Mallory Staples Responds to “Republican” Legislators Griping about Being Reprimanded for Voting for H.B. 520

In a recent newsletter we reported about how multiple GOP Congressional District Conventions passed resolutions reprimanding those “Republican” legislators who voted in favor of the awful “Mental Health” H.B. 520 while commending the few Republicans who voted against it.

Several state legislators present at the 14th District GOP Convention reportedly walked out after learning about the resolution. State Rep. Mike Cameron (R-Walker) turned to the airwaves to belly-ache about the resolution on a local podcast show from Floyd County. He claimed the characterization of H.B. 520 was erroneous and complained about not being treated with more respect as a legislator at the convention. Meanwhile, elected representatives who took strong stands for Republican principles such as State Senator Colton Moore (R-Dade) and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (CD-14) were greeted by the convention as rockstars.

Cameron said he is so offended by the grassroots in northwest Georgia that he intends to boycott the GA GOP State Convention.

In response to the show, the Georgia Freedom Caucus‘ Executive Director Mallory Staples responded to these complaints and mischaracterizations of the legislation, taking to the John Fredricks Show and other programs to defend the resolution and affirm the problems with H.B. 520.

In particular, one thing Mallory pointed out was that the first “Mental Health Parity Bill” H.B. 1013 from the previous legislative session cost the state an estimated $1 billon in taxpayer funding, and now its follow-up H.B. 520 would cost another estimated $80 million to the taxpayer, if passed. (H.B. 520 is presently sitting dormant in the State Senate until next year’s legislative session.)

During the legislative session, we heard many people from the political industry in the Atlanta Establishment say that we didn’t need to pass anymore Election Integrity legislation this year because Georgia had just passed S.B. 202 in 2021. They said that we didn’t need to pass Senator Colton Moore’s Second Amendment Preservation Act (S.B. 67) because Georgia had just passed the “Constitutional Carry” bill in 2022. They said we didn’t need to pass the pro-life Prenatal Equal Protection Act because Georgia had just passed the “Heartbeat Bill” in 2019.

However, these same political industry types had no objection to the legislature trying to pass another omnibus Mental Health bill only one year after H.B. 1013 was adopted!

Some point to reports of recent mass shootings as as an illustration of the need for the state to pad the wallets of Big Pharma, take away people’s liberties, and steal more of the taxpayer’s money through such programs as Medicaid expansions. (Remember how folks voted against Democrat Stacey Abrams because she wanted to expand Medicaid in Georgia?) Yet this is actually an example of the civil government trying to fix a problem that the government has created.

When the state prohibits children from learning the Bible or having prayer in our schools, and indoctrinates them that they evolved by random chance due to no divine purpose or design, and are just chemicals and atoms bouncing off of each other, and there is no transcendent morality; when it tells them from an early age to be worried about global warming and how the earth could become uninhabitable and lead to everyone’s death, and then tries to suppress their resulting anxiety by prescribing these children with drugs until they are dependent; when it tries to pit “white people” against people with other colors of skin; when the state engages in these kinds of practices, it is no wonder that our youth are experiencing mental health issues. It is a problem the state created, and it is a problem the state will only make worse.

The solution is less statism, not more. The solution involves looking to our Creator God and not the false-god of the state.