Reconstructionist Rabbi Moti Rieber was recently banned from the gallery of the Kansas Senate for the remainder of the legislative session after yelling out in protest of an anti-trans bill.

62-year-old Rieber, who has been a progressive lobbyist for 13 years and is also the executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, was present when the state Senate voted to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D) veto of an extreme bathroom bill.

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“First they came for the trans people,” Rieber yelled immediately after the veto passed, updating the famed Martin Niemöller quote, “and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t trans. Then they came for …” He told the Kansas Reflector he would have added that they then came for the immigrants and then the poor people, but he was quickly escorted out of the chamber.

Rieber’s protest can be heard in the official video of the state Senate’s February 17 proceedings.

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“I was feeling some heartbreak,” he said. “This one felt closer to home because of the friends and alliances that we’ve built over the issue. You’re invested in people. These people are doing nothing wrong, they just want to live their lives. I feel very strongly that victimizing a marginalized population is bullying.”

“I think I’m doing… what God wants me to be doing,” Rieber added. “You know, I found something relatively late in life that I seemed to be good at, that people want to support, and that has a purpose.”

Rieber defined God as “collective action.”

“You bring God into the world by doing these things,” he said. “We’re in partnership with God to repair the world. So we bring out these things that are broken and try to repair them.”

He said he was particularly outraged about the state Senate’s override of Kelly’s veto because there were no hearings on the matter. He called the situation “a flippant exercise in power.”

He said he has noticed an overall drop in the hearing time given to important bills over the past five years or so, as well as a decrease in the time individuals are given for their testimonies.

After the Senate voted to override the veto, the state House soon followed.

S.B. 244 was originally about jail bonds, according to out state Rep. Abi Boatman (D), but Republicans used a sneaky maneuver called “gut-and-go” to hold hearings on the bill and then change the text to include bathroom ban provisions, without holding hearings on those bathroom provisions.

The bathroom provisions ban trans people from using facilities that do not align with their sex assigned at birth in government buildings. Democrats stressed that the bathroom provisions were poorly written and would affect any situation where people are being housed in shared living spaces, like dorms, nursing homes, and hospitals.

“If your grandfather is in a nursing home in a shared room, as a granddaughter, you would not be able to visit him. If your sister is living in a dorm at K-State, as a brother, you would not be able to visit her in her room,” Kelly said in a statement when vetoing the bill. “I believe the Legislature should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans.”

The bill also bans trans people from getting the gender markers updated on their driver’s licenses and directs the Kansas Department of Revenue to invalidate licenses where the gender marker has been corrected. The same applies to birth certificates.

After the veto override, trans residents of the state whose gender markers on their licenses reflect their gender identity and not the sex they were assigned at birth began receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles this week informing them that upon the publication of S.B. 244 in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, their current licenses would be invalidated.

The letter, dated February 23, notes that the state Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials in the law.

Friends University political science professor Russell Arben Fox expressed concern to the Kansas Reflector about Rieber’s ban from the state Senate’s gallery.

“Too many people have a model of ‘civil disobedience’ in their heads which suggests that the great nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights movement, for example, were conducted with perfect decorum,” he said.

“The outright banning of Rabbi Moti Rieber from the Kansas Senate gallery is thus a potentially serious problem. He’s a citizen of the United States who is allowed to express himself, and until and unless he performs or participates in an action that crosses that subjective line, he’s following a tradition of protest.”

But his ban hasn’t stopped him from standing up for trans people. On March 10, he participated in a sit-in led by clergy members that blocked the entry to the state Senate.

“We are here because when injustice becomes law, then resistance is necessary,” Rieber told the Reflector at the time. “We are here as moral witnesses.”

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