Midnight Mutterings | Who is Selena Montgomery?

||| BY JACKIE BATES |||

A few days before Christmas I was half-listening to a radio call-in show about favorite books read in 2020. One caller got my attention when she recommended a book by Selena Montgomery. I don’t recall the name of the book, but I do remember that neither the caller nor the host
mentioned anything particular about the genre or the author. I was riveted and my mind raced down the path that follows:

Last summer I tried to corner (as much I could corner anyone at six feet while wearing a mask, but unarmed) my new neighbor to ferret out her political interests, if any. I asked her about Stacey Abrams and hit pay dirt. I asked her, in particular if she had any idea about how Stacey Abrams supported herself after narrowly losing the Georgia governorship to Brian Kemp in 2018.

I knew Abrams has been approached about running for the US Senate after that, but chose instead to work for voter rights in places around the country where such rights have been and are in peril. Working for voter rights, while a noble occupation, doesn’t pay well as far as I know. I was beyond impressed when my neighbor said she did know about Abrams’ outside gig as they had been law students at Yale at the same time. And it turns out that Selena Montgomery is Abrams’ pen name and that Selena Montgomery is a fairly well known writer of romance fiction.

Now back to politics: Recently, Stacey Abrams has been involved with  an organization of romance writers who are supporting campaigns of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who are challenging incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for Georgia Senate seats in a runoff
election which will occur on Tuesday, January 5, 2021. The group calls itself Romancing the Runoff, and has raised almost a half million dollars last time I checked.

That’s pretty much chicken scratch in this particular election as the incumbent senators have a lot of very rich donors. In addition both are very wealthy. In fact, by some accounts, Perdue may be the richest person in the US Senate. However, his net worth has been suggested at a measly $15.8 million, and is soundly outclassed by the (at least, according to Forbes) $800 million net worth of Loeffler and her husband , Jeffrey Sprecher, who is either the CEO or outright owner of the (yes) NY Stock Exchange, or the parent company of the NY Stock Exchange. (I admit I got lost in the heady wilds of So Much Money, and can’t say for sure the exact facts about any of this.) I do know that neither Loeffler nor Perdue has had to write romance novels for pocket money.

Loeffler was appointed Junior Senator in December, 2019, by Governor Brian Kemp after Senator Johnny Isakson resigned due to health concerns. David Perdue has been in the US Senate since 2015. Both Georgia senators were implicated in the Congressional insider trader scandal of 2020, though neither was officially charged. (This had to do with dumping stocks during the early days of the pandemic, which neither has denied—only that they did not use information gained in confidential Senate sessions when they did it.)

And, yes, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is the same person who narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams in 2018 when he was Secretary of State of Georgia (and therefore in charge of the election) and resigned only a day or two after the election, refusing to respond to charges of conflict of interest. He was replaced by Brad Raffensperger.

Now I’m lost in this maze myself, but do want to mention that both Governor Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensperger have both asserted that that the recent validation of the win by President-Elect Biden is correct, thus soundly irritating some higher ups in their political party.

What also got lost in this maze is the very real issue of voter suppression and voter rights violations that Stacey Abrams is working so hard on. And successfully, in some cases. Voter rights of the poor, the dark-skinned, the immigrants, and yes, the bearers of vaginas, have been at issue since the beginning of our Republic. Over time various creative means have been used to suppress voter rights, including literacy tests, poll taxes, land ownership, particular kinds of identification requirements, as well as gerrymandering and the various scheduling of times for voting and polling place locations that make it difficult or impossible for certain people to vote without easy transportation or access.

I grew up in North Carolina and remember hearing, when I was a child, that polling places were sometimes set up in the living rooms of rich, white ladies, and as Black people could enter private homes only by invitation and by the back door, they were therefore unable to cast their votes. We still have a ways to go in voting rights. Thank you Stacey Abrams/Selena Montgomery. I’ll vote for YOU any time.