This past Friday, the Lawrence County NAACP officially called for the resignation of Lawrence County Republican Party chair Shanon Terry.
Over the past week, Terry drew immense criticism for posting an image of a GOP elephant with Ku Klux Klan imagery located at the bottom of the graphic.
Terry, who maintained that he selected the image by mistake, is a sitting member of the Lawrence County School Board, representing District Four.
RELATED: Lawrence County GOP chair defiant amid NAACP’s call to resign over KKK post ‘mistake’
During a Monday interview on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program,” former Republican candidate for Alabama Secretary of State Christian Horn defended Terry and said he should not resign over the mistake.
“I had an opportunity to actually meet with Shanon on the situation,” Horn said. “I believe it’s the appropriate thing to listen more than we talk, and so I had an opportunity to talk with him and listen to his side of the story, and it went very well.”
After being able to talk with Terry in person about the situation, Horn said he believes it was simply an honest mistake.
“He just made a simple mistake, man. And I believe him wholeheartedly that that mistake was one that he understands deeply is not something that he stands for,” he insisted. “His wife is a district judge in that county — they have a great reputation. There’s no history that he’s done anything like this before.”
As the North Alabama director of outreach for the Alabama Republican Party (ALGOP), Horn also wants to put forward a specific message on racial issues in the state.
“It’s time to have racial healing,” he advised, “It’s time to have apologetics as a part of our conversation. It’s time for us to take people at face value that they can make a mistake and do make mistakes. If he had not made a mistake, or I had felt like he did not make a mistake, I would have certainly been the first person to be meeting him at a café and being able to be upset about it. But honestly, I think that he deserves the benefit of the doubt, and he’s committed to continuing the good work of making certain that our party’s well represented.”
The conservative activist expressed frustration that Democrats and the mainstream media were attacking Terry and even raising money off the issue.
“They don’t have great ideas,” he said of the political left. “They don’t have opportunities to talk about crime, they don’t want to talk about the miseducation of our children who can’t read and who are being educated on things that have nothing to do with math, writing and arithmetic. This is the easy way out … We have to punch back. If CNN wants to come for him, tell them to come for me. If MSNBC wants to call him out, then call me out ’cause I can handle it.”
Horn emphasized what he believes to be the true message of the ALGOP.
“Our brand is a brand that includes everyone,” he said. “[It] doesn’t matter who you are. We believe in liberty, we believe in freedom, and just like anyone else if they don’t belong to our party, or they’re independent or whatever — people make mistakes. Period. And if he did it on purpose, he’d be gone.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
