LGBTQ advocates, including survivors of the Club Q shooting, appeared before members of Congress yesterday.
Speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, they talked about how they believe anti-LGBTQ legislation and hateful rhetoric encouraged hate crimes.
Among those to speak was Club Q survivor James Slaugh.
He said, “Club Q was a second home and safe space not just for me, but for all of us. Outside of these spaces we are continually being dehumanized, marginalized and targeted. The fear-based and hateful rhetoric surrounding the LGBTQ+, especially around trans individuals and drag performers, leads to violence. It incites violence.”
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Related: “I will miss you forever”: Heartbreaking tributes to bartenders killed at Club Q in Colorado Springs
Slaugh’s thoughts were echoed by others. Democrat lawmakers on the committee tended to agree.
Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), said. “The horrific attack at Club Q is yet one more avoidable symptom of a larger epidemic plaguing our nation: a culture of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and violence from politicians and political extremists.”
However, Republicans were unconvinced.
Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman was among GOP members who wanted to stress that there has been a rise in violent crime across society. He had his own views on what was causing it.
According to Grothman, it’s little to do with attitudes toward gay people or the easy accessibility of guns. It’s primarily due to the breakdown of the family and a lack of respect toward the police. He also said that “open borders” might contribute.
At a hearing on violence against the LGBTQ+ community, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) instead focused on attributing violence in general in the U.S. to the ‘breakdown of the family,’ ‘police hatred,’ and ‘open borders’ pic.twitter.com/CUlJb3JSiJ
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) December 15, 2022
The Club Q shooting
The shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs last month resulted in five people dying and scores more injured.
The club’s co-founder and owner Matthew Haynes was among those to speak to Congress yesterday. He shared some of the hundreds of “hateful comments” the club received in the wake of the tragedy. Some commentators praised the shooter.
“I woke up to the wonderful news that five mentally unstable fa**ots and lesbians and 18 injured,” one message read. “The only thing I’m mad about is that the fa**ots had courage to subdue the wonderful killer.”
Related: Chasten Buttigieg and AOC join the chorus of people slamming Boebert over her sh*tty Club Q tweet
Another survivor, barman Michael Anderson, also gave emotional testimony.
“I can still hear the rapid firing of bullets today,” he said. “It’s a sound I may never forget. It’s a sound I hope no one here or anywhere else in this country has to hear.”
“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you,” Anderson said.
Watch the 25-year-old’s powerful statement below.
Club Q Nightclub Shooting Survivor Michael Anderson opening statement: “The time to do something is now. What needs to be done is placing the lives of children and adults above our unhealthy obsession with assault rifles.” pic.twitter.com/p2cH8IsjKz
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 14, 2022
Rep. Glenn Grothman
Grothman has a record of voting against LGBTQ rights. He co-sponsored a resolution in 2015 to ban same-sex marriage. In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke about sending scientists to Uganda to talk about sexuality after the country passed a harsh anti-gay law. Grothman criticized Kerry’s plan, calling it a way, “to say how wonderful the homosexual lifestyle is.”
Grothman has frequently also faced criticism for his views on race. He recently suggested “the idea that we have a huge racial problem is preposterous.”
I have spent many events in his presence as a state rep in his congressional district and I have never met a more overtly racist elected official than @RepGrothman. He is part of the problem which deepens divisions non this country, not Joe Biden. https://t.co/ODQincV72m
— Rep. Lee Snodgrass (@RepSnodgrass) November 27, 2022
Chrisk
Grothman just looks the part. Hatred just etched into his ugly fat smug face.
Why was this shithead even allowed to talk. it’s like a Nazi talking about the how the Holocaust was the Jews fault.
Kangol2
He gets to talk because, unfortunately, the people in his district in Wisconsin keep voting this vile, racist, anti-LGBTQ hatemonger back into his House seat every two years. He’s always been horrible and actually appears to be getting worse. Also, back in 2020, he had a Drumpf Loyalty Index, which measures how much he voted with the pResident traitor, and it was 93, the highest in the House GQP!
Ronbo
It couldn’t possibly be a network of conservatives banking on bigoted fears of a population facing serious problems that conservatives refuse to address and solve. No healthcare, outsourcing jobs, poverty spikes, economic decline, starting wars, climate change, etc… seem to be the modern conservative montra. They are grooming hate
jagonzalez67
I could see how the breakdown of the family has to do with all types of social issues. Much of this goes back to WWII and women’s liberation. When the mother went to work the family structure broke down. The women went to work and the men didn’t step up. Today’s dads more involved in maintaining the family unit than the vast majority were through out the 1900s.
Grothman is an idiot for tying this specifically to violence against LGBTQ and migrants but its easier for him as he then doesn’t have to look at the rest of our society. Gun violence? Racism? Incels?
So much of this can be attributed to the breakdown of the family…..especially those that look like him. At the same time as the mainstream white family has been collapsing everyone else has been improving in every way leading to the underlying issue in all of this…uneducated and privileged white people (hey Karen!) feeling left behind and therefore feeling like they don’t want things to change, want things how they used to be, entitled, on and on.
gjg64
Maybe it’s the way you wrote that first paragraph, but are you saying that the breakdown of the family is due to women working during WWII and the men not? The women worked in the factories building the materials needed for the war because the men were off fighting it! It had nothing to do with the “breakdown of the family”. Hell, they even provided day care in a lot of the factories back then. Sadly, when the post war congress tried to keep that going, the conservatives were against it because it sounded too “Soviet”.
Morandi
Really? Women have been part of the workforce all through recorded history. They worked farms, worked in factories, etc. well before the end of WWII. Perhaps the concept of the “Breakdown of the Family” is overstated, or a modern fiction, or, perhaps, this has been a societal problem for centuries.
Cam
Translation all the “Libs” are responsible for the bigotry and attacks on them.
Too bad that so many of the violent attackers seem to come from two parent Republican households.
rbernard
Rep. Glenn Grothman is a useless knuckle dragging old fossil who is part of the problem and not part of the solution. .
linedrive
He’s a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them.
tjack47
That’s not ignorant. It’s ignernt.
Brian
So, when an American-born American citizen with two American parents and four American grandparents decides to kill someone, he blames immigrants. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
peacefulruffneck
Rep. Glenn Grothman looks just like former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a married Republicon politician who went to prison in 2016 for sexually abusing boys he coached while teaching in high school. Where do they get these people? They are like something from a bizarre low-life Republican Central Casting office.
woodroad34
Oh, like this just happened (violence against gays). He’s just proven he hasn’t the brains to be in any sort of public position–straight families must be disintegrating around him since the time of America’s founding, then.
Gay Thomas
Father Time and Miss Karma are going to do a number on Rep. Grothman. Hope it’s painful and full of misery.
Peter
So typical of today’s Rs in Congress. Since they have no solutions to actual problems, they talk about inflation (except now that the midterms are over it’s never mentioned), gas prices (no longer an issue), BLM, working moms, the border crisis, trans teenagers, drag queens and abortion as society’s biggest issues. I don’t know how restrained I would’ve been if I was sitting opposite him as an LGBTQ+ representative or survivor of a nightclub mass murder. Rs will never understand they do not represent the vast majority of people in this country, but because they refuse to give up power they change voting laws, redistrict, etc., to steal elections, or flat-out lie like traitor trump and convince their pathetic base to arm themselves. And they’re still owned by the gun lobby. Nothing will change until they’re voted out of office.
scotty
well, with that hair, it’s no wonder he feels the way he does.
JBY
I believe the violence increased when Trump gave every sad, mad, lost, under educated and under employed white man permission to air their rage in public. He is the poster CHILD for saying the quiet part out loud.
linedrive
Truth! He made America anything but great.
Diplomat
MAHA Make America Hate Again, that’s what Trump really did.
GayEGO
GOP Grothman must be a religious bigot who can’t keep church and state separate. My husband of 57 years and I got married in 2004 in Massachusetts. I have had to explain to those who told me marriage is between a man and a woman that we got a civil marriage as you have to get a civil marriage license, not a religious one!
Kangol2
Where’s ChrisK to make a blanket generalization about all White men and Christians based on this horrid excuse for a Congressperson Glenn Grothman? Oh the inhumanity!