- Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla)
After last week’s fumble by a staffer at state senator Mike Hewitt’s office, in which the staffer told a caller that “gay people can just grow their own food” if a bill Hewitt is co-sponsoring to loosen our anti-discrimination laws passes, Senator Hewitt didn’t return requests for comment. The Republican from Walla Walla didn’t return my call, he didn’t get back to the Huffington Post, and he didn’t return “calls, texts and emails” from his hometown paper, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.
Well, he finally gave the Union-Bulletin an interview yesterday, and he says of the bill in question, SB 5927, that it’s gone through some changes and he “probably did not read the bill as well as I should have.”
He also explained why he’d ignored them before: “He was working in his yard and unable to hear his cell phone over the din of the lawn mower, and later in the day he’d left his phone in a jacket at the Walla Walla Fairgrounds.” (No word on why he ignored all the other requests for comment.) The day this all happened, last Friday, he did take at least one call—from his staffer, with whom he says he “had a conversation about treating people appropriately when they call.”
He won’t identify the staffer in question, but says, “When you see him interact with the disability people, you would be totally impressed… He is a very, very nice person.”
In an editorial elsewhere in the paper yesterday (they have a one-article limit if you’re not a subscriber, sorry), they mention that in his conversation with their reporter, “Hewitt said his staffer was prodded by The Stranger until he lost his temper and made the inappropriate comment.”
Nice try, Senator, but just to clarify: All I did was call your office to ask for comment on a report from Seattle resident Jay Castro, who called all the bill’s sponsors that day and had the offensive conversation with your staffer himself. The only “prodding” I did was to ask your mystery staffer if it had happened.
Castro, for his part, has now sent a letter to Hewitt, the other bill sponsors, and his senator and representatives in Olympia asking that Hewitt have a little chat with him:
I would like to meet with Senator Hewitt, and the other bill sponsors, to discuss my concerns in person. I would also like to briefly share my story of being a teenage civil rights activist in the 90’s in Spokane, so you can better understand why this bill is so harmful. I would like to hear from Senator Hewitt himself that his position is in fact not what Staffer Doe stated to me on the phone. An apology to a reporter is simply insufficient to rectify the situation.
He’s posted a full copy of his letter online here. Castro tells me, “I want to see that bill withdrawn.”