Colorado Lawmaker Uses Tired Anti-LGBTQ+ Tropes On Right-Wing Podcast

Last week Colorado state Rep. Scott Bottoms joined a right-wing podcast host to claim people are members of the LGBTQ+ community because they were groomed, suffered from mental illness, or were victims of sexual abuse.

Bottoms, a Republican who represents District 15 which includes portions of Colorado Springs and Cimarron Hills in El Paso County, appeared last Thursday on the Liberty Warrior Nation podcast with host Michael Poff. During the podcast the discussion quickly turned to sexual and gender identity with a specific focus on the transgender community. Poff spoke at length for much of the podcast, but Bottoms joined in, agreeing with all of Poff’s claims while adding his own theories and insults.

“I don’t want to trigger my audience to hate transgenders, because there’s two things that I think causes transgenderism,” Poff observed. “One is mental illness and two is grooming at a very young age.”

Poff centered what he called the LGBTQ+ “ideology” as the root cause of “why people decide that they’re going to change their gender,” but assured his audience he hated the sin and not the sinner.

“It's not the individual,” Poff explained. “The individual is confused. The individual’s sick, groomed.”

Poff depicted the community’s affirmation of a spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities as a false front for a more sinister motive. He went so far as to describe the community as having talons that are used to ensnare otherwise cis-straight individuals.

“‘Come to us, we accept you for who you are,’” he said. “Once they get you in their talons, then that’s when the whole brainwashing, grooming, everything really, really starts. That’s my own opinion of it.”

After criticizing the LGBTQ+ community and denying there is what he called “a genocide in our society on transgenders,” Bottoms added an additional cause for an LGBTQ+ sexual identity.

“They’ve been abused,” Bottoms said. “And they’re broken and they’re hurting and they go to the arena and embrace the arena where they are hurting because there is a justification there that deals with their pain and their condemnation and all the stuff that they do to themselves, and also outward influences, and I would throw here in spiritual, the stuff that Satan does to them. And so they run straight to the very essence of how they were abused.”

The first-term Bottoms was sworn into office on January 9, 2023. He received 56.2 percent of the vote in the general election, outdistancing his nearest opponent by over 16 percent. His current term will end on January 8, 2025. Bottoms is also a pastor at the Church of Briargate.