A white Republican congresswoman referred to a Black colleague 12 years her senior as "boy" — while calling LGBT+ people "fairies” in a startling interview on a Christian podcast.
In the interview with a local Christian group last week, Tennessee representative Diana Harshbarger joked about 77-year-old Texas Democrat Al Green in terms that civil rights experts have long considered effectively a racial slur.
Green made headlines in March when he protested against Republicans' reported plans to cut Medicaid by pointing his cane and shouting "you have no mandate!" during Donald Trump's address to Congress.
Wisecracking about the incident on the Christian group F.A.M.E. Ministries podcast, Harshbarger said: "Al Green was over here with his cane, and I'm like: 'Gosh dang it, boy! Put that’ — He does not need that cane,” she added, turning to the host. “That cane is a prop. I swear it's not real.” She implied that Green could have been hiding a weapon in it.
Harshbarger added: "And I’m wondering ... one of my colleagues said, 'Screw [off] the gold part of that, see if there's a gun in there'. I'm like, I don't know about that man. He's just weird Al."
Her presumably Christian interviewer laughed uproariously throughout the snide commentary in the clip first posted by Heartland Signal on X Monday..
She then went after the Biden administration's support for LGBT+ rights, saying: "Listen, I never saw so many fairies in the White House! Dancing around — I don't know where they got 'em.”
But “look, my job is to love 'em into the love of Christ, and I gotta watch what I say,” she added, after it was too late.
The Independent has contacted Harshbarger's office for further comment.
Democratic Georgia state senate candidate Jerrold Dagen tweeted the clip and called on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to call for a censure vote against Harshbarger.
Her remarks about Green mirror fellow Republican Lauren Boebert's bizarre description of his walking aid as a "pimp cane,” which led some Democrats to move that she be censured for racism.
Green was removed from the chamber during his protest and later censured by the Republican-controlled House, with ten Democrats also voting in favor of the resolution.
For many decades "boy" has been a common epithet used to belittle Black men in the South. Martin Luther King Jr, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, described it as one of the daily "humiliations" heaped upon Black people, and the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the word can function as a slur.
"If not a proxy for 'n*****,' it is at the very least a close cousin," wrote a group of civil rights experts in an amicus brief for a workplace discrimination lawsuit that partly hinged on the meaning of the term in context.
"Fairy” is a long-time slur for queer men that has largely been reclaimed by the LGBT+ community.
Harshbarger’s pharmacist husband, Robert Harshbarger, pleaded guilty in 2013 to federal charges of distributing misbranded drugs from China to kidney-dialysis patients. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $848,504 and a $25,000 criminal fine, in addition to forfeiting $425,000 in cash.
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