Our bills would assure civil rights protections for all Tennesseans
Tennessee was the epicenter of student-led nonviolent sit-ins in the 1960s, where brave Black Americans risked their safety to desegregate lunch counters.
In more recent years, Tennessee has expanded access to higher education for all by becoming the first state in the nation to offer free community college to high school graduates and returning adults.
We've stood firm on religious liberties, protecting the rights of churches and faith-based organizations to operate according to their beliefs. And at a time when voting rights are under attack in other states, Tennessee leads the nation with its commitment to election integrity and ability to balance greater access with accountability.
The list goes on, but what makes Tennessee truly remarkable is our ongoing commitment to shaping a future where everyone has the opportunity to prosper and exercise their rights.
As the sponsors of Senate Bill 861/House Bill 910, our goal is straightforward: to ensure all Tennesseans have access to efficient, effective protection against discrimination. The bill simply transfers the enforcement of the Tennessee Human Rights Act (THRA) to the Tennessee Attorney General's Office, a structural change that will better serve citizens experiencing discrimination.
We condemn discrimination in all forms. That is why we have ensured our legislation preserves every substantive protection of the THRA. While maintaining current protections, the bill expands these safeguards by adding discrimination in education as a prohibited practice and establishes a civil penalty for malicious harassment. Every Tennessean deserves robust protection from discrimination, and our commitment to this principle remains unwavering.
This bill increases government efficiency by streamlining the complaint and enforcement process, directly connecting those who experience discrimination with the state's chief legal office, who can forcefully advocate on their behalf.
If a citizen is unhappy with how their case is being handled, their individual right to sue is preserved.
We strive to strengthen the enforcement of our civil rights laws while making the process more accessible and effective for all Tennesseans. Our message is clear: If you violate civil rights in Tennessee, you will be held accountable.
The Tennessee Attorney General's Office has the capability and experience to enforce the THRA effectively. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has a notable background in civil rights enforcement. During his tenure at the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Memphis's Civil Rights Unit, he prosecuted significant civil rights cases, including racially motivated violence and religiously targeted hate crimes.
His work prosecuting the leaders of the Aryan Alliance for the firebombing of a Tennessee mosque, along with his role in securing justice for a law enforcement officer murdered in a racially motivated attack, highlights his unwavering commitment to protecting the civil rights of Tennesseans.
This dedication earned Skrmetti the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service – one of the Department of Justice's highest honors – and other awards, including the Civil Rights Division's first-ever Victim Rights Award.
As attorney general, he has been active and aggressive in protecting Tennesseans. His office has taken on some of the most powerful opponents in the country, including BlackRock, Google, and even the federal government – and won. We are confident he will be equally active and aggressive in protecting Tennesseans from illegal discrimination.
The protection of civil rights transcends political differences. All Tennesseans deserve equal protection under the law and a system that resolves discrimination claims efficiently and effectively. House Bill 910/Senate Bill 861 represents a thoughtful progression in how our state upholds these fundamental rights.
Ultimately, this legislation is about deterring discrimination and expediting justice for Tennesseans when it happens. By entrusting enforcement to the Attorney General's Office, with its established legal expertise and resources, we will continue our legacy of civil rights leadership and provide Tennesseans with more timely, effective protection against discrimination.
John Stevens is an attorney from Huntingdon. He represents District 24 of the Tennessee State Senate, which includes Benton, Carroll, Gibson, Henry, Houston, Obion, Stewart, and Weakley counties.
Johnny Garrett is an attorney from Goodlettsville. He represents District 45 of the Tennessee House of Representatives, which includes part of Sumner County.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Our bills boost civil rights protections for all Tennesseans | Opinion
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Politico
6 days ago
- Politico
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EYE OF THE BEHOLDER — Amy Sherald, the distinctive artist renowned for her stylized portraits of Black Americans like former first lady Michelle Obama, pulled her upcoming exhibition, 'American Sublime,' from the National Portrait Gallery last week, saying that the museum feared her painting of a trans woman posed like the Statue of Liberty could offend President Donald Trump. The museum maintains that it never suggested removing the painting, but rather that it pitched an accompanying video to 'contextualize the piece.' In any case, the show's D.C. run is over before it began. Sherald's withdrawal highlights the Trump administration's pressure campaign on the Smithsonian's various museums, following a March executive order scrutinizing 'improper ideology' in its displays and the recent ouster of the gallery's longtime director, whom Trump accused of supporting 'DEI' and attempted to fire — a decision the Smithsonian challenged, saying he lacked the authority to make it — before she announced her resignation. But it also underscores something that predates Trump, a tension at the heart of the Portrait Gallery's mission that has ensnared it in controversy since long before MAGA was a glimmer in the president's eye. On the one hand, it's an arts institution, ostensibly dedicated to freedom of expression, aesthetic innovation and elevating the country's artistic genius. On the other, it's a government organization beholden to the whims of politics, the sensibilities of elected officials and the tastes of voters, many of whom aren't exactly fans of cutting-edge art. For politicians, the provocations and ambiguities of the avant-garde can be a political liability — or a cudgel with which to batter the other side. It was 2010 when the Portrait Gallery walked face-first into one of the most notorious censorship scandals to hit the fine art world in recent American history. The brouhaha surrounded a 1980 video piece titled, A Fire in My Belly, by the late writer and artist David Wojnarowicz, a polemic and highly celebrated contemporary of East Village luminaries like Keith Haring, Nan Goldin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at age 37 in 1992, but the piece appeared in a 2010 show that the Portrait Gallery called 'the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture,' drawing the ire of the Catholic League and House Republicans, who seized on an 11-second shot of ants crawling over a crucifix. For the conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan, himself a Christian, there was no mistaking the work as blasphemous. 'To see a rejected Jesus left on the cross and on the ground to be covered by ants, is, in this context, clearly neither offensive nor heresy,' he wrote at the time. But to the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, it was 'hate speech,' and congressional Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner and Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor leapt at the whiff of culture war. They threatened to cut the gallery's federal funding, calling the video offensive to Christians and casting it as a misuse of taxpayer dollars — even though the gallery did not use public funds to stage the exhibition, which was privately funded. The secretary of the Smithsonian, G. Wayne Clough, unilaterally caved to the censorship demands — a decision that proved to be a lose-lose, inviting condemnation from free-speech advocates but failing to fully alleviate pressure from the right, which continued to advocate for funding cuts and the takedown of the entire exhibition. (Clough, who left the role in 2014, defended his choice to censor the show, saying it allowed the rest of the exhibit to stand.) The gallery's commissioner, James T. Bartlett, resigned in protest. And the Andy Warhol Foundation, which had backed the show with grant money, vowed to never support the gallery again — a pledge it upholds to this day. The censorship scandal followed debates from the late 1980s and early 1990s over the National Endowment for the Arts and its support of artists who explored queerness, sexuality or religious imagery. In 1989, Goldin staged a show in New York about the AIDS crisis that included in its catalogue an essay by Wojnarowicz excoriating religious and political leaders for fomenting homophobia and exacerbating the epidemic. In response, the NEA withdrew a grant it had awarded the exhibition. (That money was later partially restored, under the condition that it would not support the catalogue.) The American Family Association, a champion of the Christian right, cropped images of sex acts from Wojnarowicz's artworks into mailers that it circulated around the country with headlines like, 'Your tax dollars help pay for these 'works of art.'' Wojnarowicz won a lawsuit against the group in New York for violating his copyright and misrepresenting his work, though he was awarded only $1 in damages. The backlash to the NEA funding of Wojnarowicz's art was part of a broader uproar over the sexually explicit photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the accusations of blasphemy levied against Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ,' a darkly enigmatic photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. All of which presaged the gallery's apparent skittishness over Sherald's portrait of a Black, transgender Statue of Liberty today. But the latest dustup also breaches into new censorious territory. The political arguments over artists in the past, while often explicitly homophobic, largely focused on the supposed obscenity or blasphemy of their work — nudity, sex, religious iconography. However disingenuous, these criticisms appealed to deeply held discomfort in straight society surrounding depictions of sex — and particularly gay sex — as well as Christian symbols. Opposition to Sherald's painting, however, dispenses with these critiques altogether. You'll find no genitalia or supposedly profaned crosses in the portrait. It is a decidedly G-rated image. Were it not for the hackneyed title, Trans Forming Liberty, you could easily miss the transness of its subject entirely. Frankly, it's a boring painting — obvious, even ham-fisted in its invocation of a civic image, perhaps, but nothing remotely approaching the frankness or transgression of Wojnarowicz, Mapplethorpe and Serrano. Nonetheless, the White House celebrated the cancellation, with one official telling The New York Times it was a 'principled and necessary step.' In a sense, then, Sherald gave Trump exactly what he wanted, complying with a demand before it came — just as law firms and media organizations that bent the knee to the administration have been accused of 'anticipatory compliance.' The Trump administration has been successful in erasing trans people from government websites and documents. Now, apparently, it's winning in galleries, too. Ironically, that may increase the visibility of the portrait, which most of the country would not have seen if it hadn't splashed onto their phones along with the headlines. That was certainly the case for Wojnarowicz. After the gallery pulled his video, the media attention posthumously catapulted his name beyond the niche world of fine art and back into the political mainstream. The Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, among others, screened the censored video. And in 2018, the Whitney staged a landmark retrospective of his work called History Keeps Me Awake at Night that effectively canonized Wojnarowicz, who has surged in popularity among young queer creatives. 'The most powerful moments of the exhibition have a moral grandeur rare in contemporary art,' wrote Philip Kennicott of the retrospective in the Washington Post, 'as it becomes clear that not only was Wojnarowicz fully cognizant of the tools being used against him, he made the onslaught the subject of his work.' 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Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP DRESSING THE PART — If you go to a Pitbull concert these days, you'll likely find yourself in a sea of fans wearing bald caps, suits and fake goatees, mimicking the artist's signature look. Fans dressing up like musicians — parkas for Oasis, cowboy boots and hats for Beyoncé, feather boas for Harry Styles — has become a key part of the concert-going experience since the pandemic. Expense and hard to get concert tickets have turned shows into an occasion to go all out, and some artists have used fans' desire to dress like them to build community and expand their reach with fashion and brand deals. The Economist reports on this new era in concert going. Parting Image Jacqueline Munis contributed to this newsletter. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
