Shouting from the gallery in the Kansas Senate got Moti Rieber banned. He says it was worth it.

Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action and an outspoken advocate for progressive causes, stands March 23, 2026, by the railing at the Statehouse. Rieber was banned from the Kansas Senate gallery after shouting in frustration following passage of the state’s “bathroom bill.” (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

When Rabbi Moti Rieber shouted in frustration from the gallery of the Kansas Senate after it overturned the governor’s veto on the state’s anti-trans law on Feb. 17, he turned to an oft-quoted warning about the danger of political complacency.

But he updated it for our time.

As soon as Senate President Ty Masterson announced the veto had been overturned by the chamber’s Republican supermajority, 31-9, and smacked the gavel to signal an end to the matter, Rieber was on his feet.

“First they came for the trans people,” Rieber shouted, “and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t trans. Then they came for …”

You can hear Rieber on the Kansas Legislature’s video stream, at least until Masterson announces the Senate is “at ease until we have this taken care of.” The feed is discontinued for just more than a minute as Rieber is hustled out of the chamber. He was shouting during his exit, and according to reporting by Kansas Reflector’s Morgan Chilson, his Parthian shot at the lawmakers was “shame on you!”

He was banned from the gallery for the remainder of the session.

The next day, the Kansas House joined the Senate, 87-37, in overriding the veto. The bill became law with its publication Feb. 28 in the Kansas Register, forcing people use bathrooms in state buildings that match their biological sex at birth. It also allows Kansans to sue if they feel “aggrieved” by someone of the opposite sex using a public restroom, prevents anyone from changing gender markers on driver’s licenses and birth certificates, and prompted the state to invalidate the licenses of 275 individuals who had legally changed the gender on their driver’s license.

I recently met Rieber at the Capitol to talk about his banishment from the Senate gallery, his activism, his work as executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action — and history. We sat on a bench just off the second-floor rotunda as the day’s activities at the Statehouse wound down, and he often nodded or spoke to those who walked past.

On his left lapel, Rieber wore a rainbow ribbon pin and a badge identifying him as a lobbyist — “my 13th year,” he said — and on the right a button that admonished, “IT’S THE CLIMATE, DUH.”

“Reb Moti,” as he likes to be called, according to his website, may be the most outspoken advocate for progressive causes in the Statehouse. At 62, his beard is graying but his eyes are bright behind his glasses, and he talks in the kind of measured tones you’d expect from a teacher.

When I tell him he doesn’t seem like the kind of person given to shouting, he smiles and tilts his head.

“No?” he asks. “I’m not sure about that.”

The quotation Rieber paraphrased during his protest from the Senate gallery last month was from Martin Niemöller, a German pastor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau.

There are several versions of Niemöller’s “quotation,” because he often adjusted it for his audiences during his post-war lectures, but the best-known is the one inscribed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at Washington, D.C.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — for I was not a socialist,” it begins. It then cites trade unionists, with the same refrain, and then the Jews. It ends: “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Had Rieber been allowed to finish, he said, he would have added “then they came for the immigrants” and “then they came for the poor people.” But he was already being escorted out.

He said he was outraged because there were no hearings and the veto override was handled in a way that “seemed a flippant exercise in power” instead of responsible governing. The legislative process is broken, he said, and he shouted because his role is to be a moral voice.

“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.”

Rabbi Moti Rieber watches law enforcement as they confront protesters March 10, 2026, outside the Senate chamber in the Statehouse. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

It was necessary to shout from the gallery, he said, just as it was necessary for him and others to participate in a clergy-led sit-in March 10 blocking the entrance to the Senate, in protest of the same “bathroom bill.” State troopers dispersed the group, but nobody was detained or cited.

Masterson did not respond to my request for comment on Rieber’s ban from the Senate gallery.

But Russell Arben Fox, a professor of political science at Friends University in Wichita, had some thoughts.

“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 told me.

The range of American protest includes songs, chants, and sometimes disruptions, Fox said, and the question becomes how much is too much.

“The outright banning of Rabbi Moti Rieber from the Kansas Senate gallery is thus a potentially serious problem,” Fox said. “He’s a citizen of the United State 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.”

The tradition could appear uncivil to some, but it is fully in line with the Constitutional freedoms millions of others have exercised throughout American history.

“I think I’m doing … what God wants me to be doing,” Rieber said. “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.”

I asked him to explain God.

The look on his face was that of an astrophysics professor whose freshman student has just asked him to explain cosmology in the 10-minute break between classes.

“So, you don’t see God,” Rieber said. “I don’t think of God as an individual with a consciousness. God is being expressed through the striving to better ourselves. You know, Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, said God is the force that makes for salvation.”

I wondered if he could tell from my face that I was agnostic.

So, God is positive action?

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

Rabbi Moti Rieber speaks at a Kansas Interfaith Action demonstration on May 20, 2025, outside the federal courthouse in Topeka, where KIFA members protested Core Civic and the for-profit detention of immigrants. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

Rieber is a Reconstructionist rabbi.

Reconstructionism is one of a half-dozen primary movements in American Judaism, and perhaps the smallest. Developed by Kaplan and his son-in-law, Ira Eisenstein, from the 1920s to the 1940s, it teaches that Judaism is an “evolving religious civilization.”

Rieber, who grew up in New Jersey, attended Reconstructionist Rabbinical College at Wyncote, Pennsylvania. He had congregations at Naperville, Illinois, and Lawrence, Kansas. He said he came to the region because he married a Kansas City girl.

In 2007, Rieber said, he was hired to be director of the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation at Wichita, to strengthen and preserve Jewish identity. In 2011, he became director of Kansas Interfaith Power & Light, which Rieber described as a “single-issue, faith-based climate change organization.”

For the past decade, he’s directed Kansas Interfaith Action, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit governed by a 10-member board. Its mission, according to publicly available tax documents, is to put “faith into action by educating, engaging, and advocating on behalf of people of faith and the public regarding critical social, economic, and climate justice issues.”

In the past five or six years, Rieber said, he’s witnessed an alarming decrease in the hearing time allotted to significant bills. It’s gone from a couple of days back then to a couple of hours now. If it’s a controversial measure with many asking to give testimony, the time for each individual to speak may be only a couple of minutes.

Then there is “gut-and-go,” a strategy in which one chamber passes an inoffensive bill and the other strips it of the original language and replaces it with the content from some unrelated, but frequently controversial, proposal. It then returns to the original chamber for a yes-or-no vote with no committee hearings or public testimony.

The last time Rieber spoke with Masterson, the rabbi said, was at a meeting two or three years ago. Masterson, an Andover Republican, announced in July that he was running for governor. While Masterson doesn’t seem interested in conversation, Rieber said, other GOP lawmakers did make time to speak with him directly.

But most of what Rieber does, he said, is not bending a particular lawmaker’s ear but putting together coalitions of like-minded individuals to exert political power in support of, or opposition to, proposed legislation. He also feels the duty to speak out about the dangers posed by white Christian nationalism and institutionalized racism.

“There is an increase in antisemitism,” Rieber said. “It is unquestionable. I mean, just look at social media. … Every synagogue basically has guards outside of it now.”

In 2014, a white supremacist named Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. shot and killed three people at a Jewish community center and a retirement home in Overland Park. Miller died in prison in 2021, age 80.

“A lot of the Jewish organizations and synagogues have, I think, purposely confused anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” Rieber said. “And made Israel not only a major thing, but the major thing.”

Much of the rhetoric, he said, originally came from hard-right figures, but now has been picked up by the larger Jewish community.

“It’s hard to know even what language to use about this,” he said. “Mainstream synagogues and organizations will now leverage Israel to infringe on people, and that’s horrifying to me. … I’m not the only rabbi you would ever hear the word ‘genocide’ from, but the only Kansas rabbi you would. It’s the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure and life. You’re seeing it in Lebanon, you’re seeing it in Tehran, and of course you saw it in Gaza.”

Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, speaks to the crowd at the Jan. 14, 2026, “human needs are human rights” rally at the Statehouse in Topeka. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

When I asked if he’s always felt like an outsider, Rieber chuckled.

“Maybe it’s the Jewish condition,” he said. “It’s funny, you always get people and they say things like, ‘I’m a sixth-generation Kansan.’ They’re really proud. I’m sure you’ve heard this, as I have. And then I’m like, ‘Six generations ago, my people were still in the Ukraine.’ ”

Speaking of generations ago, let’s return to the Niemöller quotation.

It is undoubtedly the thing that the Lutheran pastor, who had been a U-boat commander in World War I and became a bestselling author in the 1930s for his autobiography, is best remembered for now.

Niemöller was famous in America from the time of his arrest in Germany in 1937 as an “enemy of the state” for resisting Nazi laws about church membership. A 2024 biography by Benjamin Ziemann, translated from German by Christine Brocks, notes that The New York Times reported on Niemöller 167 times during his imprisonment.

But, as Ziemann notes, Niemöller was a more complicated individual than the courageous pastor the press made him out to be. He was an antisemite before his captivity, and his time in the concentration camps was served as a “special prisoner” protected from torture and receiving some of the same privileges as the SS guards. During a low point of his captivity, he sought to volunteer as a naval officer for the Third Reich, but the offer was ignored.

Niemöller initially saw the Nazi Party as a way to save Germany from the threat of communism and to restore national pride and power. Even imprisoned late in the war, he saw the looming German defeat as “the decline of the West.” The change in his political views came not during his imprisonment, Ziemann concludes, but after. In the decades following, Niemöller gradually lost his rigid Protestant nationalist beliefs and embraced pacifism, activism and advocacy.

Although the central idea of what would become the “quotation” can be found in his immediate post-war speeches in which he expressed his guilt at supporting Hitler, it was only “canonized” in its current form in the 1970s.

None of this diminishes the power of Niemöller’s words, but it adds a nuanced layer of meaning to the most-cited statements about the Holocaust. He was a flawed man struggling with complicity and redemption, which I take some hope from.

Rieber takes his hope from a more popular source.

“When Trump was reelected,” he told me, “I went back to ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ It’s the story of two little people doing something impossible because it could save the world. But they don’t know that it will.”

It has been years since I read the trilogy.

Frodo and Sam. The wizard, Gandalf. The trip to Mordor to destroy the ring.

“Yes,” Rieber said. “And Gandalf says despair is only for those who know the end beyond all hope. We do not.”

Nobody knows how our national nightmare will end — or what fresh hells await in the darkest depths of Mordor that is the supermajority-controlled Kansas Statehouse — but whether it ends well or badly increasingly depends on average people taking note of what is happening and doing the imminently possible.

Rieber told me that democracy is among his sacred values, and it’s something we share, although I frame it in civic terms. Why more people aren’t speaking out is puzzling, but it likely has to do with bog standard self-interest and social media distraction. We’re a lazy lot, us Americans, until we’re not.

Sometimes it takes a great shout to get our attention.

Correction: This story has been updated to accurately reflect KIFA’s staffing.