Members of the presidential arts and humanities committee resigned Friday to protest President Donald Trump’s comments about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, The Washington Post reported.
"Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed," the members said in a letter to the president on Friday.
"Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.
"The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisers have, without speaking out against your words and actions."
The members of the President’s Commission on Arts and the Humanities are holdovers from the Obama administration. They include actor Kal Penn, who is described as a longtime Barack Obama supporter and Jill Udall, former head of cultural affairs for New Mexico and wife of Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.
Some other members of the arts board had resigned after Trump’s victory in 2016, but others had agreed to stay until Trump picked their replacements.
The commission is described as one of the "mostly ceremonial White House commission" set up to advise the president. It works with educators and leads cultural delegation to other nations, according to Politico.
The latest resignations follow the disbanding of two White House corporate advisory panels this week after those members quit in protest of Trump’s comments, the Post noted.