It was in 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the 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, Tennessee. 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 across the board.
Rep. Black’s current political capitol these days, though, 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 terrrorist is also condemn people who attack abortion clinics and the people who work at them, eh?
By June 9th, 2016, Black was hanging out with the Family Research Council (the always delightful anti-gay hate group), and she tried justifying the witch hunts being launched against Planned Parenthod 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. But alas, in 2018, Diane Black chose to leave her seat in Congress, taking her Islamophobic, anti-abortion, and gun crazy philosophy back home to run to be the next Governor of Tennessee to replace the term-limited Bill Haslam. Black finished third in the GOP Primary, only getting 23% of the vote after spending millions of dollars of her own money trying to win. At this point, we’re not sure if she skulks back into a race for her old Congressional seat in 2020, or calls it a career, but we’re hoping for the latter.
One Year Ago, August 1st, 2018: Diane Black (TN)… 2018 Update
Two Year Ago, August 1st, 2017: Diane Black (TN)… 2017 Update
Three Year Ago, August 1st, 2016: Diane Black (TN)… Original Profile
Four Years Ago, August 1st, 2015: Kerry Bentivolio (MI)… 2015 Update
Five Years Ago, August 1st, 2014: Kerry Bentivolio (MI)… Original Profile