A Republican Florida state lawmaker has made a partial apology for calling transgender people “demons”, “imps” and “mutants” during a hearing on a contentious bathroom bill.
Webster Barnaby, a self-described “proud Christian conservative”, said his “indignation was stirred” by members of the transgender community who spoke out on Monday against the bill banning them from bathrooms not aligned to their gender at birth.
The controversy comes just days after conservatives elsewhere in the state forced the removal of an illustrated novel about Anne Frank from a high school library, claiming it contained inappropriate sexual material that “minimized” the Holocaust.
By Tuesday, Barnaby’s Twitter account appeared to have been removed from the platform after his outburst the previous day at a Florida state house commerce committee hearing in Tallahassee.
“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” he told the speakers at the hearing. “That’s right, I called you demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend you are part of this world.
“We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet. This is the planet Earth where God created men male and women female.”
The British-born Barnaby, 63, made a tempered apology from the floor soon after the House bill passed. “I referred to trans people as demons – I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons,” he said.
But his expressed regret cut no ice with LGBTQ+ activists, who have been protesting against a slew of anti-trans proposals placed before the Republican-dominated Florida legislature this year, championed by the state’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis.
The bills include banning pronouns, drag shows and pride flags; criminalizing certain medical care for trans youth; and expanding the “don’t say gay” law that outlaws discussion of sexual preference and gender identity to all Florida’s classrooms.
“When Republican Webster Barnaby called trans people ‘demons’, ‘imps’, and ‘mutants it wasn’t a mistake or gaffe,” Democratic former state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote in a tweet. “It was the hatred and bigotry that’s really motivating Florida’s 20+ anti-LGBTQ proposals finally being spoken into words. Now it’s exposed.”
The advocacy group Equality Florida called on Webster to resign and on the Florida house speaker, Paul Renner, to condemn “this bigoted vitriol from his own caucus”.
The Guardian has contacted Barnaby for comment.
School officials in Florida’s Indian River county, meanwhile, are defending a principal’s decision to remove the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from his school library last month at the behest of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty.
Florida has become a stronghold of the conservative book banning movement in recent months, with a new law threatening educators with felony charges for exposing students to material deemed “inappropriate”.
According to Moms for Liberty, the illustrated novel, based on Frank’s wartime memoir, contains sexual content that “minimizes the Holocaust” that involved the murders of 6 million Jews in Europe during the second world war.
In one scene, it shows the teenager in a park looking at nude statues of females and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.
“Even her [own] version featured the editing out of the entries about sex,” said Jennifer Pippin, the chairperson of the group’s Indian River chapter.
“The publisher of the book calls it a ‘biography’, meaning it writes its own interpretive spin. It quotes the work, but it’s not the diary in full. It chooses to offer a different view on the subject.”
A spokesperson for the school district of Indian River county, Cristen Maddux, said the principal of Vero Beach high school, Shawn O’Keefe, followed protocol by removing the challenged book, a decision that can be reviewed by a district committee.
“The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students aren’t knowledgable about what happened, that is not the case at all. It’s just a challenged book and the principal removed it,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
