Use the Speaker's gavel wisely

Speaker Regier has a gavel. He can declare members of our state's legislature out of order but without depriving them of their rights as members. Members have Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure, clearly setting the way each should be treated to insure ideas become law in a correct manner. Masons Manual equally protects every member, including Representative Zooey Zephyr, against the whims of a supermajority.

Speaker Regier has unbound himself from Masons and substituted his own capriciousness. Now he is appealing to his base. Members of the Montana Bar must now have to question the procedural foundation of this session’s statutes.

Catholics, feeling closer to God than they perceived their fellows, called it excommunication, and in my time it meant being doomed to Hell as Protestants. It has taken centuries for the enlightenment of Vatican II to surface with this year's publication of Siblings All, the Signs of the Times.

Don't let Speaker Regier and his smug excommunicators capture our word Freedom. Last Tuesday I heard a Montanan say, “trans persons are not human.” Let’s lock arms with Representative Zephyr to keep all Montanans out of pompous darkness.

John Brian Driscoll

Former House Speaker

Helena