Parent arrested at state meeting after calling GOP education head a “bigot & a bully”

A 45-year-old parent of a queer child was arrested after calling Oklahoma’s anti-LGBTQ+ head of schools, Ryan Walters, “an obnoxious bigot and bully” during a recent meeting of the State Board of Education.

Audra Beasley’s wheelchair-using son Max began crying at the board’s meeting last Thursday when several state troopers arrested his mother for continuing to speak beyond her allotted three-minute comment period. In her initial comments, Beasley had complained about the lack of adult-sized diaper-changing tables in the bathrooms of the Oliver Hodge Building, the government office where the meeting was held.

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Queer protestors shut down on-campus speech by anti-LGBTQ+ educational leader

Protestors angrily called him a “power-hungry fascist,” and said that a deceased LGBTQ+ student’s blood was on his hands.

“You have intentionally denied my child restroom access in this building,” she said, adding that she had to bring her own folding table to change the diaper of her son Max so that she wouldn’t have to change him on the building’s bathroom floors, Tulsa World reported. Max uses a wheelchair and requires other accommodations for spina bifida, a condition in which a person’s spinal nerves protrude from their backbone.

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Beasley then criticized the board for its transphobic policies, stating that one of her children is “part of a sex and gender minority group.” The state requires trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth. State law has also banned trans students from competing on sports teams matching their gender identity.

“You make a fool out of yourself,” Beasley told Walters. “You come in here and you talk about Title IX and our president. You are making a complete fool of yourself…. It is none of your business what gender that child or what gender is on their birth certificate…. You are an embarrassment to Oklahoma. You are a downright embarrassment to Oklahoma. And you wear the same damn clothes all the time too — why is that?”

When her three-minute comment period ended, Walters called for her other son, Wesley, to speak since he had also had signed up to make a public comment.

“Why are you bullying kids?” he asked Walters and the board. “The disabled — my brother — the gay, the trans. Why?”

While he waited for an answer, Beasley continued to criticize Walters. At that point, state troopers approached her to arrest her.

“Y’all are arresting me in front of my children because this man over here is a bigot and a bully, picking on trans kids, picking on disabled kids, picking on my kids,” Beasley said as the arrest commenced. Video of her arrest captured sounds of her son Max crying in the background. Noting the arrest, her son Wesley said, “This is crazy. Ryan Walters.”

Almost full comment from her here pic.twitter.com/VZjoHcnssb

— Dylan Brown (@dylantbrown) April 25, 2024

Beasley was charged with willfully disrupting state business or a public meeting and causing disruption by willfully refusing to disperse or leave, KOCO reported. Walters hasn’t publicly commented on the arrest. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) wrote that “nearly every public speaker” at the meeting criticized Walters, including one community member who read comments against Walters from anonymous teachers and librarians who feared retaliation for speaking out against “offensive rhetoric” from Walters and his board.

“To watch a parent removed in handcuffs, in front of her children, for demanding answers from their superintendent was heartbreaking and, I hope, a call to action for the majority of Oklahomans who have had enough of his divisive and harmful rhetoric and actions,” the HRC wrote in a press release. “If Oklahoma schools do not comply with federal civil rights laws, it is choosing to invest not in the future of Oklahoma students, but in Ryan Walters’s political career at their expense…. Nex Benedict deserved better. Oklahomans deserve better.”

Walters, who wants to ban LGBTQ+ books but teach the Bible in public school history classes, has come under increasing criticism following the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old transgender Native American student who died on February 8 after an alleged assault by three bullies in his high school bathroom. Community members blame Walters’s anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies for contributing to an atmosphere of hostility toward queer students, and the U.S. Department of Education is investigating.

Walters recently said that his state’s schools should ignore new trans-inclusive rules issued by the administration of President Joe Biden on enforcement of Title IX, a 1972 federal law forbidding sex discrimination in education. Walters called the new rules “illegal and unconstitutional.” The new rules state that schools must allow trans students to use bathrooms and pronouns matching their gender identity, otherwise, the schools risk federal lawsuits, Department of Education investigations, and possible loss of funding.

Walters has previously pushed the transphobic lie about schools providing litterboxes to students who identify as cats. He also referred to teachers’ unions as “terrorist organizations” and illegally tried to make rules banning LGBTQ+ books and transgender bathroom access in schools. He has appeared at events hosted by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ “parent’s rights” group that has been called an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Walters also appointed Chaya Raichik, an anti-LGBTQ+ activist who goes by Libs of Tik Tok online, as a Library Media Advisor for the state (even though she has no educational experience, doesn’t reside in Oklahoma, and has made posts that have led to bomb threats against students).

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