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At a Turning Point USA event Wednesday, Vance said Minnesota law allows for "kidnapping" of young people whose parents oppose gender-affirming care. That's not remotely true.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, keeps appearing alongside anti-LGBTQ+ extremists and spreading lies about gender-affirming care, immigration, and more.
Vance spoke Wednesday at Generation Church in Mesa, Ariz., at an event cohosted by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Kirk is known for anti-LGBTQ+ and other far-right views, as is the church’s pastor, Ryan Visconti.
Vance used the event to attack his Democratic rival for the vice presidency, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on the topic of gender-affirming care for trans youth. Vance, claimed that the Minnesota law signed by Walz that makes the state a refuge for young people and their families seeking such care actually allows for the “legalized kidnapping” of children whose parents oppose this care.
“He signed legislation, he supported legislation, that would take children away from their parents if their parents don’t want to do sex changes,” Vance told Kirk in an onstage interview.
“He wants the government to steal your children from you if you don’t agree with Tim Walz’s values,” Vance went on. “That is not small government. That is disgusting, and he should be ashamed of himself.”
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Vance has made this assertion before, and it’s not remotely true. “The law now gives Minnesota courts temporary jurisdiction to hear child custody cases when a child is in the state with a parent to seek gender-affirming care,”PolitiFactreported in August, after Vance had made a similar statement at a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wis. “It does not authorize the government to take custody of children whose parents don’t consent to them getting gender-affirming care.
“Courts will not automatically rule against a parent who doesn’t consent to a child receiving gender-affirming care. Courts seek to determine parental custody based on evidence about what is in children’s best interests.”
Journalist Erin Reed has debunked the claim as well. “The legislation contains no provision allowing the state to ‘kidnap’ children when their parents do not support their gender transition,” she wrote in a column carried by The Advocate in August. “These claims arise from an intentional misinterpretation of a provision that specifically applies to custody disputes between parents in different states.”
Vance also attacked immigrants during the Turning Point event. “Vance’s discussion with Kirk was filled with anti-immigrant fear-mongering, including the blatantly false claim that ‘we have thousands of missing children because Kamala Harris let the cartels sex traffic minors in our own country,’” MSNBC reports. “Vance said this is ‘hard to believe’ — and it is, because according to the Department of Justice’s 2023 report, the vast majority of those prosecuted for child sex trafficking in the U.S. are white male citizens of this country.”
Visconti spoke at the event as well. He took the “railed against ‘secularism,’ which he described as the removal of God from ‘the boardroom and the courtroom, the classroom and the bedroom,’” MSNBC notes. “The pastor claimed that ‘demonic gods who hate us’ are promoting things like ‘DEI, sexual depravity [and] radical gender ideology.’”
Visconti has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic remarks. “In one post on his X account from July of this year, Visconti wrote that in order for ‘America to be “great again,” we need to go back to opposing the abomination of gay mirage [sic] & abortion as we did before,’” NBC News reports. “A separate post from the fall of 2023 features Visconti saying that in ‘God’s eyes, there’s no such thing as “gay marriage,”’ and argued in a lengthy thread posted earlier that year that ‘God wants homosexuals to repent and change.’”
The pastor has also said that spousal abuse is not necessarily “a biblical justification for divorce” and that a strong woman “will become a toxic woman” if she has a weak husband.
Vance will continue appearing with extremists. He’s scheduled to join former Fox News host Tucker Carlson onstage in Hershey, Pa., September 21, just as Carlson is being blasted for hosting a historian who called British Prime Minister Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II and claimed that genocidal German dictator Adolf Hitler didn’t want to go to war.
“Vance will be joining Carlson’s tour after Carlson got himself dismissed from Fox News, after Carlson’s fawning interview with Vladimir Putin, after his on-camera speculation that the U.S. government is in alliance with a malevolent spiritual force, and after this week’s program, during which guest Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as ‘the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,”’ declared that Winston Churchill ‘was the chief villain of the Second World War,’” Jim Geraghty wrote in a Washington Post opinion column. “Really? The chief villain? You can’t think of any other figure who might have earned that title?”
Carlson, who was fired by Fox News in April 2023, now has a show online on the Tucker Carlson Network. He has continued to be all in for Trump, even though he once said privately that he hates Trump “passionately.”
Vance will appear with Carlson during the latter’s tour of several cities with guests from the right-wing fringes, such as former presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr., and disgraced talk show host Alex Jones.
