Donna Paul | Photo: Lawrence Sinclair - lsnewsgroup.com

“I’m the original Ron Paul groupie!” beams author and inspirational speaker Donna Paul, the Texas congressman’s sister-in-law. Her husband Wayne, Ron’s brother, will be addressing the 2012 Ron Paul Festival Friday afternoon.“I campaigned for Congressman Paul in 1973, when he first ran for Congress!”

Donna shared with Sunshine State News some of her life story and history of acquaintance with the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate. She remembers well the day she met Ron: July 4, 1968, when he arrived at the medical practice at which she was already a practicing nurse. Ron later bought the practice, and she continued to work for him until 1982.

“Right after work, we would hit the campaign trail and go door-to-door,” she reminisces.

Donna authored a memoir, “A Song in Every Silence,” for which Ron wrote the introduction. It recounts her harrowing story of date rape by her fiance the night he broke off the engagement, her refusal to accept her physician’s offer of an abortion, her successful struggle to come to terms with and overcome her tragedy, and her long-sought (and finally attained) reunion with her son 38 years after having put him up for adoption.

Donna can’t find enough words of praise for her employer-turned-brother-in-law. She confirmed several media reports of her boss’s policy never to perform abortions or accept Medicare or Medicaid subsidies. Donna tells us Ron’s practice never turned away an indigent patient; all were treated, regardless of their ability to pay.

She sees no conflict between her family’s libertarian politics and their commitment to Christian solicitude for the economically disadvantaged.

Asked whether anyone in the Paul family will be backing the Republican ticket come November, she shrugs her shoulders: “Not to my knowledge. I really can’t say.” She declined to comment on her nephew Sen. Rand Paul’s public endorsement of Romney-Ryan.

She prefers to say on the positive side, “I applaud all those who have shown up [for Paul Fest], have stepped up, and are saying, ‘We’re going to change the way our country works!”