The expulsion and reinstatement of Tennessee House of Representatives members, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, becomes more troubling the more we learn.
Sure, I understand the importance of following protocol in legislative sessions. Pearson, Jones, and Gloria Johnson, should not have approached the podium during a session without being recognized. Leading chants to call for gun reform after the shooting of three students and three staff members at the Covenant School March 27, probably should have been left to the protest organizers, rather than coming from legislators.
But I understand being fed up with the almost daily news of mass shooting in this country and the visceral response when an automatic weapon is used to kill children in your own community. An appropriate response to this breach of protocol should have been worked out calmly and rationally. It should not have devolved into the highly-partisan-arguably racist-tug-of-war that we witnessed through television.
Most importantly, the those whom we vote into office to represent us should be allowed to weigh evidence and vote their conscience, rather than being strong-armed into toeing the party line. I thought representative Scott Cepicky’s statement from a leaked audio clip published in the Tennessee Holler, was chilling. In it, he reprimanded representative Jody Barrett, who had voted against expelling Johnson because he didn’t want to vote “on a resolution I know is wrong” because Johnson had only “approached the well” during the protest. Cepicky is recorded as saying:
“If you don’t believe we’re at war for our republic, with all love and respect to you–you need a different job. ‘The Left’ wants Tennessee so bad, because if they get us, the southeast falls and it’s game over for the Republic. This is not a neighborhood social gathering. We are fighting for the republic of our country right now, and the world is staring at us. Are we going to stand our ground? . . . You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong.”
Let that sink in. Even if you know something is wrong, you need to do it if your political party tells you to do it. Maybe my shock is colored by the fact that I just finished reading A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets, by Noah Lederman. The defense used by those committing atrocities is: “I was only following orders.” If we put our own conscience and reasoning skills aside to follow orders, while demonizing our fellow citizens as some monolithic group we can caricature as “The Radical Left,” “The Radical Right,” or “The Jews,” it’s easy to premeditatedly kill them, as we saw with Daniel Perry of Texas.
For those who haven’t followed the Daniel Perry story, he’s the man who searched online for information about the classifications for murder, basically asking how to kill people and get away with it, before driving his car into a group of Black Lives Matter protestors in Austin Texas in 2020, then getting out of the car to shoot and kill Garrett Foster, a United States Air Force veteran, who confronted Perry for driving his car into the crowd. Texas governor Greg Abbot is preparing to pardon him this year.
If we are to learn anything at all from history, it is to teach our children two things:
1. We need to maintain dialogue with one another rather than stereotyping and dehumanizing groups of individuals, and
2. Obeying one’s conscience should always take precedence over following orders. The alternative is a slope made slippery with the blood of innocent individuals.