Perkins unfit to hold office at any level [View all]

The Albany City Council last week booted Jo Rae Perkins from her position on the city’s Human Relations Commission. It was right to do so. Now the state’s Republican voters need to quash her ambition to hold higher office.

Perkins was appointed to the HRC in 2019. But she was never a good choice for the board, whose mission is to promote diversity, because she never supported that mission. She pushed back against the commission’s sponsorship of Festival Latino and LGBTQ pride events, calling for an “all cultures” celebration instead. In an interview with the Democrat-Herald, she made statements suggesting that a government welfare program, rather than documented historical inequities, was responsible for the generational wealth gap between Black and white families.

Members of the city administration attempted to justify Perkins’ role on the commission under the banner of “diversity of thought,” the nonsensical notion that a variety of opinions on the HRC about diversity is equivalent to the racial, religious and gender diversity the board was created to uplift. That would be akin to appointing a member of the Flat Earth Society to help run NASA.

On Jan. 27, the Albany City Council voted 4-2 to remove Perkins from the HRC — not because of her stated opposition to its goals, but because of her participation in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Read more: https://democratherald.com/news/local/editorial-perkins-unfit-to-hold-office-at-any-level/article_9d7d5146-08e7-5813-86fe-ed3544b620d5.html
(Albany Democrat Herald)