Legislators Address Moms for Liberty Town Hall
Colorado Representatives Jarvis Caldwell (R-Monument) and Brandi Bradley (R-Littleton) took part in a panel discussion with Kate Anderson of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Laura Hanford of the Heritage Foundation during Moms for Liberty’s Aurora town hall on Colorado’s House Bill 1312.
“I’m a charter school board member,” said Caldwell. “We have boys uniforms and girls uniforms. Right now, if this bill passes, basically a boy can go to the girls section and say I want to wear that skirt, and with this bill we can’t stop that.”
Bradley claimed the bill was part of a plan from the Colorado Democratic Party. “The goal of the Democrats of Colorado is to take your children,” she said. “Government is their god. They love to pass 700 bills every session because it’s the nanny state. I don’t think they can go to the bathroom without being told to go to the bathroom in this state.”
Last week, Bradley took part in a press conference from Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs), focused on outrage over a transgender person using the bathroom.
“I think parents and children are being led a lie,” Bradley told the audience of approximately 100 people in the audience, which included current and former Republican elected officials, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans’ (R-CO) field director Eliseo Gonzalez, and noted anti-trans activists. “They have put profit over their children’s health, and it’s a sad thing for me to sit here and say as a healthcare worker, to watch doctors do this to children with no research, no systematic reviews because the money is more important than the research. It’s sad that they’re selling these children mutilation and lifelong sterility and we look like the bad guys — that we’re these Christian conservatives and we don’t want this. That’s not true we don’t want children harmed and the medical profession is harming these children, and it’s an outright lie that they’re selling, and by transgendering these children it’s about a million dollars that the health care professionals and big pharma is making off of them.”
Bradley works as a physical therapist when she is not at the Capitol or running the Douglas County Moms for Liberty Chapter. She did not offer any evidence for her claims.
Julia Serano, a biochemist and author, has written extensively about misinformation regarding transgender people. Her 2023 essay, “Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies” contains a comprehensive review of the prevailing literature on the subject.
Hanford, currently a fellow with the Heritage Foundation, compared the political climate surrounded transgender issues to life in Romania under communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. “I got to see firsthand what it looked like to uh live in a society that forced an ideology on its people,” she said.
Hanford is one of the authors of Virginia’s Sage’s Law, the failed effort to require schools to out transgender students to their parents and bar schools from engaging in socially affirming practices without parental consent. Hanford used the questionable account of Missouri “whistleblower” Jamie Reed — who is represented by the anti-trans Child and Parental Rights Campaign and works for Genspect — and the anti-LGBTQ campaign against the U.K.’s Tavistock Clinic to justify her law.
“I was asked by Heritage to come and help other states across the US,” said Hanford. “I do some work at a national and international level too on these issues trying to support families who want to protect their kids.”
Caldwell claimed the bill would lead to more lawsuits against Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop, which has been at the center of two separate ADF-represented lawsuits.
“I think if this bill passes and signed into law, the moment it goes into effect you’re gonna have someone — an activist — go to his cake shop and say ‘I’m transgender my biological name, or given name is this. I want this name on a cake,’” he said. “If he refuses they’re going to sue him all over again, but instead of on the gay marriage issue it’s going to be on the transgender issue.”
Anderson discussed the ADF’s role in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and other LGBTQ anti-discrimination lawsuits in Colorado. “I’m so glad that the free speech piece is coming up because that’s critical,” she said. “Free speech is critical to everybody, and when the government is telling us what we have to say, or what we have to believe, that squelches any debate, any learning, any discussion of issues. It’s dangerous for both sides of an issue because political winds change, and if we have a system where you can compel people to say things or think things that’s dangerous for everybody, no matter what they think. The Supreme Court has weighed in on that in Colorado with 303 Creative — who is also my client — and she won at the U.S. Supreme Court just recently because Colorado is trying to compel her speech through the public accommodation law. The exact same law they’re trying to compel speech through now, just through a different method.”