Minnesota Republican lawmaker's anti-LGBTQ+ 'perversion' speech slammed as 'incitement to violence'

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18 April 2023

Minnesota Republican state Senator Eric Lucero‘s comments on an amendment to legislation that directs funding for natural resource projects like protecting wetlands and wildlife habitats, and for children’s museums and the arts has gone viral for his remarks on sin, Satanism, LGBTQ people, “sexual perversion,” “gender confusion,” “the occult,” and “grooming.”

While many are mocking Senator Lucero’s speech, one professor is warning the claims are an “incitement to violence.”

“Sin is real,” declared Sen. Lucero, who reportedly “rallied at the Minnesota Capitol, as part of a ‘Stop the Steal’ demonstration on Jan. 6, 2021,” according to Minnesota Public Radio. MPR News also reports Lucero attended a Mike Lindell election fraud event, and signed a letter asking the Texas Attorney General to sue Minnesota over the election.

(Lucero weeks later filed legislation that would block anyone “convicted of offense related to protest, demonstration, rally, civil unrest, or march prohibited from receiving any state loan, grant, or assistance.”)

“And those wicked people manifest themselves in many different areas of our society. One of those areas that they have manifested themselves is in the areas of the arts,” he claimed. “And I want to make sure that taxpayer dollars do not fall into the hands of these wicked, vile people that push sexual perversion, gender confusion that might come to our capital and in displays of abomination parade themselves around the rotunda.”

“And I do not want pictures, plays, theater, sculptures, or any other type of art to be used to channel the occult to promote the occult or any of its variations, Satanism, and the wicked, evil practice of grooming young children, such as pedophilia.”

The video of Lucero, posted to Twitter Monday night, has been viewed more than 555,000 times in well under 24 hours. The tweet has been viewed nearly 2 million times.

Sen. Lucero has called drag queen performances “wicked perversion,” and “sexualized grooming performances.” Last month he introduced legislation that would classify them as adult entertainment.

Meanwhile, Lucero says, “I will never stop fighting for our rights to keep and bear arms! We cannot and should not legislate from a place of emotion when it comes to our foundational rights.”

Last year Lucero was one of the perpetrators of the “furries” falsehood that claimed children in schools were identifying as animals, a tangental attack on transgender people.

Later during debate on the amendment Lucero falsely said, “there is no such thing as separation of church and state. It is not in a law. It is not in a court ruling. It does not exist.”

There are numerous comments mocking Sen. Lucero, but Professor of Medieval Studies Matthew Gabriele, the Chair of the Dept. of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, is taking a different approach.

Professor Gabriele warns what Lucero’s remarks are are “incitement to violence.”

Gabriele’s bio says his “research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle Ages or modern world.”

Responding to the video of Lucero, Gabriele tweets: “fwiw [for what it’s worth] his rhetoric is incitement to violence. nobody’s going to do anything about it because we’re just gonna laugh but he knows what he’s doing.”

Quoting from a 2018 article in Forbes he wrote, Gabriele says, “Calls to violence become actual violence when actors are prepared to act in certain ways. To put it another way, speaking opens up a certain set of possible actions, but the audience decides which among those actions to do.”

He adds, “Lucero is emphasizing that the world is a battlefield between god & the devil. here, the left are lumped together as ontologically (intrinsically) evil. they need to be fought – and his audience is already armed and ready to shoot people unlike them.”

Watch video of Sen. Lucero “sin” speech below or at this link.

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