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| Tennessee State Rep. John DeBerry Jr. photo credit: Sean Braisted / Flickr |
DeBerry was forcibly removed from the Democrat party after the Tennessee Democratic Party’s executive committee voted 41-18 to remove him from the August primary ballot. Luckily for him, legislators passed a measure which allowed him to be on the ballot for re-election even though he was unable to participate in the primaries. The Democrats removed DeBerry from their party after the filing deadline had passed to run as a Republican or independent, so he would have been unable to run at all even though he was currently an incumbent.
DeBerry, who serves as a minister for the Church of Christ, told the Catholic News Agency, “My work in Nashville as a legislator is nothing more than an extension of my work as a child of God, as a Christian,” he said. He added that it was ridiculous for the Democratic party to claim voters don't understand what he has been doing in office, or what his stance on abortion is. “So for them to say that folks don’t know where I stand, they actually said that the people in my district don’t have sense enough to elect their representative.”
CNA also wrote that DeBerry “was one of more than 100 Democrats at the federal, state, and local levels who recently asked the platform committee of the Democratic National Convention to moderate the abortion language in the party’s platform.”
