Denker: Rep. Melissa Hortman’s legacy? Democracy and human rights are worth fighting for.

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While I write this column, I see Melissa Hortman’s face looking down at me. Literally. She always is, every time I sit down to write.

I have a photo from 2019 taken at the Minnesota House, where I’d been invited to share an opening invocation. At that time, I was just 34 years old and had been ordained for only five years. Hortman had just recently been elected as speaker.

When I walked into the State Capitol that day, I knew I was slightly out of place. I knew I didn’t look like the typical Lutheran pastor, even in a denomination that had been ordaining women since 1970.

The same year I spoke before the House, I’d entered into several other rooms where my role as a female pastor had been met with disdain and derision. I’d spent almost all of 2018 researching the 2016 election and the role of conservative Christian voters in Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. When I wrote about Christian nationalism or spoke about it on TV or the radio, I always received threatening notes, mostly via email but sometimes handwritten, and in the mail. They always mentioned that they hated me most because I was a woman and I dared to call myself a pastor. Often, they mentioned abortion, and they commented negatively on my appearance. I once made a doctor appointment after receiving several hateful comments about my neck, convincing me that maybe I had a thyroid problem. The doctor said my neck was fine; my anxiety, not so much.

So even though I may have appeared confident walking into the House on that day in 2019, in truth I carried with me the deep knowledge that many people there might think I had no right to be there, in that hallowed space, and certainly not speaking as a pastor.

As I know is the case for all women, we carry with us at all times the warning of the potential threat for violence. Our guard is never completely down, especially in traditionally male-dominated spaces.

Hortman, though, immediately gave me a sense of calm and acceptance. In the photo I have pinned behind my writing desk, she is looking down at me while I address the room. She has a tiny smile on her face, an expression in her eyes that I interpreted as being both one of goodwill and also knowing support and solidarity, alongside a hard-earned wisdom that comes with being a trailblazer in places where people who look like you have formerly been banned to enter.

I think that’s part of the reason I have held onto this photo for so long, over the years where Hortman presided over some of the most productive legislative years in Minnesota history. Whenever I read her name, and I remembered that she represented Brooklyn Park — neighboring suburb to the one where I grew up — I felt a distinct sense of pride.

When I looked at her photo, and I read about all of her accomplishments, I remembered the hopeful possibility of public service, and those who enter into it to serve their community, rather than seeking to enhance and preserve their own wealth and power.

Last Saturday morning, I awoke to the news that a shooter impersonating a police officer had shot Hortman and her husband, Mark. We didn’t yet know their condition when I walked downstairs to my writing desk and looked again at that photo. I prayed desperately for preservation of their lives, but I had an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Domestic terrorism, hastened by the same Christian fundamentalist theology that praises violent masculinity, had come to roost in my own beloved home state. We know now that the man charged in the shooting, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was a self-styled Evangelical pastor and a rabid anti-abortion advocate, as well as a Trump voter.

The danger was so close, now, almost in my own backyard. I saw former high school classmates writing about Yvette Hoffman, wife to Sen. John Hoffman, both of whom were also victims of an attempted assassination by the same shooter who killed the Hortmans. My friends wrote about Yvette’s beautiful and kind presence at their local elementary school. The light she brought to kids. The kind of everyday hopefulness that we have all needed to carry us through these past several difficult years, from a global pandemic to war in Ukraine and Gaza to the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis just five years ago.

In times like these ones, it is ever-so-tempting to find refuge in cynicism and nihilism. In a state and culture that praises stoicism, especially among white men, too many have resorted to claims of “nothing matters,” and “they’re all corrupt, so who cares” when it comes to coping with America’s toxic political climate.

In the wake of Melissa and Mark Hortmans’ deaths, another relevant and prescient fact cries out to be heard.

Not everyone is in it only for themselves.

American democracy, borne in slavery, enriched in colonialism and genocide, tested in ill-advised overseas wars, is now writhing and twisting, beset by internal illness and self-inflicted wounds. Our country has never been perfect. Not even close.

And still American democracy gave birth to leaders like Melissa Hortman. American democracy has, in its best efforts, expanded and given space for more freedom, more acceptance, more love. It would be the greatest tragedy, in the wake of their killer’s murderous and evil intent, to decide it wasn’t worth fighting for after all.

How do we do that? Marching peacefully for No Kings all across America last weekend was a dynamic start. Another critical one? For Minnesotans in particular, pushing back against the pernicious lies that distorted the truth about Saturday’s shooter.

No, this has nothing to do with Tim Walz. Boelter had been appointed by Walz, and first by Mark Dayton, to a volunteer, nonpolitical board that had no personal connection or interaction with Walz. Sharing this appointment prominently, as too many national media outlets and Republican operatives did early on Saturday, distorts the larger truths about Boelter and his possible motivations. He voted for Trump. He was virulently anti-abortion. He was a self-styled Evangelical pastor who saw himself as a missionary and security specialist. And like so many of the devastated and diminished boys and men who I researched for my latest book, his interaction with right-wing media and fundamentalist Christianity had left him economically ruined and depressed, seeking meaning and purpose in a movement that led only to violence, death and his own ignominious end.

After spending the last decade researching right-wing Christian nationalism and Trumpism, I know all-too-well how these narratives end. We’ve seen way too much heartbreak and loss. It’s time to write a better story, and for lawmakers — particularly Republican officials in Minnesota — to stand up for democracy and against the Trumpian slide into violent autocracy, in memory of Melissa.

The Rev. Angela Denker is a contributing columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. She is a pastor, author and journalist who focuses on religion, politics, parenting and everyday life.