COLORADO, USA — The Colorado Republican Party is issuing a call to its members to pull their children from public school, saying Democrats are using schools to “turn more kids trans.”
The message was delivered in an email blast to Republicans statewide Tuesday.
“All Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education,” read the directive from Darcy Schoening, director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP.
Schoening is a former leader of the El Paso County chapter of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty.
Under the leadership of Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams, the state Republican Party has tacked to the hard right despite holding less electoral power than at any time since before World War II.
Culture war issues, like attacks on gay and transgender people, especially youth, have become a focus of Republicans nationwide in 2024.
The Colorado GOP opposes a new measure requiring schools to use children’s preferred names, even if they have not gone through a legal name change.
The bill was passed into law by the Democratic majority at the State Capitol and recently signed into law by Democratic Governor Jared Polis.
“If your child decides he identifies as a girl because he is angry with you, or all of his friends are doing it, the Colorado government will actively encourage his new fetish by allowing him to identify as "she," "they," or whatever nonsensical terms your son's teachers and peers may dream up,” the email read, in part.
The Colorado GOP attacked two Democratic LGBTQ sponsors of the bill, saying they “do not know their own genders and do not have children.”
Colorado Republicans’ 2022 nominee for Governor, Heidi Ganahl, issued a similar call for families to abandon the public education system last year.
Speaking to the Truth and Liberty Conference in Woodland Park, which mixed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric with calls for Christian dominance of government, Ganahl said children should be removed from public schools and placed in church-run schools.
Ganahl said Colorado’s public schools teach “that parents are not to be trusted, that government is God, that sexual deviance is King.”
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