GOP governor candidate wants to go back to a time when women couldn’t vote

North Carolina’s rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) – who recently became the Republican nominee for governor – said, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.” His comment appeared in a recently unearthed video from his March 2020 speech at an event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County.

His comment is just the most recent among many inflammatory comments against LGBTQ+ people, Jewish people, school shooting survivors, and other vulnerable communities.

Related:

Who is Mark Robinson? What is his stance on LGBTQ+ issues?

He has declared that God created him to battle against LGBTQ+ rights.

In his March 2020 speech, Robinson said that someone had asked anti-LGBTQ+ conservative broadcaster Candace Owens which one of the following scenarios would “make America great again” (a slogan associated with former President Donald Trump): an America where “Black people were swinging from cheap trees” or one where women weren’t allowed to vote, The Huffington Post reported.

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Robinson replied, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” adding, “because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.” He then claimed that Republicans ended anti-Black Jim Crow laws, though the laws were ended by bipartisan civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.

His praise of the landmark civil rights legislation is notable considering that, in a March 2018 podcast, Robinson called the Civil Rights Movement a communist plot to “subvert capitalism” and “to subvert free choice.” He had said that Black protestors and white allies who had protested racist laws by eating at a racially segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter during a July 1960 protest in Greensboro, North Carolina were “ridiculous” and wrongly trying to pull “the rug out from underneath capitalism and free choice and the free market.”

He also said the Civil Rights Movement destroyed many Black businesses because when other businesses became racially integrated, Black people stopped going to venues that exclusively served Black people. It’s unclear if Robinson would also prefer America to continue its past system of “free market” racial segregation.

Robinson has made numerous inflammatory comments against women and women’s rights. He said feminism was created by Satan and that male feminists are “weak-minded, jelly-backed ‘men” and “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties.” He has regularly called  feminists “fem-nazis” and once referred to women’s rights activists as “sexist, hairy armpit having, poo-poo hat wearing pinkos.”

In a December 2017 Facebook post, he wrote, “The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his.” In a 2016 Facebook post, he called women who breastfeed in public “shameless attention hogs.”

Last Tuesday, Robinson won his state’s Republican gubernatorial primary election. He will now run against the Democratic primary winner, state Attorney General Josh Stein, in November.

Democrats will likely try and tie Robinson’s anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion rhetoric to Trump, who endorsed him as “[Martin Luther King Jr.] on steroids.” In addition to thinking very poorly of Martin Luther King — Robinson called him a bad pastor and a communist — Robinson has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ and antisemitic statements, and voters nationwide seem largely opposed to his hardline brand of GOP anti-abortion policies that lack exceptions. Robinson voiced support for such hardline policies as recently as 2020. Robinson paid for his now-wife to have an abortion in 1989. He has said God allows school shootings in America as a punishment for Americans getting abortions.

Robinson’s long history of inflammatory comments is getting highlighted as the November election looms closer.

In March 2023, Robinson declared that God created him to battle against LGBTQ+ rights and added, “Makes me sick every time I see it — a church that flies that Rainbow flag, which is a direct spit in the face of God almighty.”

In 2017, he wrote on Facebook, “You CAN NOT love God and support the homosexual agenda.”

In 2021, Robinson compared LGBTQ+ people to cow dung and claimed straight people are superior to gay people due to their ability to procreate. In the same sermon, he declared there are only two genders and disparaged trans people’s bodies: “I don’t care how much you cut yourself up, drug yourself up and dress yourself up, you still either one of two things — you either a man or a woman.”

He also said people who support events like Drag Queen Story Hour do so because they desire to molest children.

He has previously proclaimed that being gay is a step before pedophilia, that former First Lady Michelle Obama is secretly a trans woman, and referred to trans-affirming people as “devil-worshipping child molesters.” He also condemned gay people as an “abominable sin” in response to the 2016 Pulse massacre.

Robinson created an education task force to investigate and pull LGBTQ+ literature from public schools, as well as report instances of LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools. Teachers’ names, employers, and information were released unredacted by the report, yet many of the complaints weren’t verified or even authenticated.

Also in 2021, he refused to heed calls for his resignation after he declared that homosexuality and “transgenderism” are “filth.” He has also called the trans equality movement “demonic” and “full of the spirit of Antichrist.”

In November of that year, he allegedly wagged his finger in the face of a state lawmaker who made a speech about supporting LGBTQ+ people.

In 2022, he said climate change is “junk science” and called for eliminating science and social studies education from elementary schools.

Robinson also has a history of antisemitic comments and conduct, loathing Black people who went to see Marvel’s Black Panther due to it being created by a person whom he described as an “Agnostic Jew” and a “Satanic Marxist.” He also stated his belief in the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created by a cabal of globalists to try to ruin Donald Trump’s re-election.