State Senator of Rhode Island Tiara Mack also sponsored a bill aimed at teaching children about sexual pleasure.
Rhode Island State Sen. Tiara Mack, a Democrat, released a campaign video Monday in which she twerks backwards and asks for votes. Mack called the conservative reaction to his stunt “deranged”
In the video, posted on TikTok, a bikini-clad Mack stands on her head and shakes her buttocks, before asking viewers to “Vote for Senator Mack!”
Rhode Island State Senator Tiara Mack (D) made this video encouraging people to vote for her. She also sponsored a bill to teach children “pleasure-based, inclusive queer sex education.” pic.twitter.com/835n4jS8LS
– TikTok Libraries (@libsoftiktok) July 5, 2022
The bizarre campaign speech was met with outrage from some conservatives, as well as memes and ridicule from others. “If I had one of these, maybe I’d be sitting in Congress right now,” joked Naomi Levin, a former Trump campaign official who ran unsuccessfully for a House seat in New York in 2018.
Mack herself did not apologize. When a commenter suggested that she had “has made women who struggle to be taken seriously a serious disservice,” ella shot back that she was “still an Ivy League graduate and sitting state senator.”
“Dammit,” ella tweeted. “Reverse twerking really makes unhinged, conservative internet accounts explode on a Monday.”
Mack was elected to the Rhode Island State Senate in 2020 and is running for re-election this year. She has sparked controversy before, most notably in February when she sponsored legislation that would require schools to teach sixth graders about gender and sexual orientation and “affirmatively recognize sexual relations based on pleasure”.
The bill faced pushback from Republicans and some teachers, one of whom told the Providence Journal that “There is no place in school to discuss pleasurable sex. If I thought a teacher was talking about an orgasm, I’d want her job.”
A former sex education teacher, Mack said “Teaching comprehensive, queer-inclusive, pleasure-based sex education was the highlight of my time as a teacher.”