COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert said she’ll continue her long-running verbal attacks on trans people despite the mass shooting targeting an LGBTQ nightclub near her district.
Boebert made her comments on 850KOA’s Ross Kaminsky show on Tuesday morning, two days after Sunday’s shooting killed five people and injured 17 others at Club Q in Colorado Springs.
When asked if she’d change her rhetoric, Boebert repeated her criticism of trans people and gender-affirming care.
“This is stuff we absolutely have to be standing up for and talking about,” Boebert said.
She rejected calls by critics to take responsibility for her language about the LGBTQ+ community in light of the mass shooting.
“It’s absolutely disgusting to try to blame this on me and try to say that I’ve had bad rhetoric about the LGBT community,” Boebert said. “That is completely false.”
Boebert’s anti-trans statements have been well documented.
In response to a May 2022 fact-checking segment rebutting the false claim that people who discuss LGBTQ topics are grooming children for sex, Boebert replied on Twitter, “Okay, groomers.”
In July 2022, Boebert said allowing children to identify as transgender is “grooming them.”
When the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Boebert as having one of the farthest-reaching social media accounts tweeting the “hateful grooming narrative,” Boebert promised to double down.
“Guess that means I have to tweet about these sick, demented groomers even more,” Boebert said.
In Tuesday’s interview on KOA, Boebert described trans women as “men dressing up as caricatures of women.”
Boebert also falsely claimed that the media isn’t reporting on the two men who stopped the Club Q shooter or Colorado’s Red Flag law, which was not invoked despite the shooting suspect’s history of threatening behavior. Both topics have been widely covered by local and national media outlets.
“It’s unfortunate that people aren’t talking about the two heroes who risked their lives to stop this vile shooter and they’re also not talking about enforcing the laws that are on the books,” Boebert said. “Why was that Red Flag law not enforced?”
Boebert has previously opposed a federal version of Colorado’s Red Flag gun law, which allows a judge to temporarily seize a person’s firearms if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.
“Red Flag laws will be a liberal activist's dream,” Boebert wrote in June 2022. “We all know that the Left will abuse them so flagrantly the Second Amendment will practically be nullified for anyone to the right of Mao.”
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