Sheila Butt

Sheila Keckler Butt (born November 20, 1951) is an American politician from Columbia, Tennessee, currently serving as the mayor of Maury County. Butt is the former Republican Majority Floor Leader of the Tennessee House of Representatives and she formerly represented House District 64, encompassing the cities of Columbia, Mount Pleasant, and Spring Hill in parts of Maury County, Tennessee. She retired from the House in 2018, and she was replaced by Republican Scott Cepicky in the subsequent election. On August 4, 2022, Butt was elected Maury County Mayor, succeeding incumbent Andy Ogles, who instead ran for an open U.S. House of Representatives seat. Butt was sworn in as county mayor on August 30.

Biography

Early life Butt was born on November 20, 1951, in Rockford, Illinois. Butt was also both a high school cheerleader and a high school newspaper editor.

Career

Butt was a co-founder and managing editor of S&S Bovine Images and also co-founder and managing editor of Tennessee Cattle Business, the official publication of the TN Cattlemen's Association

Tennessee General Assembly

Butt served as a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives until 2018.

NAAWP Twitter post

In her book Everyday Princess: Daughter of the King, Butt posed the following leading questions pertaining to biracial dating toward the young female readers on her book:

...Will dating someone of another race be helpful or beneficial? Understanding that you will eventually marry someone that you date, will you be just as happy for your children to grow up biracial? I have seen instances when a young lady started dating someone of another race, and there were those of her own race who were not interested in dating her after that.

In a 2015 tweet critical of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Butt called for the creation of both a Council on Christian Relations and an NAAWP organization in the United States, presumably the National Association for the Advancement of White People. The comment was made on a post by Cathy Hinners, an anti-Muslim activist who operates the Daily Roll Call blog. The NAAWP is a white nationalist organization that was formed in opposition to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which itself was earlier formed during 1909.

Butt was reportedly commenting on an open letter from the CAIR urging potential Republican presidential candidates to reject Islamophobia and reach out to American Muslim voters. CAIR representatives stated the reference to "NAAWP" is an apparent racist twist to the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP.

Butt responded to the backlash resulting from her NAAWP statement in part by stating: "It saddens me that we have come to a place in our society where every comment by a conservative Christian is automatically scrutinized as being racist". The Tennessee Black Caucus is now calling for both an apology and the removal of Rep. Butt from leadership in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Butt later deleted her NAAWP post on Twitter and said in response to suggestions that "NAAWP" was a racist abbreviation for the "National Association for the Advancement of White People," that she had been "misinterpreted" and was offended by the reaction from critics. Butt attempted to walk back her NAAWP Twitter post by stating she actually meant "National Association for the Advancement of Western Peoples" to be widely understood for her NAAWP Twitter post. Butt's remarks were criticized on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives as "dangerous and insulting" by TNGA Rep. Sherry Jones who in part stated,

Yesterday we heard a lot of unsettling things on the floor, from bogus descriptions of women's health clinics to a member of this body [TNGA Rep. Sheila Butt] actually saying that the violent crimes of rape and incest are, quote, not verifiable. There are 206,000 women in Tennessee who unfortunately can attest to the fact that rape and incest are too verifiable. Those women have endured horrors that we cannot imagine, and for it to be said the violent crimes they suffered are not verifiable is to suggest that they are somehow not legitimate rapes. That's dangerous and it is insulting to say the very least.

According to Leighann Lassiter, the state director for HSUS in Tennessee, another legislator who has a contradictory voting record to Rep. Butt described Butt's action as a public official against the HSUS as being a "purely political attack".

Lassiter also claimed Butt used false information from the Internet in asking the state's attorney general to launch an investigation. Butt has asked the attorney general to issue a "Consumer Alert" to raise public awareness about the group's "potential fundraising abuses".

One of Butt's sons, Kyle Butt, is the director of Biblical research at Apologetics Press in Montgomery, Alabama, and is an editor of Discovery: A Monthly Christian Evidences Magazine for Kids magazine.

Another of Butt's sons, Cliff Butt, was arrested by the Maury County Sheriff Department on May 7, 2015, for allegedly contributing to the delinquency of a minor with his buying alcohol for a 17-year-old Columbia Academy student who then brought the alcohol to an off-campus prom night party attended by twenty other Columbia Academy students who reportedly consumed beer at the event. Cliff Butt was jailed on one misdemeanor charge and later released from the Maury County Jail after posting a $1,500 bond and he was scheduled to appear in court on the charge on June 10, 2015, in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. Cliff Butt was previously serving as a youth minister at the Eastside Church of Christ (now the South Gate Church of Christ) of Columbia, Tennessee.

Butt is a member of the Anderson Bend Church of Christ.