Tommy Benton

Thomas Housch Benton (born May 20, 1950) is an American Republican politician who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from the 31st district from 2005 to 2023. He has been repeatedly criticized for neo-Confederate comments. and was unopposed in the general election. He has been reelected seven times since then, usually without opposition.

Criticism over racial comments He has been criticized for his neo-Confederate views, which lionize the South's secession and have been criticized as racist. He has claimed that, contrary to historical consensus, slavery was not a cause of the war, the Confederacy's leaders were equal to the Founding Fathers, and that taking down Confederate monuments was "no better than what ISIS is doing."

In 2016, he gained national attention for apologetic comments about the Ku Klux Klan, which he described as "not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order...It made a lot of people straighten up. I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were." Benton also proposed a bill that would have returned Martin Luther King Boulevard in Atlanta to its former name, Gordon Road, which honored John Brown Gordon, a former slaveholder who historians believe was the Georgia head of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s.

In 2017, Benton received criticism for distributing to members of the state legislature an article headlined "The Absurdity of Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States." As a result, Republican House leadership stripped him of his chairmanship of the House Human Relations and Aging Committee.

In December 2021, Benton announced he would not seek re-election.