Lauren Boebert is a hypocrite & voters need to make her pay on election day

The GOP has built its entire anti-LGBTQ+ agenda around the notion that queer people are a danger to children. We’re not hateful, they tell us. It’s not bigotry, they assert. It’s about safety! They say they don’t hate gay people, and they don’t hate trans folks. They just don’t want us to be gay or trans in front of their kids because presenting as queer somehow means exposing kids to sex.

Sex has long been the conservative big bad wolf. The very thought that their kids could hear about it or see it or learn about it – or even someday have it – has sent enough voters off the handle to create an entire “parent’s rights” movement among conservatives.

Related:

Lauren Boebert is afraid her groping scandal cost her the 2024 election, panel suggests

“The voters are sick and tired of this embarrassment,” her Democratic challenger said. He’s beating her in the polls.

The GOP wants you to believe that LGBTQ+ identities are inherently “inappropriate” and should be considered “adult content.” Yet it is the very voices making this claim (often the loudest ones) that always seem to be caught red-handed being the inappropriate ones.

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I could provide a slew of examples, but today I want to focus on one of the most hateful of them all: Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. Boebert has largely built her brand around hating LGBTQ+ people. She and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are basically in a Twitter battle for who can say something more brutal and outlandish about the LGBTQ+ community.  

Boebert believes that supporting LGBTQ+ youth is akin to sexualizing children, and she has long perpetuated the right-wing “groomer” narrative about drag queens.

“I’ve criticized men dressing up as caricatures of women,” she said in a 2022 interview defending her anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric after the mass shooting at Colorado Springs gay club, Club Q. “We don’t need six-year-old children putting dollar bills in the thongs of grown men shaking and twerking in front of children… That is child abuse.”

This, of course, is not what happens at drag shows that allow children.

In June of last year, Boebert tweeted, “Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars.” The following August, she posted another tweet opposing a drag queen story hour event at a local library. “Sending a message to all the drag queens out there: stay away from the children in Colorado’s Third District!”

And yet.

Boebert has dominated the news cycle this week for getting kicked out of a theater. First, rumor had it, it was only because she was singing too loudly and taking photos of the cast. Then, it was revealed that the self-proclaimed defender of children refused to stop vaping near a pregnant woman. And now more security footage has been released showing Boebert and her date, identified as Aspen bar owner Quinn Gallagher, getting handsy with each other during the performance. Gallagher can be seen groping Boebert’s chest, while the congresswoman places her hand in Gallagher’s lap.

And there were children present in the theater.

Lauren Boebert is a hypocrite. That’s nothing new. But it bears repeating again and again because right now, she’s a hypocrite with power. And until she no longer holds LGBTQ+ lives in her hands, we need to keep reminding anyone who will listen (and especially those who can vote her out) that this is who she is.

It is she who is the danger to children. Not because she let her boyfriend grope her in a theater, but because rhetoric and policies like hers are contributing to increased suicidality of trans youth who can no longer access the lifesaving health care they need and to rising anti-LGBTQ+ attacks from dangerous right-wing groups.

But her hypocrisy, her gaslighting, telling everyone LGBTQ+ people and lives are inherently inappropriate and then acting inappropriately herself. Railing against drag and then dating someone whose bar hosted a drag show. It’s all just… slimy. It speaks to the core of who she is. Some of her hate and outlandishness may be an act (albeit one she is happily willing to perform), but that sliminess… that is innate.

Somehow, the GOP keeps getting away with things like this. It’s like Donald Trump said in 2016: he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters.

Well, Boebert has fired enough shots. Let’s not let her get away with anything else.