DENVER (LifeSiteNews) — A Colorado Democrat dismissed the notion of conferring with parental rights groups on a bill to penalize “misgendering” and “deadnaming” in child custody disputes, on the grounds that her political opponents were akin to the racial terror group the Ku Klux Klan.
Named after a victim of the 2022 Club Q nightclub shooting, which was perpetrated by a gender-confused person, the Kelly Loving Act would establish that, “when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s [so-called] gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.”
It would also ban state courts “from applying or giving any force or effect to another state’s law that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from the child’s parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive” dangerous “gender transition” procedures and has a host of additional requirements unrelated to custody matters, as LifeSiteNews covered on Thursday.
SHAMEFUL
Last night during closing statements on HB25-1312, Transgender Protections, two House Judiciary members referred to traditional parental rights groups as “hate groups” & compared them to the KKK. #coleg #copolitics pic.twitter.com/G0aP9zpJF2
— Rep. Jarvis Caldwell (@RepCaldwell) April 3, 2025
During April 1 proceedings over the bill, Republican state Rep. Jarvis Caldwell asked, “I really am curious about how much stakeholdering went on both sides of the issue, and not just one side. I’m curious with, if the businesses in the community were included in these and if parent groups that are not part of the [so-called] LGBT community, if they were involved.”
Democratic state Rep. Yara Zokaie made clear her contempt for differing and biologically accurate views, declaring, “we don’t get to have a difference of opinion over somebody’s basic rights.”
“A well-stakeholded bill does not need to be discussed with hate groups,” she said. “We don’t ask someone passing civil rights legislation to go ask the KKK their opinion.”
Democratic state Rep. Javier Mabrey agreed, adding that “there’s no reason to go to the table with people who are echoing the hateful rhetoric going around about the [so-called] trans community.”
The Ku Klux Klan is the most well-known white supremacist group in American history, founded after the Civil War to resist Reconstruction and terrorize former slaves. It is estimated to have murdered 3,446 black Americans between 1882 and 1968, making comparisons with mainstream opponents of “transitioning” children particularly shocking.
Caldwell called their answers “shameful” and “particularly when it involves labeling parents – the people who care the most about the future of their children – as hate groups,” he told Fox News. “Parents who stand up for their children’s education and rights should be respected, not vilified.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate them, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Yet Colorado has been notoriously hostile to those who dissent from LGBT dictates, such as banning counseling for minors suffering from unwanted gender confusion or homosexual inclinations (which is currently before the Supreme Court), attempting to legally punish small businesses for refusing to participate in pro-LGBT messages, forcing female students to share restrooms with gender-confused males, and even proposing legislation to make it a crime to “misgender” the deceased on death certificates (i.e., to accurately identify their sex on official medical records).
