Seeds for gun reform and chronicling corruption
Tennessee clergy acknowledged the prayers of hundreds for substantive gun reform legislation didn’t come to fruition, but say their efforts weren’t altogether futile. “We can be honest and say we didn’t get what we wanted to see happen,” the Rev. Cherisna Jean-Marie, a Nashville minister, said Wednesday. “But seeds were planted.”
Following the conclusion of the special session, Jean-Marie and three other local clergy, a national faith-based organizer and a Vanderbilt University senior spoke at a news conference organized by the Southern Christian Coalition about what they saw as inaction by the General Assembly.
“I believe that something is happening in the spiritual realm that perhaps we don’t see manifesting just yet,” added Jean-Marie, founder and CEO of The Co-Conspirator Institute, which works with victims of gun violence. “But something is happening here in Tennessee.”
Last week, on the first day of the special session, hundreds of clergy and other Tennesseans of faith gathered for a prayer vigil. Following a group prayer, participants processed to the state Capitol and surrounded it. The group held hands to create a human chain and sent through individual prayers like an electric current.
Reflecting on that prayer vigil and the subsequent events of the special session, the clergy at Wednesday’s news conference said prayer is important for different reasons. The clergy didn’t organize the prayer vigil with a single goal in mind, such as seeking God’s intervention to ensure the passage of sweeping gun reform. “It’s not just us putting out words and prayers and intentions and requests. It is opening space for a dialogue,” the Rev. Morgan Gordy with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) said at the news conference. “I saw that time around the Capitol also as an invitation, a holy invitation to those inside the hall.”
Gordy and the Rev. Mark Thompson, an organizer with Repairers of the
Breach, a national faith-based advocacy group, said it was also up to lawmakers to heed those prayers.
“They didn’t have to be there holding our hands, but they had to be open to receiving prayers and encounter that presence of the divine,” Gordy said.
Hemmer donates special session per diem to nonprofits
Rep. Caleb Hemmer, D-Nashville, says he will donate his state salary from the special legislative session to two gun reform nonprofits: Voices for a Safer Tennessee and Rise and Shine TN.
“I cannot in any good conscience accept a salary for a week of unproductive disputes, wasted resources, and not a single bill that effectively addresses our community’s need for sensible gun reform,” Hemmer said in a statement.
Each of the groups will receive $250. Hemmer said he will continue to advocate for gun reform measures, including safe storage, when the legislature returns in January.
“I’m extremely disappointed and frustrated with the lack of action at the Legislature,” he said. “My Democratic colleagues and I returned to the Capitol with the goal of fighting for Emergency Risk Protection Orders, truly significant investments in access to mental healthcare, and strong legislation that would address Tennessee’s problems with secure storage and gun theft but instead we gaveled out without passing anything substantive.”
Chronicling Capitol corruption in new book
Tennessee has seen its share of political corruption over the years among both Republicans and Democrats. Two veteran journalists chronicle some of the most high-profile and intriguing cases over the past half century in the new book, “Welcome to Capitol Hill: 50 years of Scandal in Tennessee Politics.”
Joel Ebert, a former colleague of ours at The Tennessean and now with the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, and Erik Schelzig, a former Associated Press reporter and now editor of the Tennessee Journal, co-authored the book, published by Vanderbilt University Press.
The two were kind enough to answer a few questions for about Tennessee politics and the new book.
Joel and Erik, congratulations on the book “Welcome to Capitol Hill”
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