Glenn Declares Candidacy for U.S. Senate

* Marriage Protection Amendment co-author
* Right to Work and School Choice leader
* Health care reform “pioneer”
 

Midland, Mich. — Gary Glenn, 53, of Midland Wednesday filed a formal statement of candidacy for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, for the U.S. Senate in 2012.  Glenn, who said he has crossed the $5,000 fundraising threshhold at which federal election law requires a formal statement of candidacy, is the only GOP candidate to formally file after former Rep. Pete Hoekstra announced his entry into the race.

Noting Hoekstra's votes for the $850 billion Wall Street bailout, earmarks such as the $223 million "Bridge to Nowhere," and budgets and debt ceiling increases that added trillions of dollars to the national debt, Glenn cited "Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

"The last twenty years, Debbie Stabenow and Pete Hoekstra both voted for red-ink budgets and debt ceiling increases that resulted in trillions in crushing new debt on our economy and our children's future," Glenn said. "A Democrat in Congress fourteen years, a Republican for eighteen years plus two more as a lobbyist, a total of over three decades as part of the go along to get along culture that got us where we are now. If we want to end the fiscal insanity in Washington, is it rational to expect we'll get a different result if we keep sending the same people back there over and over again?"

Glenn said the nation's "economy, security, liberties, moral foundation, and founding principles — all that’s made America and Americans exceptional in the history of the world – are under attack from within."

“If they're not stopped, liberal ideologues like Debbie Stabenow and Barack Obama will rob our children of their birthright and turn our country into the United Socialist States of America," Glenn said. "My mission, commitment, and duty is to do whatever I can to help senators like Jim DeMint and Rand Paul and Mike Lee stop them.”

Glenn said one statistic should be the focal point of the general election for Senate in 2012: 

“In the ten years Debbie Stabenow has been a U.S. senator, Michigan has lost 800,000 private sector jobs, the worst job loss in the nation. If we want jobs in Michigan's future again, we must return to an environment of freedom and growth rather than trying to socialize American medicine and manufacturing and the rest of our economy.” (800,000 jobs lost: Nolan Findlay, Detroit News, May 19, 2011)

 

Glenn has served as president of the American Family Association of Michigan since 1999, in which position he was the first to publicly call for a Marriage Protection Amendment to the state constitution and was one of two coauthors of the amendment overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2004.

 

Glenn was a featured speaker at the first Midland County Tea Party rally on April 15, 2009, and has spoken at two dozen Tea Party rallies and meetings since.

Prior to joining AFA-Michigan, he was briefly on the education policy staff of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy after serving as president of School Choice YES!, a ballot campaign committee that in 1998-99 promoted the center's “Universal Tuition Tax Credit,” a School Choice proposal to incentivize individuals, businesses, churches, and civic groups to provide scholarships that would give low-income parents the option to choose a better or safer school for their children. Under Glenn’s leadership, the proposal was endorsed by 72 percent of all Republican candidates for state and federal office in Michigan in 1998, by the president of Michigan’s largest African-American religious denomination, and by the president of the National Baptist Convention of America, one of the largest black denominations in the nation.

 

Before moving to Michigan from Boise, Idaho, in 1998, Glenn led the successful 1980′s effort to win legislative and ballot approval of a Right to Work law in that state, banning compulsory union membership or financial support as a condition of employment. He and epic Hollywood actor and former Screen Actors Guild (AFL-CIO) president Charlton Heston, who grew up in St. Helen, Michigan, were named co-recipients of the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives’ “Freedom Fighter of the Year” award for their leadership in that campaign. Glenn persuaded Heston to appear in both television advertising and at campaign events supporting the law. (Idaho Statesman, Aug. 4, 2010)

Glenn also served two terms as a county commissioner in Boise, during which he authored the first Medical Savings Account-based health care plan for county employees anywhere in the nation. He was invited to testify about the plan before the U.S. House Civil Service Subcommittee chaired by Rep. John Mica, R-Fl.

   

“We consider (Glenn) a pioneer,” Mica’s senior policy director Dan Moll told the Idaho Statesman newspaper. “The chairman believes (Glenn’s plan) strengthens the free-market aspects of the federal health care program.” (Idaho Statesman, Nov. 30, 1995)

Glenn’s pioneering health care reform plan was also featured during a news conference by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and cited during Senate floor debate on the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Care Reform bill. He was invited to address the issue before the annual convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council, comprised of state legislators from across the country.

In addition to leading AFA-Michigan, Glenn serves on the board of two other pro-life organizations: Michigan Chooses Life and Michigan Citizens for Life, both of which in 2006 supported an initiative drive for a Personhood Amendment to the state constitution, which did not succeed, that would have declared prenatal children to be persons, with full protection of the law, from the moment of conception.

Glenn served as a Midland County GOP precinct delegate for a decade and represented the county at half a dozen Michigan Republican Party state conventions. He represented Michigan at the 2008 Republican National Convention as an alternate delegate for former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.
 
Glenn enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves during the Persian Gulf War buildup in 1990 and served eight years as a member of the Reserves and Army National Guard. He was an honor graduate of both basic and advanced individual training, a recipient of two Army Achievement Medals, and an Expert marksman.
 
He also serves as chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Glenn’s father, James R. Glenn, was a U.S. Marine who survived the December 7, 1941 attack by the Japanese on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which prompted America’s entry into World War II.
 
Glenn is a member of Midland Baptist Church, and he and his wife Annette have five children and one grandchild.