As one of Louie Gohmert’s last actions in Congress, he pulled out a last-minute attack on schools, teachers, and of course, LGBTQ people, casting the blame for school shootings not on a gun-obsessed culture, but on what he calls “grooming,” as well as the rejection of “Biblical, Judeo-Christian morality.”
If the rant itself isn’t disgusting enough, Gohmert added insult to injury by using his time in a hearing on gun violence and the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 innocent children, as well as two teachers, to make it.
Instead of focusing on the point of the hearing — “Bipartisan Solutions To Gun Violence” — he went after the LGBTQ community and non-Christians.
Looking for anything but guns and gun culture on which to pin the cause of gun violence is right along party lines, but Gohmert takes it to bizarre extremes, as usual.
He even goes so far as to claim that the “grooming” — a word that child advocates use to mean training a child in a way that will make him more susceptible to sexual abuse, and Republicans use to mean acknowledging that LGBTQ people exist — is actually crossing lines into behaviors that are legally sexual assault.
It’s not just the LGBTQ community that gets the blame in Gohmert’s world, though.
He also blames the absence of fathers, and the decline of Judeo-Christian (by which he likely just means right-wing Christian) morals. He said, in a Congressional hearing:
We have started teaching children that there’s no absolute right and wrong…We’ve got schools that are grooming children to be what our current laws say is sexual assault of a child.
You can watch his rant below.
This is description for this hearing is “Examining Uvalde: The Search For Bipartisan Solutions To Gun Violence” pic.twitter.com/94fDbhkNWq
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 15, 2022
He’s not the only Republican who had a bad take.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan also weighed in briefly, simply to declare that the strength of nuclear families, with “a mom, a dad, and kids,” is a major factor in keeping society functional and successful — as he expressed appreciation for all the witnesses, “but in particular the two Republican witnesses.”
It should be noted that the witnesses included families who lost children to gun violence, a pediatrician who treated children injured in the Uvalde shooting, but Jordan’s preferential appreciation goes to Jack Brewer, of the America First Policy Institute, and John Lott Jr., a gun rights advocate.
The full hearing is here.