“When I win this election everyone will know their gender again,” Stewart Parks wrote. “The populace will know Men cannot get pregnant and can actively define a woman.”
Tennessee Christian conservative candidate Stewart Parks is trying to stand out amongst his nine U.S. House competitors by pledging to ban Pride Month and deliver a bunch of other far-right campaign promises.
“If you elect me, this month will be the last National Gay Pride month ever celebrated,” he wrote in a public Facebook post published June 1. “We need to elect people into US congress that will stand up and say Homosexuality and Transgenderism are evil.”
“Sexual Liberation is NOT western values,” his post continued. “LGBQT+ movement is communist as they seek to destabilize our country with their divisive rhetoric and destroy families. Transgenderism and Pedophilia are now rampant in our society. We have to ban it asap and safeguard our children against it. We have to get Transgenderism out of our schools.”
While Parks’ rant against “transgenderism and pedophilia” may sound bonkers, they’re increasingly mainstream positions in the Republican Party. Republican officials nationwide seek to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth and accuse supporters of LGBTQ content in classrooms of being pedophilic child rapists.
Parks has supported efforts to prosecute supportive parents of trans children and supports the anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty which seeks to replace LGBTQ library books with homophobic books. He has also called LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books “filth” and opposes transgender women participating in sports.