The Minnesota Child Protection League joined religious right radio host Paul Ridgeway on AM 980 KKMS on May 3 to talk about the League’s upcoming seminar titled, “Gender Fluidity and other Fables: Understanding the Harm of the Transgender Movement.” The conversation included assertions that President Obama was destroying America through “false sexuality” and that there’s a “war of gender assault” on women and children.

Paul Ridgeway introduced them with a diatribe:

We’re in a war that’s a war of gender assault and what is behind the gender assault on women and men and the movement to — there’s a movement to legitimize transgender as another acceptable alternative lifestyle and we’re to accommodate it even though we Christians know it’s wrong and the lifestyle is — the left is forcing it upon us, to people who are right Godly men and women — and by the way God made men men and women women and transgender is an emotional problem that needs be treated with kindness and compassion but God didn’t make transgender people. This is an insanity at its height. Men now going into women’s bathroom, women going into men’s bathrooms, showering together. It’s unbelievable how fast this has come upon us. I’ve got with me Michele Lentz, the president of the Minnesota Child Protection League Action, also Julie Quist who is board member of CPL action, who are battling this insanity.

Michele Lentz, head of the Child Protection League decried the “clear agenda from the left” and blamed the “assault” on Obama:

It’s a movement that, you know… it’s a clear agenda from the left it is part of — if you look at the redefinition of marriage, you look at the equality acts that they’re trying to pass in Washington and the ordinances that are popping up across the country. This is the assault that’s coming on the people and the ordinance — what North Carolina did. What you saw in Houston, Texas where they overturned the ordinance. There is a response to this assault that is coming. It shouldn’t be a surprise to too many people that one of the roots of this comes right out of the Obama administration. It is President Obama’s Department of Education Office of Civil Rights that is telling schools that they have to have a transgender policy that is part of a reinterpretation of Title IX. These things are absolutely not true. Title IX has never said that and schools do not have to have these policies but that push is coming from the administration both through schools and then through the organization’s like the EEOC, the Employment Equal Opportunity… Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pushing that on businesses and so it’s not necessarily the root of the agenda but it’s certainly where the push is coming from in public policy.

Later in the interview, Ridgeway claimed Obama’s motive is to destroy America:

How are children gonna view themselves as schools begin teaching this horrible and false sexuality that transgender is normal?… But this is insanity. But it’s also — Can I just give a scriptural thing… But Jesus said you harm a child better that you hang a millstone around your neck. We are harming children and will be harming by the thousands. This is folks, Obama, why he should have never been elected. The change he’s bringing to America is to destroy it and he’s doing an effective job.

The interview then shifted to MNCPL board member Julie Quist who repeated some of the claims she made while promoting her group’s event in April (You can read some of her false assertions in “Child Protection League’s Julie Quist doesn’t have even a basic understanding of LGBTQ people“).

Well you know it’s not just an issue of a lifestyle either and it really isn’t. It’s schools are being told that they must teach our children that biology doesn’t matter and that biological sex is really irrelevant when it comes to their sexual identity and so it’s false. It’s entirely false. And so we’re not talking about just the choice or the direction of individuals and the lifestyle they choose but it is imposing on everyone the false Idea that your biology doesn’t matter and so in Minnesota, for example, right now we have a couple of different schools that we know of… There are maybe more that we don’t know of that are trying to pass a transgender policy that defines within the policy that gender identity and gender expression and sexual orientation are three separate things they can be all different and then there’s biological sex which is it can be very different. Again so I mean it is what we call a dangerous assault upon all of us, you know. We focus on women and children because we tend to be more vulnerable. It is just as much a confusion for men too. And I mean I have a great deal of compassion right now for all of the children and the parents and the grandparents who are trying too much to help people. I mean you go through this very natural stage of questioning who are you when you were a young person. I think we can all remember going through that stage and if you insert into that the idea that “I don’t even know if I’m a boy or a girl and what does that mean,” you have just utter chaos and that’s is such… you… we really have to become grounded and realize what the threat is how it’s being promoted and really come back against it. We won’t hesitate to speak out and to speak the truth.

Ridgeway followed Quist’s words by calling gender-inclusion “evil”:

All of you listening I’m just not only upset with this, this inanity and it’s evil and Mark Dayton, our governor, is pushing it. So is the federal government. Obama brought change. It’s short change that’s evil.
Kids being told that this is normal and boys and girls showers and all the rest. It’s happening folks right now. Not come, it’s happening.

After a commercial break, Michele Lentz made the assertion that most of the LGBT community doesn’t even want equity for transgender people:

First of all, it’s important to understand that even within the LGBT coalition and community, there’s a lot of disunity. The feminists don’t agree with the transgenders. The young transgenders don’t really agree with the old gay rights movement. There’s a lot of disunity and crumbling that occurs within that coalition itself and what is really… If you had to choose sides here, it’s really the radical LGBT activists versus parents and children. That’s where the line has been drawn because most of us who are parents who have children there, you know, we all have that same concern for the privacy and health protection of our children. But many of us also have relatives, family members who are gay who love them just the same. There are no… They not on the other side and we’re on this side, there — I would assert that there are many, many people who belong… who are gay or lesbian who just want to live their lives privately. They are not part of this radical activist group that is pushing these policies across America and it would be better for us to understand that it’s not us versus them. It’s the radicals versus us and our kids.

Contrary to Lentz’ assertion, transgender equity is a part of virtually every local, state, and national LGBTQ coalition and organization. According to Community Marketing and Insights, an LGBTQ market research firm, more than half of all LGBTQ people either donate to or volunteer for such organizations. Another 15 percent are employed by nonprofits. In a recent study of more than 5,000 members of the LGBT community, transgender equity was the second most important topic among the cohort behind only the broader concern of “equality.” There are no national or state polls that ask LGBQ people their views on gender-inclusion.

Here’s the full audio of the interview: