During an appearance on the Liberty Warrior Nation podcast Thursday, Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-CO Springs) discussed a recent conflict with Rep. Brianna Titone (D-Arvada) and claimed that LGBTQ people are the result of mental illness, grooming, or sexual abuse.
“Our entire Republican caucus got dressed down by a transgender representative [Titone] because I said — in a bill that had to do with children — a bunch of stuff like you cannot change XX and XY chromosomes,” said Bottoms during his appearance on the Liberty Warrior Nation podcast. “That is male and female, and you can dress differently, you can say things differently, but you can’t change that. When we do that, we are living in such a weird, warped, lie mentality that now the people that actually speak scientific truth about the very basic core of humanity — that there is male and female and that’s it — when that happens we become the pariah, and we got dressed down by the entire Democratic Caucus. They all went up and stood while this transgender representative said that we were all spewing hate because we said there’s only male and female.”
Host Michael Poff claimed he did not want to target the transgender community, but suggested trans people transition due to mental illness or because they have been groomed. “I don’t want to push hate on the individual [trans person],” he said. “I don’t want to trigger my audience to hate transgenders, because there’s two things that I think causes trans transgenderism. One is mental illness and two is grooming at a very young age. I think those two things are contributors to why people decide that they’re going to change their gender. I think that children are easy prey, and I think what we need to realize is the ideology is the problem.”
Rhetoric that equates the existence of LGBTQ with “grooming” has been common in conservative circles in recent years. Bottoms’ predecessor, former Rep. Dave Williams, also a Republican, used groomer rhetoric to justify protests against a Highlands Ranch drag show last summer, and recently Rep. Stephanie Luck (R-Penrose), claimed students are being “recruited” to be trans.
According to the Human Rights Campaign’s “Digital Hate: Social Media’s Role in Amplifying Dangerous Lies About LGBTQ+ People” 2022 report, “‘Grooming’ rhetoric is being spread by a small group of radical extremists as part of a coordinated and concerted effort to attack LGBTQ+ kids to rile up extreme members of their base, the only voting bloc they are moving on these issues, ahead of the midterm elections.”
Bottoms agreed with Poff, and claimed that people also become LGBTQ due to childhood sexual abuse. “I do believe there’s a third category for why — I agree with your first two categories — but why people get into the LGBT community, not just transgender, but the entire community is abuse,” he said. “They’ve been abused and they’re broken and they’re hurting and they go to the arena and embrace the arena where they are hurting because there is a justification there that deals with their pain and their condemnation and all the stuff that they do to themselves, and also outward influences. I would throw in your spiritual stuff that Satan does to them. They run straight to the very essence of how they were abused.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The American Psychiatric Association noted in a 2000 fact sheet available on the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, that dealing with gay, lesbian and bisexual issues, that sexual abuse does not appear to be any more prevalent among children who grow up and identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual than in children who grow up and identify as heterosexual. Similarly, the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization notes on its website that ‘experts in the human sexuality field do not believe that premature sexual experiences play a significant role in late adolescent or adult sexual orientation’ and added that it’s unlikely that anyone can make another person gay or heterosexual. Advocates for Youth, an organization that works in the U.S. and abroad in the field of adolescent reproductive and sexual health also has stated that sexual abuse does not ‘cause’ heterosexual youth to become gay.”
Bottoms, who is also the pastor at the Church at Briargate, denied having animosity toward the LGBTQ community. “I don’t hate transgender or gay or any of the categories, I don’t,” he said. “We have ministries in our church to help them. In fact, right after the [2016 Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida] shooting a few years back we paid for some guys in our church to get together — we did this two different times — we paid for the ammunition we supplied the guns for for LGBT people to learn how to defend themselves. They have the right to defend themselves, which is a part of the Second Amendment too. There’s no limitation of category there and so we did it and we had dozens and dozens of LGBT community [members] showing up and we trained them. We helped them develop that, and then they begin to ask me right here in Colorado Springs to go and speak at their meetings and I did that multiple times and they were never rude to me I was never rude to them. They didn’t agree with me and I didn’t agree with them, but they realized I am truly trying to help. We did have some people that we helped with mental health and everything else and they eventually left that community because they finally got whole. I care deeply for these people, but what is not okay is to force their language and their mentality upon everybody else and say, ‘You must embrace what I believe.’ I don’t demand anybody embrace Christianity — I want them to, I want everybody to, yes — but it’s not a demand.”
