October 26, 2023 11:46 AM UTC

Terrible Takes With Rep. Ron Weinberg

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday at the Colorado State Capitol, as 9NEWS reports, students from the Colorado Youth Advisory Council presented their annual proposals for legislation addressing “needs affecting Colorado youth now and in the future.”

The teenagers are a part of the Colorado Youth Advisory Council. It was created in 2008 to better understand students’ needs. Students create bills on topics they feel passionately about, and present them individually to state lawmakers. A few of the bill proposals have the potential to make it to the Governor’s desk…

Students fielded comments and tough questions from state lawmakers.

Representative Ron Weinberg (R) represents House District 51 in Larimer County. He was impressed with the students’ efforts.

“They’re essentially legislators presenting to legislators and their bills could actually become law,” he said. “They did fantastic, they stood behind their convictions.”

As 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark noted last night, some of those “tough questions” from GOP Rep. Ron Weinberg were a little more than merely tough, veering into the downright offensive:

NEW: Colorado @RepWeinberg (R-Loveland) told students that allowing trans kids to use their preferred names in class could confuse police during a school shooting. #coleg #copolitics pic.twitter.com/mtYSvfVkVJ

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) October 26, 2023

The kids who proposed legislation protecting the rights of trans students reportedly answered that nobody they had spoken with in their schools had raised the possibility that what’s known in the transgender community as “dead naming,” or insisting on using names and genders that the student no longer uses, could constitute a security risk during a school shooting. That’s because it wouldn’t–but the discussion of this bill provided another opportunity for Republican lawmakers to embarrass themselves on subjects they have only a stereotypical understanding of at best.

On the day of another horrific mass shooting, talking with kids about legislation responsive to the experiences in their daily lives, Weinberg managed to drag the conversation to that dreadful hypothetical space where facts don’t apply–only shock value and the depths of his prejudicial imagination.

We just want those kids to know that the legislative process isn’t always like this.

And at least in Colorado, these people are the minority.