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A Republican legislator in Utah is trying to change a road named for civil rights leader Harvey Milk so that it honors anti-LGBTQ+ MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Milk, a San Francisco city councilmember in the 1970s, was one of the first out LGBTQ+ people elected to public office and was integral in leading the fight against California’s Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gay people from being teachers. Kirk spoke out against LGBTQ+ rights and said that it was “God’s perfect law” that called for people to stone gay people to death. Both of them were shot to death.
Utah Rep. Trevor Lee (R) introduced a bill to change Salt Lake City’s Harvey Milk Blvd to “Charlie Kirk Blvd” earlier this week.
In an interview with ABC4, Lee claimed that the only reason he chose Harvey Milk Blvd to be renamed – and not any other road in the state – was because Milk was from California. Kirk was from Arizona but was died in Orem, Utah.
“From the vast majority of Utahns, they would say that Harvey Milk does not have any connection to Utah whatsoever,” Lee said about his bill. “But Charlie Kirk does now, especially after being assassinated in the state of Utah.”
ABC 4 noted that Harvey Milk Blvd. isn’t a state road and that the city government is in charge of naming it, which could mean that the state legislature doesn’t have the authority to rename it.
Lee has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. He introduced a bill earlier this year to ban Pride flags in government buildings. His bill would have allowed Nazi and Confederate flags because, he argued, those are “historic,” while it would ban the rainbow flag.
Also this year, Lee threatened to withdraw state funding from the state’s NHL team, the Utah Mammoths, because the team posted a rainbow-colored version of its logo for Pride Month and wrote “Happy Pride” on social media.
“Utahns overwhelmingly don’t support pride month,” Lee said at the time. Lee has not cited any proof for his ability to speak for the “vast majority” of people in his state. He represents Utah House of Representatives District 16, a district of around 40,000 inhabitants that includes parts of Layton.
In 2022, Lee said on a podcast that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) “might even be transgender because he’s all for everything they say and do.” Cox is not transgender and has signed anti-trans legislation.
“Was that before or after he vetoed a bill for tr***ies?” Lee said, using an anti-trans slur.
Lee then claimed to speak for Black people, saying that “a lot of my friends who are Black, they’d be like, yeah, man, I don’t agree with all that LGBTQ stuff.”
“I’m like, that’s embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to be associated with those people,” Lee said.
He said that it was “crazy white liberals who do not have another purpose in life” who need to stop supporting LGBTQ+ rights and “start families and make babies.”
That same year, the Salt Lake Tribune found that Lee was running a secret account on Twitter to attack LGBTQ+ people while posting imagery associated with the “DezNat” or “Deseret Nation” movement, a rightwing movement that advocates for a Mormon, white ethnostate. The movement is not supported by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Yes, than our spineless governor can stop acting like he needs to let transsexuals destroy our girls in sports,” he wrote on that account in one post.
In another post, he shared a meme that accused LGBTQ+ teachers of trying to turn kids transgender, a rightwing myth used to advocate banning LGBTQ+ people and allies from being teachers.
In 2021, he posted that a meme calling Pride Month “Satanic” was “amazing.”
“Doing things that are explicit, you know, people that are topless, that are running around in underwear and they have children there,” Lee said in an interview at the time about Pride. “Yeah, I think that’s satanic. I think that’s horrible.”
Lee also said that “teachers should be paid less not more” with the hashtag “#deznat.”
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