Democrats link surging violence toward LGBTQ community with GOP rhetoric

Survivors of violent anti-LGBTQ attacks told their stories Wednesday at a House hearing where Democrats linked rising violence against the community to rhetoric and policies from the GOP. 

“We are experiencing a crisis,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday during the hearing, one of the last of the current Congress.

The hearing comes just short of a month after a gunman shot and killed five people at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, injuring more than a dozen others. 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, the suspect in the shooting, has since been charged with 305 counts, including hate crimes and murder.

Maloney and House Democrats on Wednesday said tragedies like the club shooting were influenced in part by the more than 300 state and federal bills introduced in the last year alone that seek to limit how LGBTQ people — particularly transgender youth — navigate their daily lives.

“These hateful pieces of legislation have fueled a dangerous rise in extreme anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric,” Maloney said Wednesday.

Michael Anderson, a survivor of last month’s attack on Club Q, during Wednesday’s hearing said elected leaders have a responsibility to protect all people, not just those who voted for them.

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you. As leaders of our country, it is your obligation to represent all of us, not just the ones you happen to agree with,” Anderson said. “Hate speech turns into hate action, and actions based on hate almost took my life from me, at 25 years old.”

“I beg you all to consider your words before you speak them, for someone may use those words to justify action — action that may take someone’s life,” he said.

The committee on Wednesday also heard testimony from fellow Club Q survivor James Slaugh, Club Q owner Matthew Haynes, Pulse nightclub shooting survivor Brandon Wolf, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson, Inside Out Youth Services CEO Jessie Pocock and Charles Fain Lehman, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute.

“Here’s the truth: politicians and pundits are spreading lies about LGBTQ people, falsely and dangerously stating that LGBTQ Americans are threats to children,” Pocock said while testifying before the committee. “This false rhetoric fuels hate and division — and it works.”

An August report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, found that inflammatory and false rhetoric targeting LGBTQ people was able to thrive on mainstream social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, which recently relaxed its hateful conduct policies under new owner Elon Musk and reinstated the accounts of previously suspended users.

The same report found that social media posts comparing LGBTQ people to “groomers” and “pedophiles” surged by more than 400 percent following the passage of a Florida education law that heavily restricts how sexual orientation and gender identity are talked about in schools. Critics have dubbed the measure — officially titled the Parental Rights in Education Act – the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

At the same time, violence against LGBTQ people has continued to increase. More than 120 online or in-person threats were reported against drag events, according to a recent GLAAD report, and an October analysis of federal crime statistics from the group Everytown for Gun Safety found the number of homicides against transgender people in the U.S. more than doubled between 2017 and 2021.

In 2022, at least 32 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were killed in the U.S., according to a November Human Rights Campaign report. The report was published prior to the Club Q shooting, which claimed the lives of Daniel Davis Aston, a transgender man, and Kelly Loving, a transgender woman.

Republicans during Wednesday’s hearing said Democrats were shifting the blame on conservatives to ignore how Democratic “soft on crime” policies and the “defund police movement” have made the nation unsafe for “all Americans” — not just LGBTQ people.

“Let me say clearly, as we have consistently said, Republicans condemn violence in all forms. Unfortunately, Democrats are using committee time and resources today to blame Republicans for this horrendous crime,” Rep. James Comer (R-K.Y.) said, referring to the Club Q shooting.

Comer, who will chair the Oversight committee in the next Congress, has consistently voted against passing federal gun control legislation, which he has said would “infringe on the fundamental right to gun ownership.”

House Republicans including Reps. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) and Fred Keller (R-Pa.) suggested Wednesday’s hearing on LGBTQ violence was hypocritical because other groups like Christians, anti-abortion advocates and law enforcement officers have been discriminated against and attacked because of their identity or beliefs.

“You want to talk about hate? Between May and October of this year, over one hundred pro-life organizations and churches were vandalized and attacked,” Hice said Wednesday. “We need to admit that this is not a one-sided issue. It’s on both sides of the aisle.”

Panel witnesses pushed back on that comparison, arguing that LGBTQ identities have been stigmatized for years and increasing violence against the LGBTQ community is not equivalent to those made against groups like Christians.

“To be attacked for being Christian has a different nature – not that I’m supporting any attack or any discrimination,” said Ilan Meyer, a senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity. “Being Christian is not a stigmatized position in American society.”

To attack LGBTQ people and identities, he said, is “embedding and reverberating hatred and stigma that has been going on for decades.”