On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day published profiles of South Dakota State Senator Phil Jensen, a man who drew national headlines back in March of 2013 for producing legislation that would allow businesses to discriminate against whoever they want, Civil Rights Act be damned. Jensen actually tried claiming that if a bakery owned by the KKK tried discriminating against an African American, that the matter would take care of itself, because customers would be too offended to patronize such a place. This logic, of course then fails to understand everything about the Jim Crow era South. Anyway, South Dakota Republicans threw Jensen under the bus for his remarks, but have never said anything about other extreme legislation he’s produced or supported, including drug testing welfare recipients, an unnecessary ban on Sharia Law in the United States, an attempt to criminalize abortions as “attacks on a fetus”, co-sponsoring “religious freedom” legislation to allow people to discriminate against LGBT citizens, and Jensen’s sponsorship of transphobic legislation including not just a ban on transgendered citizens using public bathrooms, but also to forbid transgendered athletes from participating in high school sports. (Because that just reeks of a “party of smaller government”, right?)
While the South Dakota GOP spent two years aghast and trying to do damage control over Phil Jensen’s remarks about the Klan, in 2016, he survived Jacqueline Sly, a primary challenger and he still won re-election comfortably in Rapid City with 61% of the vote. Has he dialed back the extremism since we last checked in? Hell no, he hasn’t! Phil Jensen has continued his attacks upon this LGBTQ community, but apparently isn’t content to only do so as a legislator. At a town hall in February of 2017, as David Hubbard, from the Human Rights campaign asked “Who will protect the people of South Dakota from discrimination??”, Jensen’s response drew groans from the audience for its sheer bigotry:
“Should a known pedophile… be allowed, be allowed to adopt. There are reasons this is not allowed.”
Now, equating a transgendered person to a “known pedophile” did not go over, especially because there was a transgendered man in attendance who HAD adopted a child, and lambasted Jensen for believing a child should not find a loving family to care for them.
In 2018, Phil Jensen has swapped out his focus on homophobia to instead, move back to transphobia again, as he sponsored legislation to try and force businesses with public restrooms to place signs to warn users that “someone of the opposite gender may be inside”, because that’s a “smaller government” thing to do. Just like the other bill Jensen sponsored, where he tried to place a ban on public school teachers from being able to teach anything about gender identity in classrooms.
Phil Jensen survived both a GOP challenger, as well as a Democratic challenger in the 2018 elections. He has decided to use that political capital to sponsor legislation to allow school children to challenge the lesson plans of any science teacher who dares to try and educate the youth of their state about climate change, claiming teachers “worship at the altar of climate change”, and calling any plans to teach kids about it “indoctrination”. The only good news about that fact is… Jensen is term-limited and cannot run for re-election to the South Dakota State Senate in 2020.