Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has boasted of founding the local chapter of an organization that demands the “abolition of the police, abolition of borders,” “reparations for all indigenous and black peoples,” placing males in female correctional institutions, and transgender procedures for minors without parental consent — all while concealing children’s transgender identity from their parents. An LGBTQ website has said Walz’s behavior toward his students would get him labeled a “groomer” today. Walz’s wife, Gwen, is equally supportive of indoctrinating children in this group’s agenda, because she considers it part of her religious faith that “God created … some people gay.”
Tim Walz founded the local chapter of the GSA Network at Mankato West High School in the late 1990s. Numerous delegates highlighted Walz’s connection to the organization as he prepared to speak on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“I want to hear from the man who stepped up to create the Gay-Straight Alliance in the late ‘90s — the coach who stood up for the kids who needed him,” a teary-eyed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid early Wednesday evening. In a video that night, the Minnesota governor’s wife, Gwen Walz boasted, “When one of our students started the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, Tim agreed to serve as faculty adviser, because he knew how impactful it would be to have a football coach involved.”
Both called the group by its former name, the “Gay-Straight Alliance.” But the organization renamed itself the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA Network) in 2015 to prove that its 4,000 affiliates “have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system.” (The Mankato West chapter has also changed its name.)
The GSA Network codified its political beliefs in a document on its resources page titled “Truth Nine Point Platform.” The platform calls for “the Abolition of the Police,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Borders and the Judicial System”; “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy”; “Reparations for all Indigenous and Black Peoples,” including “Indigenous reclamation of stolen lands”; and “free and non-compulsory education for all ages.”
“We demand abolition! Abolition of the police, abolition of borders and ICE, abolition of the current punishment-based justice system. [sic.] We demand for our communities to be empowered to take care of themselves, for no borders, for rehabilitation and healing justice,” the manifesto declares.
The diminutive revolutionary screed claims that it “builds upon the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program,” although the FBI has confirmed that the Black Panther Party “advocated the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”
“We are in a moment which calls for us to bravely and ferociously fight for our communal liberation,” which will be launched “in the name of our transgender and gender nonconforming ancestors who struggled before us,” proclaims the GSA Network’s document. “The revolution is a relationship.”
The Walz family signaled its solidarity with the George Floyd/BLM riots, which touched off in Minnesota in May 2020. Gwen Walz said she inhaled the smell of burning tires through her open window in order to feel close to the revolutionary BLM movement. Whistleblowers say Tim Walz ordered police to abandon the third precinct to arsonists, whom Kamala Harris urged her followers to bail out of jail.
The organization’s revolutionary platform, adopted in 2018, is anything but a dead letter: The GSA Network referred to “our TRUTH Nine-Point Platform” last November (specifically, its call for reparations) and quoted the manifesto in its most recent press release in March. (The November press release also demanded U.S. taxpayers furnish “aid to Gaza” and decries “the ongoing colonization and cultural genocide of black and brown peoples.”)
The GSA Network’s Extreme Transgender Agenda
The GSA Network believes in promoting transgender ideology and facilitating children’s transgender “transitions” with or without parental consent. “Know the laws in your state around students’ privacy rights and what you do and don’t have to tell parents/ guardians/families. This is important so you don’t inadvertently out a student as a member of the GSA,” states the GSA Advisor Handbook, aimed at public school teachers like Walz. “When calling youth, it may not be safe to mention ‘GSA club’ or another trans or queer reference.”
The Nine-Point Platform also states “trans youth” should have “self-determination” over “all aspects of our lives.” The GSA Network slammed state laws that protect children from the predatory transgender industry. Laws against “providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth … effectively deny trans youth basic human rights and dignity,” claimed GSA in 2020.
At the local level, Mankato West High School’s GSA chapter walked out of class in April 2022 to protest Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which says teachers should not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade.
The GSA Network also believes in placing teenage boys who say they identify as transgender in female juvenile detention facilities. In a 2017 report co-authored by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, the GSA Network complained, “LGBTQ youth are frequently placed in facilities according to the sex on their birth certificate or based on their genitalia. … [T]ransgender youth should be housed based on the gender identity they express rather than based on anatomical sex or the sex on their birth certificate.”
Tim Walz has put many of the GSA Network’s political priorities into action as governor of Minnesota. He signed a bill (House File 146) that would take minors into state emergency custody if the child has been “unable to obtain gender-affirming health care” because his parents objected, as well as banning compassionate therapeutic care for people suffering from unwanted transgender feelings. The roots of these policies date back to Walz’s days as a teacher.
Walz’s Action Would Get You Called a ‘Groomer’: LGBT Website
Walz has said publicly that Mankato students came to him about founding a GSA chapter — but his advocacy of the LGBT agenda predates his time at Mankato West High School. While teaching at a high school in Nebraska in the early 1990s, Tim and Gwen Walz took a student who identified as homosexual to a concert by the Indigo Girls, an openly lesbian folk rock group.
The LGBTQ website Them stated that, today, the Walzes’ behavior would be “liable to get you called a ‘groomer.’”
In 1997, two years before the founder of Mankato West’s GSA chapter ever thought of the idea, Gwen Walz announced “out of the blue” on the first day of her 10th grade English class that it would be “a safe space for gay and lesbian students,” according to former student Jacob Reitan. He reportedly told Mrs. Walz about his sexual preference before he told his own parents.
Tim Walz also encouraged children to have frank discussions about adult subject matter at school. One of Walz’s former students, 2004 graduate Seth Elliot Meyer, remembered that Walz “wanted me to be OK with who I was” by embracing a bisexual identity as an impressionable teenager. Another of Walz’s former pupils — Micah Kronlokken, who described himself as “a young, closeted, queer kid” when Walz coached him in the seventh grade — said Tim Walz believed that teenagers should be “treated a little more like adults and trusted to have tricky conversations, and that high school is a microcosm for our world at large.”
Walz later confessed, “To create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open, and understanding” of the LGBTQ movement and its aims “was something that Gwen and I always strove for.”
“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students,” said Reitan, who is now a lawyer and LGBTQ activist. Walz “showed the bully a better path forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better path forward for America.”
Walz did not defend these policies during his debut on the national stage Wednesday night. Instead, the Harris-Walz campaign appears to be relying on media tropes that brand their political enemies as intolerant hatemongers. In the DNC video, Walz’s former student Noah Hobbs said Walz “stands up to bullies,” repeating the common LGBTQ activist tactic of bullying people of faith, who do not celebrate extreme transgender ideology or sinful sexual relationships, as “bullies.”
Walz has used the same language throughout his political career. While running for governor, Walz asserted that he — as “an older, white, straight, married football coach” — could assure “that there’s no bullying.” During his 2023 his State of the State address, Walz alleged that Republicans “want to put bullies in charge of your health care,” while he would “put bullies in their place. And that’s why we protected access to gender-affirming health care.”
Walz, who has been accused of opportunism, may believe his association with the GSA Network boosts his standing with the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. In a 2018 campaign ad for governor, Walz cited his founding of his school’s GSA chapter as proof that he “can actually deliver on those progressive promises,” because he had “done it in the past.”
Walz’s ties to GSA would send a more concerning signal to the parents of children suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Yaeli Martinez first encountered transgender ideology at an LGBTQ high school club. In time, she began to identify as a boy named “Andrew” and ran away from home. Upon learning that her mother, Abigail Martinez, did not support her gender transition, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services put the underage Yaeli into a group home. In 2019, Yaeli committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving train. (Her heartbreaking story is illustrated in the movie “Gender Transformations: The Untold Realities,” an original production of The Epoch Times.)
The Walz Family: ‘God Creates People … Gay or Straight’
Stories such as these, or those of other detransitioners left with the scars of poor adolescent decisions facilitated by adults, seem unlikely to sway Tim Walz and his wife, who appear to have a religious devotion to LGBT ideology.
“For Ms. Walz, being an ally for gay students was a matter of living up to the tenets of her Christian faith,” reported The New York Times. A spokeswoman for Gwen Walz, Claire Lancaster, told the newspaper that Mrs. Walz holds a “strong belief that God creates people in the way they are supposed to be, whether that is gay or straight.” President Joe Biden has expressed similar sentiments.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has described Tim Walz as “steeped in the Catholic social justice traditions of his parents.” However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that sodomy is a grave sin that can never be approved:
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”
If Tim Walz rejects the Roman Catholic Church’s binding doctrine on faith and morals, he is also out of step with U.S. voters. Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump contrasted Walz’s extreme views with the mainstream of the American electorate. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” said Trump. “He’s very heavy into transgender — anything transgender he thinks is great.”
“He’s not where the country is on anything,” Trump concluded.
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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