News (USA)

Anti-LGBTQ white supremacist Rep. Steve King loses primary after 9 terms

Representative Steve King
Representative Steve King Photo: AP

Infamous white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ Rep. Steve King (R-IA) lost his primary election yesterday to state Sen. Randy Feenstra (R). Feenstra took 46% of the vote while King only got 35%.

The nine-term Congressman has stood out for his extremist views, getting chastised by Republican leadership for his racist rhetoric and support for neo-Nazis.

Related: Rep. Steve King says ‘We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies’

King has displayed a Confederate flag on his desk and retweeted a Nazi sympathizer. He tweeted support for a Canadian who lost her job after she did an interview with a neo-Nazi website.

In 2018, he did an interview with Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by a former Nazi officer.

“Western civilization is on the decline,” he said in the interview.

King has also had hateful words over the years for LGBTQ people.

In 2009, when the Iowa Supreme Court recognized marriage equality, King warned that the state would “become the gay marriage Mecca” and said the judges who voted for marriage equality “should resign from their position.” He spent $80,000 for ads against retaining the judges in the next election, and all three were voted off the bench.

When the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage equality in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, King proposed a resolution to allow states to ignore what he called a “perverted” Supreme Court decision and embrace the “traditional definition of marriage.”

“The domestic life of America has been dramatically transformed by the order of the Supreme Court,” King said at the time.

In 2018, he bizarrely insulted Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor by saying they “will elope to Cuba.” They both publicly identify as straight.

King got a consistent score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard, voting against discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, allowing people to serve openly in the military, and LGBTQ-inclusive hate crimes laws, while sponsoring legislation like a federal constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality.

In 2014, HRC named him one of the 19 most anti-LGBTQ lawmakers in its “Hall of Shame.”

Feenstra will face the Democratic nominee, paralegal J.D. Scholten, for the U.S. House seat this November. The Republican state lawmaker isn’t all that far to the left of King, though.

Feenstra’s website says that he is a “true Christian conservative” and a “pro-Trump effective conservative.” He voted for a bill that would have banned the state Medicaid program from paying for gender confirmation health care.

In 2011, Feenstra introduced a state constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality and pushed it for years even though not enough state senators supported it for it to pass.

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