It was in both 2016, as well as 2017, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the sitting U.S. House Representative from Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District, Diane Black, who was another beneficiary of the 2010 Tea Party Wave to help her find her way to Washington, D.C. Back 2012, Black faced no Democratic challenger, getting a slam-dunk victory that saw her main threat coming in the GOP Primary, where she had to fend off Lou Ann Zelenik, an anti-Muslim fearmonger who claimed Rep. Black hadn’t done enough to prevent the rise of Islam in Tennessee, with the evidence being the mosque that stands in Murfreesboro. Rather than call out Zelenik for her bigotry, Black instead began trying to one-up her, saying that “violent Islam” was becoming the norm, and “not the exception”. Don’t worry, though, she didn’t abandon this disgusting belief after surviving the primary challenge that year. Diane Black has actually introduced one of those blatantly paranoid anti-Sharia bills you normally see idiots trying to pass at the state level back in Tennessee in 2010, and now that she’s in Congress, she tried to get it banned at the federal level. Perhaps Diane Black’s worst comment on Muslims, however, is when she said, “Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them.” Great. We’ll just expect an entire religion to condemn those who represent it most poorly before we can allow them to be in the country. Maybe we should ask Rep. Black to properly condemn the KKK before she can be a citizen, too, just so everything’s equal.
Rep. Black’s current hobby lately, is mostly being spent on her mad quest against Planned Parenthood. Back in March of 2016, Black was sitting on the “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives”, and was asking important, totally non-biased questions like, “In our society, have we reached a point where there is an Amazon.com for baby parts, including entire babies?“
That’s a pretty easy answer: "No, Goddamn it.”
“Baby Body Parts” was the sort of rhetoric that inspired Roland James Dear to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, through the apparatus of stochastic terror. So great job there, Rep. Black. Maybe after you’re done criticizing the Klan so we can trust that you’re not a Christian terrorist is also condemn people who attack abortion clinics and the people who work at them, eh?
By June 2016, Black was hanging out with the Family Research Council (the always delightful anti-gay hate group), and tried justifying trying to defund against Planned Parenthood after the “sting” videos (the fraudulent ones) produced by the Center for Medical Progress were released. Diane Black did not need much justification to get the torches and pitchforks, because the organization was worthy of suspicion “just because they provide abortions”.
Meanwhile, when actual children were slaughtered, en masse, by Adam Lanza, and there was a call for universal background checks and preventing the mentally ill from getting military-grade weapons, Diane Black was not thinking about dead children quite the same way. Because she knew guns weren’t the real problem… she blamed it on “Unprecedented levels of violent games, music and so on.” After a more recent mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in May of 2018, Diane Black revisited the topic of mass shootings yet again, saying that “pornography is the root cause” of the problem.
”Pornography. It’s available. It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there. All of this is available without parental guidance. And I think that’s a big part of the root cause, that we see so many young people that have mental illness get caught in these places.“
Now, there’s a lot of stupid to unpack there. First off… what the hell grocery store is Rep. Black shopping at that has nudie mags? Second… if you’re going to blame this on easy access to porn, have your head out of your *** enough to know how readily available it is to find some ON THE INTERNET. Third… WHAT? The problem isn’t that mentally ill people can wank to porn, it’s usually more of a problem that they have issues of violence or abuse towards women in their background, and there’s no reason to think seeing images of bewbs is going to trigger a violent outrage. Maybe, and stop me if this sounds silly, Diane, but maybe the problem is that these mentally ill men can go buy an assault rifle and have an easier time finding it than they would a porn mag in a goddamned grocery store?
Black’s legislative record is full of attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act, defunding Planned Parenthood, and she even voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown, only to vote against re-opening the government when the time came, sixteen days later. In this session of Congress:
- February 16th, 2017: Black votes for HJR 69, to make it legal for hunters on wildlife reserves to kill several species of hibernating bears or wolves while they’re sleeping.
- March 16th, 2017: Diane Black votes for HR 1181, which would allow veterans deemed mentally incompetent to continue to own firearms, and not have them taken away without a judge’s written order.
- March 28th, 2017: Rep. Black votes for SJ Res 34, which allowed internet providers to sell the data information of their customers’ internet usage to businesses.
- May 4th, 2017: Black votes for the House GOP’s healthcare plan, that would kick roughly 24 million people off their health insurance plans, allow up to 28,000 more people to die a year, give $50,000 in tax breaks to millionaires, and would eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions which would include such medical conditions as pregnancy (current or past), postpartum depression, or prior sexual assault. Oh, and a provision in the bill would make sure that Black would be allowed to keep his healthcare plan as it exists under the ACA, which would be repealed for the rest of the country. She and her Republican compatriots then threw themselves a beer bash, to celebrate what they thought would take away healthcare from millions.
- June 8th, 2017: Diane Black votes for HR 10, the GOP’s attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform, because what the country really needs is to allow the big banks to make the same mistakes that imploded the economy only a decade earlier.
- September 8th, 2017: Rep. Black chooses to be one of 90 Republicans in Congress who votes against disaster relief for Hurricane Harvey.
- October 3rd, 2017: Black votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks (medical science tells us fetuses do not have the capability to feel pain until 29 weeks).
- December 19th, 2017: Diane Black votes for HR 1, the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.
- February 18th, 2018: Black and her fellow Republicans decide that poor big businesses are suffering too much at the hands of the Americans with Disabilities Act too much, and vote for HR 620, which would strip most of the civil rights protections guaranteed by it.
We’ll close this update by pointing out that Diane Black might not be in Congress much longer to be an Islamophobic, anti-abortion zealot for long… she’s currently running to be the next Governor of Tennessee to replace the term-limited Bill Haslam. Assuming she campaigns better than her town halls have gone of late, that could come to pass, and we can be even more afraid for the Volunteer State than we currently are. The primary is tomorrow, and Black faces off against five other GOP candidates to take on whoever wins the Democratic primary in the general. We’re personally rooting for Karl Dean, former Democratic mayor of Nashville to pull the upset in November, and start dragging Tennessee out of the pattern of extremism it’s been under for the past 8 years.
One Year Ago, August 1st, 2017: Diane Black (TN)… 2017 Update
Two Year Ago, August 1st, 2016: Diane Black (TN)… Original Profile
Three Years Ago, August 1st, 2015: Kerry Bentivolio (MI)… 2015 Update
Four Years Ago, August 1st, 2014: Kerry Bentivolio (MI)… Original Profile