Colorado politician and former Navy Chaplain joins war against Colorado transgender teen

Former (and some would add disgraced) Navy Chaplain Gordon “Dr. Chaps” Klingenschmitt has joined in on the battering of Florence, Colorado teen “Jane Doe,” who the Pacific Justice Institute has falsely accused of harassing girls in the restrooms and locker rooms.  Klingenschmitt, who is running for the Colorado House in District 15, has accused the trans teen of “visually raping” teenage girls.

Now the public school children are being told by a demonic spirit, “You must open up your daughter’s privacy to our perversion.”  And this demonic spirit inside of this boy is now violating, and for all intents and purposes, he’s raping – at least visually – these teenage girls.

There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about Jane Doe; she simply had the misfortune of existing in a community where a few intolerant families rallied against her and used an anti-LGBT group to draw national attention to her.  But PJI is simply using Jane as an example.  There are trans young people in schools all across the country just like Jane who simply want to be safe in school – to be able to go the bathroom or change clothes for phys ed without being ostracized to a staff bathroom or nurse’s office.  How that has any impact on other students remains unclear.

—Zack Ford, ThinkProgress

Jane is now said to be on suicide watch after her family decided she needed professional intervention.  There is something to worry about when some right-wing voices say she deserves to die.

TransAdvocate’s Cristan Williams interviewed PJI’s staff attorney Matthew McReynolds.

Details continue to emerge on this in terms of what what kind of comments may have been made.  We’ve heard some reports that he’s commented on what girls are wearing or their figure while in the bathroom.  If you can imagine that scenario from the reference and framework of a teenage girl, I think that’s pretty harassing.

–McReynolds

So girls talking about clothes is harassing?

They can’t… how do you say… They have to learn to love all God’s creations and to believe that they have so much hatred in them… and to be this way [begins to sob]  is hard. Because, because my daughter is a precious life just like, just like anybody else, I know how precious everybody’s kids are to them and they have to understand that it’s been a lot of hurt, that there could be so much hatred directed at my daughter, who, she’s just trying to be a normal teenager and go on with life.

–Jane Doe’s mother

Cristan: So, that’s Jane Doe’s mother and specifically she has a statement that she wanted me to read to you:  “What you’re doing isn’t right.  You say that you’re a God-loving people but you’ve targeted my daughter – a kid – like this.  You shouldn’t do this to any kid.  You should be ashamed.  You’re wrong for what you’ve done to my daughter.”  What do you have to say to Jane’s mother.

McReynolds: Well, a couple of things.  First of all, all of us identify with the raw emotion we hear in her voice and her instinct to for her son who’s now her daughter and all the many, many issues that accompany that.  At the same time, we have to go back to the reality that nobody went out looking for Jane Doe to launch this.  We didn’t come from California to Colorado looking for this situation because, he decided that he wanted to walk into the girl’s bathrooms and girls locker rooms and interact with them there, that caused some serious discomfort on our client’s part as it would on the part of most teenage girls in that situation and so, as much emotion as is there and as much desire is there to protect that child, you know, we have to balance that with the privacy interests and the constitutional privacy rights of all the other students and that is what has not been done to date.

Actually, they did go out looking to target someone like Jane Doe.  PJI ran an ad looking for plaintiffs to help fight California’s AB1266 prior to its attack on Jane Doe.

Maybe we should listen to someone less involved…maybe like another parent.

A little background, my daughter is a sophomore at Florence High School and my daughter and I sat down about this, you know, ‘Have you seen this happen?’ and she said in the bathroom there’s no big deal.  She goes in, goes into the stall and is very discrete and is very quiet and stays very much to herself and never poses a problem with anybody.  So my daughter asked around to the other students, ‘Does anybody have a problem with [Jane] being in there?’ and their answers were ‘No’ and they all pointed the finger to this one individual.

Also from a Florence High School parent is the following:

It’s their prerogative to seek out everyplace they can find in the US to try to do this, there’s not much we can do about that from the standpoint that that’s their prerogative.  It is my prerogative however, to prevent them from injuring this child, or any other child.  You want to go after an adult, that’s fine.  As an adult, you have a right to do that, but do not do it against a child.

Cristan: A common theme that keeps coming up, and let me just ask you this directly: Do you value the life of Jane Doe?

McReynolds: Oh absolutely. I think that’s a point we can all agree on and we have very different approaches. What we believe, you know, the health and wellbeing of kids who are in this situation entails and so from out perspective, you don’t lead to healthier outcomes by enabling potentially unhealthy behavior and so that’s where we, you know, our paths diverge.

Errmmm…translation:  PJI advocates ex-gay therapy…and would extend that to ex-trans therapy.