Last week was apparently “Some Tennessee Republicans Discover Tennessee Republicans Suck” week, which I was unaware was a statewide commemoration. But I honor the moral journeys of those faceless members of the “Leopards eat your face” party who have just now discovered that their party is exactly what it claims to be.
First up we have Eddie Mannis over in Knoxville lamenting to Betty Bean that his time as Tennessee’s first openly gay Republican legislator was very difficult because — pause here to prepare yourself for a revelation that will shock absolutely no one — Tennessee Republicans are incredibly hostile to gay people.
This past February after an anti-LGBTQ vote, Mannis decided to try to reason with some of his colleagues. He went to some of their offices and sent emails to others.
“I asked them to think about what they were doing to LGBTQ students … just wanted to express from personal experience the impact this can have on children. Do you think I am gay because I had gay influences? Have you ever sat down and talked with a gay person?”
His efforts were not well-received. One colleague came to his office seething with anger. Then he was summoned to House Speaker Cameron Sexton’s office where the entire leadership team was waiting to rake him over the coals for “insulting” his colleagues.
But what did he expect? It’s not like the Tennessee GOP is claiming to be open and affirming of gay people. And then, bam, he gets to Nashville and it’s all bigotry. They are who they say they are. The baffling and upsetting part is why Mannis thought he would be the exception.
Mannis complains that some of the hostility even came from people who had encouraged him to run in the first place. I guess he thought he would get to be the exception because he has the right friends or something?
The other example comes from this barn-burner of an article at Pro Publica by Kavitha Surana, who repeatedly got state Sen. (and doctor) Richard Briggs to admit to such absolute stupidities about the Tennessee Republican position on and conduct around abortion that I am stunned he hasn’t changed his name and grown a goatee so that he can plausibly deny that he is himself.
Every bit of Surana’s piece is so good and so important. Just read the whole thing and imagine me shouting after every sentence. Republicans are flat-out coming for birth control and in vitro fertilization next. They want the ability to mine your medical records. They don’t want exceptions for abortion, at all. And they’re saying so out loud. Read it and absorb it.
But back to Briggs. “When Tennessee Right to Life, the state’s main anti-abortion lobbying group, proposed the trigger ban in 2019, Briggs admits he barely read the two-page bill forwarded to his office," writes Surana. "He followed the lead of his colleagues, who assured state lawmakers that the bill included medical exceptions. He even added his name as a co-sponsor. ‘I’m not trying to defend myself,’ he says now.”
He co-sponsored a bill he hadn’t even read. He couldn’t even be bothered to read a two-page bill. When I told you all last week that there are only two types of bills filed by our state legislature, I’m sure many of you thought I was just joking or being hyperbolic. Briggs is literally describing how “I’m going to say I wrote this bill, but actually some special interest group or lobbyists or a think tank wrote it and I’m not that clear on what’s in it” bills happen.
And what has Briggs found now that he's pulled his head out of the sand and applied his expertise as a doctor to the Republicans’ stand on abortion? He has found that it’s horrific, that it calls for endangering pregnant people, and that it doesn’t line up with science.
Which, yeah, this is all true. But it’s not new. I mean, they gave him a two-page bill that told him exactly what they were up to, and had he — as a doctor — read it and given it any thought, he would have realized the consequences of that legislation before he co-sponsored it and voted for it. For years, loads of us have been saying anti-abortion groups in Tennessee were disingenuous and seemed not to have even a basic understanding of pregnancy or its risks.
I guess Briggs felt comfortable dismissing our voices because we are liberal, but he didn’t even read the bill that would have told him what anti-abortion activists want, in their own words.
I’m somewhat appreciative that he’s coming forward now to say he has discovered that the state legislature went too far. But why is he OK with a system where state legislators don’t even know what’s in the bills they’re signing? Why is he cool with just believing what his colleagues tell him about what these bills say? The problem isn’t just the abortion mess (though that’s going to kill people, so it’s pretty important). It’s that the culture at the Capitol is such that even a doctor half-asses his job.
If Briggs asked a nurse what medications a patient had been prescribed and she said, “I don’t know, I didn’t really read her chart,” he’d be pissed. You can’t make good medical decisions without having all the information. But Briggs is admitting (and let me be clear, we all know he is not alone; this is how it’s done) that when it comes to his political work, when his constituents are in the position of trusting him to have read the bills he votes on, he doesn’t do it. And we all know that many legislators don’t.
I think Briggs and Mannis have more in common than just one recent day discovering that Tennessee Republicans are who they say they are — I think they both actually embody a deeply held Republican belief that they are exceptional. Not just in the “I’m super awesome” way, but in the sense that, no matter how the people around them treat anyone else, those same people will treat them with dignity.
It apparently never occurred to Briggs that his colleagues might not be being completely honest with him about what’s in the bills he doesn’t bother to read. The only explanation for how someone could believe that, in spite of the behavior of legislators since the dawn of time, is if one believed himself to be the special dude who a pack of liars respects enough not to lie to him.
And isn’t this similar to Mannis, who is a politician, who had to be aware of Tennessee Republican attitudes toward gay people? What on earth made him think he would be the exception to their homophobic attitudes? Again, I think he just thought he was the special dude a pack of bigots would respect enough to hear out.
And lord knows we’re seeing this with anti-abortion women who fully expect that their case will be the exception or that the medical treatment they need isn’t actually an abortion. It’s a kind of arrogant dumbassery that, predictably, always bites them in the butt.
There’s an old joke about a dude who meets a scorpion at the river bank. The scorpion asks the man to carry it across, and after assurances from the scorpion that it will not sting the man, the man agrees. But when they get close enough to the other side that the scorpion can jump to shore, the scorpion stings the man and does just that. As the man is dying, he asks “Why did you sting me?” The scorpion replies, “You knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.”
What else is there to say to Mannis and Briggs? You knew who the Republicans were when you picked them. You’re not the special exception who can get them to act against their nature.
