Gillette Fourth of July Parade participants not being allowed to hand out Bibles and copies of the U.S. Constitution has prompted a complaint to the Campbell County Commission.
State House Appropriations Chairman John Bear, R-Gillette, asserts in a July 15 column that community groups “were barred by Campbell County Parks & Recreation officials from handing out U.S. Constitutions and Bibles during the Independence Day 250 parade.”
Campbell County Parks officials say they were merely enforcing a rule against handing out paper products at the parade, adopted around 2021 to curb trash cleanup after the event.
Bear wrote in the same column that a few towns away, Lander’s local LGBT advocacy group handed out condoms to parade-goers and kids.
“Since when are free condoms protected by the Constitution while Bibles are not?” asked Bear in the column.
Organizers of the Lander parade’s Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) float adamantly deny handing out condoms.
Carol Smith in an open letter to Bear, which she sent to Cowboy State Daily, says she was on that float, and no one on it handed out condoms.
“We handed out candy to children and celebrated inclusion with the community, just as we have in previous years,” wrote Smith, who reiterated the point in a phone interview this week.
Sarah Reilley, who said she’s driven the float for three years but couldn’t attend the parade this year, told Cowboy State Daily she would never have handed out condoms.
“Absolutely not,” said Reilley in an interview. She wrote in a Facebook post last week that doing that would have been both expensive and “WILDLY inappropriate.”
"It's important for leaders in our state and elected representatives to do the work to fact-check for themselves, instead of taking fake images and spreading lies in order to create division," said Reilley.
Bear told Cowboy State Daily that a “solid” witness had alerted him to the alleged Lander incident. The witness said no to being interviewed by Cowboy State Daily, said Bear.
According to Reilley and a screenshot she posted, the image Bear dispatched of two hands holding what appears to be a condom returned a Google Reverse Images result of a viral SnapChat screenshot.
Cowboy State Daily’s own Google Reverse Images search, days later, did not replicate that result. That could be because SnapChat doesn’t retain images, Reilley said.
The rest of the controversy is now a complaint that is pending before the Campbell County Commission.
First, The Church
Kurt Siebenaler applied for a permit to run a float on behalf of his church, Church at the Barn, in Campbell County’s Fourth of July parade, he told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.
It was a fun task before all the drama, he said.
“The theme was, our country was founded on Biblical principles,” he said.
Congregants decked out the float with Bibles, a big USA sign and a liberty bell. They’d planned to hand out pocket versions of the U.S. Constitution and New Testament volumes, he added.
When Siebenaler applied to be in the parade, the application said fliers, stickers, paper products, brochures, paper handouts, and leaflets weren’t allowed in it, he recalled.
Siebenaler went to check with a Parks and Recreation staffer, Darla Cotton, and she said the volumes would not be allowed under that rule, he added.
“She said because if people don’t want them, they’re just going to throw them on the ground when they leave,” Siebenaler said.
He countered that they weren’t going to hand them out to “a half dozen kids or whatever” but would be more targeted.
Cotton maintained her veto but said the churchgoers could sign up for a booth at the later hot dog feed at Bicentennial Park and hand out Bibles and Constitutions there, Siebenaler said, adding that the church approved that plan.
Cotton contacted Siebenaler ahead of the hot dog feed to say the department had run out of room for booths and needed to give political candidates priority to be fair across races, he recalled.
Siebenaler told the church, and “word got out to a couple (county) commissioners.”
Then Cotton reportedly told Siebenaler that if the church could find a political candidate willing to share a booth, it could hand out its volumes from there.
Ira Shober, a county commission candidate who attends the church, agreed to share, Siebenaler said.
The Monday Meeting
Commission Chair Bob Jordan and Commissioner Jerry Means met with Campbell County Parks and Recreation Director Dwayne Dillinger, superintendent Adam Gibson, Bear, Republican state Rep. Abby Angelos, at least one attorney representing the county and other stakeholders to discuss the issues on the Monday before July 4.
Dillinger and Angelos are both Republicans running against each other for a Gillette-based seat in the state Senate.
Bear is running again for his seat in the House.
The primary election is Aug. 18.
In Bear’s telling, Dillinger wasn’t aware of the dustup, “but he defended it when the time came.”
“I keep telling him if you have a conflict, you can’t err on the side of trampling people’s inalienable constitutional rights,” Bear told Cowboy State Daily.
Dillinger was reticent in his interviews with Cowboy State Daily, saying he had to be careful not to campaign in a story told from his professional post because of the Hatch Act.
That federal law bars people working for agencies that receive federal money from using their positions to campaign.
He said the parade rules on which Cotton relied were implemented long before he became the director.
Bear said that county personnel said Gillette city officials didn’t want the trash, but that a later call to the city debunked that.
Cotton sent Cowboy State Daily the PDF copies of the rules for each year from 2021-2026. Those show the ban on “flyers, stickers and other types of materials” starting in 2021, with the warning that “they end up everywhere as trash rather than in the hands of the parade attendee.”
“They’re the same (rules) for everybody,” said Cotton in a Thursday interview. “We’re not restricting what they can say; just how they deliver it because of the trash issue.”
In 2024, that rule expanded to all paper products.
Cotton said Parks and Recreation staffers have had recurring conversations with city officials about the trash problem, and main discussion driving that rule happened in 2021.
And in 2021 the streets division contact was a different person, she said. “Back then it was different people (voicing these concerns) than are there now,” said Cotton.
The City Council Candidate
Ben Decker is a Gillette City Council candidate.
Cotton is managing campaigns for two other candidates, Heidi Gross and Eric Scott. She said she’s received permission since these are nonpartisan campaigns and she works for the county, not the city.
She said she’s helped with social media work for legislative campaigns, but doesn’t manage any legislative campaign.
Decker in his own interview referenced a 2020 parade float by Bob Vomhof.
Vomhof defied the Parks and Recreation director that year and ran a float highly critical of the city’s then-mayor, whom protestors accused of blackmail over the sudden resignation of now-mayor, then councilman Shay Lundvall.
That was before Dillinger ran the Parks and Recreation department.
Vomhof said in a Thursday interview that both the Parks and Recreation director of the time and county commissioners tried to shut him down.
But he ran the float — which showed a jail cell and signs reading “fire the mayor” — after what he described as a conversation in which the police chief noted that running a parade float without a permit isn’t an arrestable offense.
Decker told Cowboy State Daily that the war between some residents and “tyrannical” officials started with Vomhoff’s protest float and continues today.
Decker asserted that Cotton, who is his second cousin, has tightened the rules each year based on whatever he did the prior year.
Cotton denied that assertion, pointing to the largely stagnant rules.
And This Time
Decker said an early version of the hot dog feed rules required candidates to stay at their tables and prohibited them from handing out fliers and Bibles.
The rules were later changed so that booth holders could hand out paper products and no longer had to stay at their booths, he said.
The rules were acceptable but their earlier, tougher version “created a chilling effect” on attendees, who “self-censored,” said Decker.
Decker ignored the rules altogether by leaving the designated area for political candidates and handing out fliers to people standing in line at the hot dog feed, he said.
Decker said the flier contained the political group Coal Country Conservatives’ list of preferred candidates for various offices. That flier included an endorsement of Bear and Angelos.
In Decker’s telling, Dillinger called the cops on him for campaigning outside the designated area. Decker calls the move unconstitutional. His complaint to the commission asserts a First Amendment rights violation.
In Dillinger’s telling, he did not call the cops on Decker.
So The Cops Weigh In
Gillette Police Department Deputy Chief Brent Wasson clarified in a Thursday interview.
Dillinger didn’t call the police department. He contacted an officer directly.
“I’m assuming he had seen (the officer) working the parade and … spoke with him about the concern at the park,” said Wasson.
Gillette officers patrolled the parade on bicycles then ride over to the park.
All this happened just after midday July 4, the deputy chief said.
The encounter was brief. Officers told Decker they didn’t want to interfere with his campaigning, though he was outside the designated area.
“And that’s pretty much it,” said Wasson.
“That’s what we do when we have big events. We make sure there’s security. We bring in different security people for fireworks, and that’s what we do,” said Dillinger. “I was just doing my job. … It was a simple call: ‘Are you guys heading out to the park after you get done at the parade on your bikes?’ That’s all there was to it.”
He theorized the original fallout over the Bibles involves political fervor. "Now that I'm a candidate, it's an issue."
The Bible Ladies Venture Out Too
Siebenaler wasn’t paying close attention to all that, but recalled that women from his church booth were emboldened by Decker’s move. They also verged toward the hot dog line, he said.
“They were just outside the fence and holding up Constitutions and Bibles, and asking politely, or just showing people, ‘Would you like to have one?’” Siebenaler said.
The rules seemed practical at first, Siebenaler said. But looking back on it, he’s not as sure.
“That would be in their mind or heart to what their motive was,” said Siebenaler of the involved county officials.
Campbell County Commissioner Scott Clem wasn’t involved in this situation, but knows about Decker’s complaint now pending at the county’s human resources department level, he said in a Thursday interview.
That complaint will likely be handled in executive session since it involves personnel, he noted. That’s a provision of state law.
“Something will come out of this so that we avoid problems like this in the future, and we’ll try as much as we can to correct things now,” said Clem.
Jordan, who chairs the commission, told Cowboy State Daily he's shaking his head at how the saga unfolded.
"It’s not good optics to have yourself and your employee making it hard on somebody else," said Jordan of Parks and Recreation management. "I personally wouldn't ban Bibles and Constitutions."
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
