Douglas County, about 40 minutes southwest of decaying Democrat Denver, is a life raft of red in the turbulent blue tsunami of radical woke Colorado. Once a rolling countryside with more horses and cattle than people, the county has grown into a beautiful community of well-kept lawns and homes where people love their kids, their dogs, and their country. Summer Sundays are found most at church, followed by neighborhood barbecues and baseball. The majority of about 360,000 residents vote Republican; three Republican Commissioners govern the County, and hard-fought elections have given parents a common-sense school board of five Republicans dominating the two Democrats.
Yet even here, the cracks of LGBTQ militancy are fracturing the peaceful landscape. In June, the Town of Parker community celebration known as Parker Days brings tens of thousands to this Douglas County small town for fun, carnival rides, music, and food, for the first time ever featuring a drag queen show onstage. In the daytime, on a Sunday, with hundreds of children present. That is, until citizens noticed it on the schedule and barraged the mayor and town council with blowback.
The council had previously vetoed the drag act when it appeared on the event list submitted by the Parker Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors Parker Days. But somehow It turned up on schedule anyhow. The Chamber scrambled with a flurry of oops excuses. Coincidentally, the president and CEO of the Chamber happens to be a man married to another man, and he formerly led the Chamber of Louisville in the county of the People’s Republic of Boulder. Oh and he lives in rock-solid blue Denver. Gay militants often use their jobs to promote their personal and political ideology.
Last summer, a drag queen show called PrideFest held at the tax-payer-funded County Fairgrounds shocked the citizenry when event videos were circulated showing bearded men in stripper spangles dancing provocatively and baring their butt cheeks and fake prosthetic but very realistic breasts and nipples with children just a few feet away.
Since then, the commissioners have ignored pleas from the public to restrict this summer’s PrideFest to adults only. Terrified of lawsuits, they insist that it’s a “parent’s right” to let their kids see sexual shows and hear a drag queen croon, “Sex is in the air, I love the smell of it; sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me,” as if public indecency laws don’t apply to the Fairgrounds and community standards protecting children never existed.
Unsurprisingly, sadomasochism peddled to youngsters is frowned upon by the good citizens of Douglas County. At various meetings, we repeatedly asked for an adults-only drag show restriction only to be lectured by Laydon that he’s a Christian who believes in the Constitution, not in fascism or book burning. As if we do. He compared the in-children’s-faces drag queen fake breast flaunting to kids watching cheerleaders at NFL games. He slandered Catholics and the Boy Scouts for their alleged transgressions and topped it all off with: “I will not use the power of government to support thinly veiled bigotry and anti-gay rhetoric.”
Then on July 25, Commissioners, Laydon and Thomas voted to award a “Suicide Prevention” grant to Castle Rock Pride, the LGBTQ social club that produces PrideFest. Laydon has repeatedly outed himself as an “aesthete” and “member of the LGBTQ community,” entirely unexpected since he’s 47 with three small children and a lovely blonde wife. Go figure. If he had done the right thing and recused himself, the vote would have failed. Pride’s grant application said they intended to use the funds to expand their social events for kids age eight and up – hikes, “GA(Y)ME nights,” beach parties, pizza nights, ice cream socials, etc. to neighboring Parker and Highlands Ranch, and to hire a “therapist” to help youth with their mental health and/or gender problems.
They hired Dr. Corinne Votaw Freer, whose website identifies “her” as a “Malcontent Humanist & Enemy of Christian Nationalism.” Also: “I am a social psychologist, researcher, and advocate” focusing on “the loneliness pandemic, the gender spectrum, and bolstering opposition to Christian Nationalism.” (https://corinnefreer.com)
So we have these Douglas County Republican Commissioners awarding tax money to a radical trans person actively working against Christianity, Nationalism, and most emphatically, the Left’s toxic bugaboo known as “Christian Nationalism.” While Webster defines Nationalism as “loyalty and devotion to a nation…especially a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others,“ to the globalist Left religion-haters, Christian Nationalism means Deplorable Patriotic Fascists and Jesus-loving White Supremacists who want to force a theocracy on America.
To add to the fun, Ms. Freer’s (real name Corrine Joye Votaw, formerly Jeremy Craig Votaw according to Douglas County records) on the website bio page notes, “Corinne identified as transgender before discovering her intersex status in her early thirties and now identifies as an intersex woman.” Yet this person was married for many years to a biological woman and fathered three children. But aren’t we constantly told LGBTQ people are “born this way”?
In any case, the radical left political and gender views of this so-called counselor and therapist have been unleashed on the 14-year-old children of Douglas County at a recurring “Youth Community Group” announced on the Castle Rock Pride Facebook page. Further, her/his woke ideology has a podcast called “Wildly Queerious.” Some podcast titles: “Sensory Deprivation and the Religious Right” (March); “Disney, DeSantis, and the End of the Republican Party (April).
Covering politics, religion, and the gay agenda all in one convenient earful of hate.
In the June 25, 2023, podcast Votaw becomes irate over the NHL.
Players who refuse to wear Pride jerseys because of their personal beliefs. He/she rants: “What is your personal belief that you think certain people shouldn’t be allowed to exist? What personal belief says I don’t want certain people to have access to health care, to marriage…” F-word, F-word. Whoa. Is this very educated “doctor,” the world’s only LGBTQ person unaware that gays and lesbians, etc., have had that access for many years? Later in the same June 25 podcast, Votaw raves, “You have such a (f-word) problem with a rainbow; take it up with your God that gives us a rainbow every time it rains. I’m sorry that’s so offensive to you, celebrating people who are different…”
Here is an angry, defensive, reality-denying, grievance-addled Christianity-and-Republican-hating transgender adult influencing lonely, gender-confused kids who are at their most vulnerable as they suffer the typical emotional/mental anxiety of adolescence. These are children just learning who they are. Looking for love and acceptance, their minds and emotions are in emotional turmoil; one day, they adore their parents, and the next day they’re planning to run away from home. Glued to Tik-Tok and YouTube, where LGBTQ and transitioners are celebrated with fun videos, they are questioning their budding sexuality and experimenting with different identities. What happens when at the age of eight, an unhappy, insecure child comes into the loving orbit of LGBTQ adults who surround this innocent soul with unicorns, rainbows, and ice cream? When does counseling become grooming and creeping indoctrination into “changing” into another gender as the solution to all their insecurities and growing-up angst?
An increasing number of “de-transitioners,” primarily young women like Layla Jane and Chloe Cole, now regret being pushed into early sex change hormone drugs and disfiguring, life-altering surgery by therapists and other medical professionals who ignored their pre-existing mental health problems and quickly started gender-affirming care. Doubtful parents agreed after being presented with the grim and often-wielded but inaccurate warning, “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?”
On January 1, 2023, a new law from Colorado’s deranged Dem majority made the state the first in the nation to “explicitly include gender-affirming services” in insurance company coverage for many plans. That includes not only puberty blockers and sex change hormones but also costly surgical procedures like penectomy, vaginoplasty, and clitoroplasty. Don’t ask. Hooray, Colorado is eagerly becoming a sanctuary state for transgenderism. It’s easier than ever to switch genders – and almost free!
Of course, Commissioners Laydon and Thomas couldn’t possibly have known that Pride would use the County’s grant money to hire a radical LGBTQ activist to influence impressionable young people and possibly put them in danger. But there were obvious clues: last year’s PrideFest showcased not only lewd songs and acts but drag queen story hour for three-year-old toddlers as well as an age-restricted “Teen Zone,” no adults allowed. The queens also handed out drag wigs to underage girls whom they invited to dance on the main stage. Can we say “recruitment”? Yet the Commissioners were eager to accept CR Pride’s apology for those exposed fake breasts, insisting multiple incidents were “wardrobe malfunctions” when no sane observer would agree.
Castle Rock Pride won its suicide prevention grant by citing stats claiming higher suicide attempts for LGBTQ youth. But these studies are self-reported by young people and could be unreliable; they are often created by biased, pro-lgbtq organizations like Trevor Project; Studies don’t ask about depression, gender dysphoria, and other mental conditions from which these youth often suffer.
The ultimate irony may be that while the Commissioners have failed to protect children because they fear lawsuits if they restrict drag shows to adults only, they could be vulnerable to legal action by making yet another very bad LGBTQ decision. Further studies may well find that gender-affirming care causes more suicides than it prevents. Commissioners Laydon and Thomas will likely seek higher office. We’ll see about that.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado-based journalist whose work has appeared in Complete Colorado, Townhall.com, American Thinker, The Federalist, The Washington Times, and elsewhere. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @JoyOverbeck1