Arizona: One of the Sunnyside School Board recall targets was former intern who helped rescue Rep. Gabby Gifford

A little bit of a surprising aside on the Sunnyside school board recall that came up last week. The two School Board Members, Louie Gonzales and Bobby Garcia, are facing recall petitions for backing superintendent Manuel Isquierdo, who has a number of ethical black marks on his recent resume.

Those two board members are now pushing for the recall of two other board members who are in the anti-Isquierdo camp, Daniel Hernandez Jr. and Buck Crouch. Petitioners need about 1300 valids by December 14.

Hernandez helped save Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when she was shot in Tucson (he was one of her intern). He is also gay. Those two facts are being used in the campaign against him:

Here's the two flyers:

The first targets him for being openly gay, imploring, "Put a REAL Man on the Sunnyside Board... Daniel Hernandez is LGBT... We need someone who will support Sports and cares about our kids. We don’t need someone who hates our values." 

The second flyer attacks Hernandez’s work on behalf of gun violence prevention in the wake of the Giffords shooting, claiming, "Daniel Hernandez cares about only one things [sic] taking your guns away."

The article with the flyers does seem to be misleading, as it leads with the statement that Hernandez is "fighting to save his job for being openly gay and working toward gun violence prevention." The recall doesn't seem to be about those issues at all -- they are more of a tactical as Hernandez makes clear in his quote:

"These efforts are really blatant efforts from Louie and Bobby to make sure that their recall doesn’t go through," said Hernandez. 

Hernandez told News 4 Tucson that critics had been gathering signatures to get rid of Sunnyside Unified School District governing members Louie Gonzales and Bobby Garcia, who were behind the effort to out him and board member Buck Crouch.

But Hernandez said that he and Crouch were not the ones who submitted the petition to recall Garcia and Gonzalez. Of the five school board members, only Eva Dong is not facing recall.