Dealing with political hot potatoes is a lot like the task assigned the mythological Greek king .
They get pushed uphill first before crashing back down, often landing on those at the bottom of the political mountain.
So it was this past week in Missouri politics as the administration of Gov. Mike Parson found itself in yet another controversy of its own making by kowtowing to the fringe elements of Republican Party extremism.
Let’s start at the bottom of the hill, on the first floor of the Missouri Capitol, where the operates several displays, some permanent, some rotating, telling the story of the Show-Me State. This is a real museum, with well-trained curators who are tasked with protecting the state’s artifacts and deciding what to present to the public, and how to interpret the material, in the beautiful marble and limestone structure in Jefferson City known as the people’s house.
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On Aug. 27, the museum opened a display that was to be on exhibit through the rest of 2021, about the history of LGBTQ rights and activism in Kansas City. The display was developed by the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is called
Within a couple of days, a Republican state lawmaker started asking questions about the display. “I was hoping you could explain to me the reasoning of having the gay rights banners hung up in the state museum at the Capitol?” state Rep. Ann Kelley, R-Lamar, wrote to Rich Germinder, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Department of Natural Resources, which oversees the museum.
Germinder sent the question to Tiffany Patterson, director of the museum, who offered a clear explanation.
“The exhibit provides some national perspective on the Gay Rights movement in the United States, but focuses more on Kansas City’s role in the formation of gay rights organizations and launching the movement. While the exhibit focuses on LGBTQ+ history, the exhibit also tells a component of the larger story of Civil Rights movement in Missouri and the United States,” Patterson wrote. “This particular exhibit was borrowed due to its connection to a notable date on the Missouri Bicentennial Timeline on display in the History Hall — the formation of the Phoenix Society of Individual Freedom.”
Republicans love to talk about freedom these days. Just not for gay people. That same day, a DNR official ordered the display removed. After my colleague Jack Suntrup wrote about the exhibit in the Post-Dispatch, Parson came up with a cockamamie explanation for what happened, that the display wasn’t properly approved by the Board of Public Buildings. That’s a three-person board, and, since at least 1994, it has never approved any museum displays, state officials tell me.
The display was removed because the Missouri Republican Party is at war with gay people. For more than 20 years, Democrats — with a few Republicans backing them — have tried to pass a version of the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, which would make it illegal to fire gay people in the state simply because they are gay. Republicans block the bill every year. When he was in the Legislature, Parson regularly voted against it.
“The Parson administration’s removal of an exhibit on LGBT history from the Missouri (State) Museum was disappointing,” said Rep. Crystal Quade, D-Springfield, House minority leader. “That the governor lied about his reasons for doing so is indefensible.”
There was a time when Republicans also would have been outraged at political interference in the museum’s operations. It was just a few years ago, when Jay Nixon, a Democrat, was governor, and DNR officials ordered the museum to share some historic artifacts with Bass Pro founder Johnny Morris after Morris, a prolific political donor, made a $50,000 donation to the state parks system.
Republicans held a committee hearing in which they questioned DNR officials to get to the bottom of the interference with a taxpayer-funded museum’s operations. They had no problem rolling the stone right back up the hill to the governor’s office, as long as there was a Democrat in the seat.
In this case, there has been no response from House Republicans. But the outrage over the decision did cause the Parson administration to respond Friday by saying they were putting the display back up, in an adjacent building that gets much less traffic than the Capitol.
Isn’t that nice. The Parson response to bigotry is to put gay people back in a closet.
When Kelley first ran for office, the representative from the birthplace of Harry S Truman said she wanted to “make things better for all Missourians.”
Except for gay or lesbian ones, apparently. Their stories aren’t allowed in the people’s house in Missouri.
The exhibit was removed after complaints from some GOP officials. Democratic House leader says it should be returned ‘immediately.’