Two Oregon Mayors Resign After Anti-LGBTQ Posts
Oregon Public Radio reports:
Newport Mayor Dean Sawyer [photo] resigned Monday, three days after OPB revealed he has been posting offensive content in a private Facebook group for current and former law enforcement officers. Sawyer notified City Manager Spencer Nebel and City Council President Jan Kaplan of his resignation in an email just before 9 a.m.
“I am sorry – in its simplest and sincerest form,” the email opens. Since at least 2016, Sawyer has shared memes and posts denigrating women, immigrants, non-English speakers and the LGBTQ+ community in 39,000-member Facebook group.
Many of Sawyer’s most recent posts specifically targeted the transgender community. Over the weekend, Newport Oregon Pride organized a protest that brought more than 100 people to City Hall demanding Sawyer resign.
Oregon Live reports:
The mayor of Baker City in Eastern Oregon announced his resignation late Tuesday after heated controversy over an offensive meme he posted last month that depicted four pride flags rearranged to form a swastika.
Mayor Matt Diaz did not address the controversy when he resigned at a city council meeting, telling residents only that he would be moving out of the city of 10,000 people and therefore could no longer serve.
After Diaz compared pride flags to Nazi symbolism, he told residents in a statement June 20 that the post was “meant to illustrate how the DEI or ‘woke’ ideology is being propagandized and militantly forced on American society.”