governor of the state. Just last year he said Texas’ ban on gay marriage encouraged heterosexual couples to marry and have children. He also argued:

“First, Texas’s marriage laws are rationally related to the State’s interest in encouraging couples to produce new offspring, which are needed to ensure economic growth and the survival of the human race. By channeling procreative heterosexual intercourse into marriage, Texas’s marriage laws reduce unplanned out-of-wedlock births and the costs that those births impose on society. Recognizing same-sex marriage does not advance this interest because same-sex unions do not result in pregnancy.”

Abbott has said that same-sex marriage should be illegal because it ensures “the survival of the human race.” He has  also written:

“Because opposite-sex relationships are the only union that is biologically capable of producing offspring, it is rational to believe that opposite-sex marriages will generate new offspring to a greater extent than same-sex marriages will. “It is therefore rational for the State to subsidize opposite-sex marriages, which tend to produce benefits for society by generating new offspring, while withholding these subsidies from same-sex relationships, which are far less likely to provide this particular societal benefit.”

With that kind of narrow-minded, parochial view of the world, Governor Abbott should probably expect more encounters like the one that occurred earlier this week in New York.

This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org.