The Democratic majority in the State Senate in Sacramento has stripped Sen. John Schmitz of three key committee posts for making anti-Semitic remarks about opponents of an amendment to the California Constitution that would ban abortions. Schmitz, an ultraconservative Republican and former member of the John Birch Society, said in a press release that at a hearing in Los Angeles on the amendment, he looked out on “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces.” He called them “murderous marauders.”
Schmitz was deprived of his chairmanship of the Senate Constitutional Amendment Committee, the vice chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Industrial Relations and his position as Senate delegate to the state Commission on the Status of Women. The Democratic leadership acted with the endorsement of the Senate Republican leader, William Campbell.
Schmitz accused Campbell of being “a front” for a Jewish aide and said he stood by his remarks. The conservative legislator, who was the 1972 Presidential candidate of the rightwing American Independent Party, is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate this year against the incumbent, fellow-Republican, Sen. S. I. Hayakawa.
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