A former lawmaker in Mississippi tweeted that those supporting trans rights should be executed.
"Some of y'all still want to try and find political compromise with those that want to groom our school aged children and pretend men are women, etc," Robert Foster wrote last Thursday, according to the Mississippi Free Press. "I think they need to be lined up against [a] wall before a firing squad to be sent to an early judgment."
The tweet was taken down by Twitter for violating its rules.
The former Republican state representative from Hernando, Miss., now runs Cedar Hill Farm, which is an agritourism business in DeSoto County, Miss.
While in the state legislature from 2016 to 2020, Foster drafted the state's death penalty law in 2017. The current law executions by gas chamber, electrocution, and firing squad. In 2019, he came in third in the Republican primary for governor, the Free Press reports.
Foster previously made headlines for not allowing women journalists to accompany him in his truck during his campaign but allowing male journalists to ride with him.
In tweets after the initial one, Foster wrote, "Transgendered people are merely victims, it's their pedo groomers that are consumed by evil," according to the Washington Blade.
He declined an interview with the Free Press but sent a statement.
"I said what I said," he wrote, adding to what he had tweeted. "The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad."
Foster's comments come as 12 states have adopted anti-trans bills directed at trans students in sports.
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