Reps. Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman’s State of the Union guests highlight gun violence and extremism

Guests at the State of the Union address can serve as symbols of lawmakers’ values and priorities. That was the case for Sonoma County’s two congressmen at this year’s speech.

March 07, 2024

U.S. Reps. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, sought to highlight the specters of gun violence and religious extremism respectively in their choice of guests for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech.

Thompson’s pick, Liz Russell, is the former manager of The Pathway Home in Yountville, where on March 9, 2018, an Army veteran suffering from serious mental health issues and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder showed up at the residential treatment center with an assault rifle and a shotgun and killed three employees and himself.

Russell was held hostage and lost a close friend who was six months pregnant. Thompson was a family friend of another of the victims and spoke at a memorial event for the three women.

“It’s really meaningful to me as a survivor of gun violence particularly because the six-year tragi-versary is this Saturday,” Russell said. “It was a really horrific incident, but being here before a president and an administration that has prioritized gun violence prevention … It means a lot to me to be here.”

Russell has dedicated her time since the shooting to awareness and prevention, working with the advocacy groups Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action to call for gun policy reforms. She also is co-organizer for Rock the Ride, a benefit event to end gun violence. It will take place June 22 this year in Yountville.

Gun violence prevention has been a key issue for Thompson, a Vietnam War combat veteran, gun owner and avid hunter. He is chair of House Democrats’ Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and authored the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, versions of which he has been working to pass for over a decade.

“The only place it is a partisan issue is in the U.S. Congress,” Thompson said, citing statistics that show a vast majority of Americans support background checks.

Despite obstacles, Thompson is committed to pushing forward on gun safety. “It’s important, and our failure to enact laws that would help will be responsible for the deaths of innocent people,” he said. “It’s an epidemic … Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children and teenagers today. It’s not cancer. It’s not car accidents. It’s shameful because we can do something about it.”

“Gun violence prevention at this point is a long game,” Russell said. While there is resistance to reform at the federal level, “we are seeing progress in our state, and we’re also seeing progress locally.”

Russell pointed, for example, to California legislation, Assembly Bill 28, passed in 2023, that imposes an excise tax on firearms and ammunition sold by gun manufacturers and dealers with funds going to violence prevention programs. She noted, too, Napa County’s “Safe Firearm Storage“ ordinance adopted in October that requires guns kept in homes be stored in locked containers or be disabled with a trigger lock, building on related state law.

For his part, Huffman chose to bring Amanda Tyler, lead organizer of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, in his long-running effort to bring attention to religious extremism and what he sees as an urgent need to keep it from further seeping into state and federal law.

“This is really an important moment for Americans to realize how vulnerable separation of church and state is and how relentless this Christian nationalist agenda is,” Huffman said, pointing to the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos created during fertility treatments should be deemed children under state law.

“It’s very alarming and is in many ways worse than most people think,” Huffman said. “The belief system that this judge articulated … is incredibly widespread. There are judges all the way up to the Supreme Court that believe the same thing, and I have dozens of colleagues in Congress that believe the same thing and are acting on it every single day.”

Huffman has raised concerns about current House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson’s fundamentalist views into lawmaking.

The fight is relevant to his California constituents, too. “This movement is not going to stop at the state lines of Alabama.”

Huffman, who is openly nonreligious, is founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus and has been vocal about the separation of church and state. He also sounded the alarm about the threat of Christian Nationalism in the lead-up and aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Christians, he said, have been some of his strongest allies, which is why he went with Tyler as his guest.

“Part of the challenge is that when you criticize this movement, the first thing they do is call you anti-Christian, which is not true, but it has a chilling effect on the willingness of politicians, journalists and others to speak out against this,” Huffman said. “That’s why I really appreciate Amanda and others in this interfaith alliance so much because that tactic doesn’t work with them.”

Tyler is a lawyer and also serves as the executive director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. She’s testified about the impact of Christian Nationalism at a number of congressional hearings.

“The President, members of Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and everyone else in attendance has the responsibility to defend the U.S. Constitution and the institutional separation of church and state,” Tyler said in a news release. “I hope Congressman Huffman and I can model for the nation the type of religious and nonreligious solidarity sorely needed in our society today.”

Huffman hopes Tyler’s attendance will “make people think a little bit and spark more of a conversation.”

The North Bay and North Coast congressmen both sailed through their primary contests this week, advancing to the November general election where they’ll face Republican challengers who each came in distant second March 5.

You can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On X (formerly Twitter) @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.


By:  Marisa Endicott
Source: The Press Democrat