GOP senator says “satanic” liberals “ruined” sex education to turn kids transgender

Anti-LGBTQ+ Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) went on an unhinged rant earlier this week about how liberalism is a “satanic cult” that is making kids transgender.

“They asked me what I thought and the direction this country are going,” he said on Charlie Kirk’s far-right Real America’s Voice podcast on Tuesday. “And I said that- I said, we’re fighting a satanic cult.”

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While speaking at a hate group summit, Pence also called trans acceptance a “tragedy.”

“They attack everything that makes us strong, they ruin everything they touch. Liberalism, it can’t build, all it does is destroy.

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“We’re not just in a policy disagreement up here in the Senate and the House. We’re in a war of good versus evil.”

“Wokism, it’s more than just a political opinion,” he continued. “It’s like a religion for people, it’s an obsession. And it’s not the religion of any Bible that I’ve ever read.”

“Liberalism and socialism, these cities are making it worse and worse,” he said. “They’ve ruined education, sex education, our schools, and look what they’re doing, transitioning young kids before they even reach teenage years.”

“And if that’s not a satanic cult, I don’t know what is!”

The idea that schools are turning kids transgender is popular on the anti-LGBTQ+ right because it absolves them of blame for the consequences of their anti-trans policies; if trans kids are only saying they’re trans because schools are making them say so, then they’re not really hurt when they’re banned from the bathroom throughout the entire school day.

In reality, transgender kids face immense pressure to pretend to not be trans from their families and schools. Even under all that pressure to conform, kids can still know what their gender is at a young age and many assert their identities.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was caught telling a similar lie in 2022, when he claimed several times that a school made a kid transition when they “changed the girl’s name to a boy’s name, had her dress like a boy and on doing all this stuff, without telling the mother or getting consent from the mother.”

CNN looked into the story and found that the student had identified as nonbinary on their own and that their mother was well-informed of the situation and told the school to handle the situation by doing “whatever you think is best.”

“This gender situation has thrown us for a loop. I sincerely appreciate your support. I’m going to let her take the lead on this,” that mother wrote in an email to her school’s administration.

Tuberville spent most of 2023 blocking promotions for military officers because of the military’s support for servicemembers’ access to abortion. In an interview, he also said that he was blocking military promotions because a nonbinary person read a poem on a Navy vessel’s loudspeaker.

“It is absolutely insane the direction we’re headed in our military, and we’re headed downhill, not uphill,” he said at the time.

Earlier this year, Tuberville said that Democrats’ support for trans equality is proof of an attempt to make women go “extinct.”

“They do not like women,” he said at the time. “They want women to be extinct and now they’re getting into athletics to make sure that ‘Hey, let’s don’t let women learn from sports. Let’s attack them by letting biological men compete against them.’”