A top Oregon Republican faced calls for her resignation after her son was photographed giving a Nazi salute in front of a World War II German fight plane during a school field trip.
The unidentified teen, a student at Crook County High School in Prineville, was captured making the apparent Hitler salute while standing next to the swastika-emblazoned plane at the Erickson Aircraft Collection in Madras, Oreg. last week, The Bend Bulletin reported.
The offensive image, which was shared online, prompted the Central Oregon Diversity Project to call for the unnamed teen’s mom, GOP state Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson, to step down from her Salem post as minority leader of the Oregon House of Representatives.
The local activist group — which is dedicated to providing solidarity and opportunity to Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and all people of color – also alleged that school district officials “avoided handing down discipline.”
The Diversity Project said it has “reason to believe that the student wasn’t disciplined because of his mother and ‘who’ she is.”
It also called for the Oregon Legislature and Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, to hold the caucus leader accountable.
“We have a problem with the way Vikki Breese Iverson [sic] has and is conducting herself. We feel that if she can’t handle the scope of parenting her child who is nearing adulthood and was caught perpetuating Nazi symbolism, then she is also not fit to fill her elected position,” said Josie Stanfield, a Central Oregon Diversity Project board member.
“No person should feel comfortable having a person like that representing Oregon as the Minority Leader of the Oregon House of Representatives. We will be working further to hold Vikki Breese Iverson [sic] accountable to her role in office, and her only way out of that accountability is to make the choice to resign,” Stanfield added, according to the news outlet.
Breese-Iverson has posted an apology on Facebook “to anyone impacted by this image.”
“Out of extremely poor judgement and without considering the impact this photo would have, he posed in front of the aircraft,” she wrote, The Oregonian reported.
“My husband and I have been in contact with the school administration about enforcing adequate consequences for his actions, both at school and at home. In no way do my husband or I condone these actions, and we apologize to anyone impacted by this image,” she added.
In her post, the lawmaker added an image of her son’s handwritten apology, in which he wrote that posing for the snap that a friend captured “was a dumb mistake.
“I really get that now. Doing something bad in the moment without thinking can cause harm,” he wrote.
“I apologized to anyone that was offended and accepted the punishment handed down to me by the school and my parents,” the boy added, according to the Bend Bulletin.
The Central Oregon Diversity Project noted that Breese-Iverson has blocked people from viewing her Facebook page where she made the apology, which a federal court has ruled is unconstitutional behavior for elected officials who use the social media platform as a public forum, advocates pointed out.
The Oregon House Republican Caucus provided the Facebook statement on behalf of the pol, who did not respond to the Bulletin.
The Crook County school district said in a statement to the outlet that it “does not condone or tolerate any form of discrimination, hate speech, or the use of symbols that are considered hate speech.
“School administrators take issues like this seriously and utilize existing policies for appropriate disciplinary action,” it said.
The district said it could not disclose disciplinary action due to student privacy laws.
State Rep. Emerson Levy (D-Bend) stressed the need for Holocaust education and not censoring books or history in schools.
“If students had a true, in-depth knowledge about the Holocaust and pogroms, they would not have done that,” she told the Bulletin.
In a statement, Levy wrote: “When something is wrong, we say something, partly to ensure that harmful outcomes don’t reoccur. If we as a community fail to present and learn from the past, honestly, we will be doomed to relive that nightmare because, without intervention, history will repeat itself.”
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