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Watch this mom BRUTALLY confront an anti-LGBTQ+ state superintendent to their face & get arrested
Mom Audra Beasley bravely stood up for her children, calling Oklahoma's superintendent a "bigot and bully."
We love to see parents stand up for their LGBTQ+ kids!
The mom of disabled and queer children was hauled out of an Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting and arrested by state troopers after calling the anti-LGBTQ+ head of schools “an obnoxious bigot and bully.”
Audra Beasley’s disabled son Max, who uses a wheelchair, cried while six state troopers were arresting his mom because she went over her allotted three-minute comment period. Beasley at the meeting to speak out about the lack of accommodations in the government office bathrooms and for the board’s transphobic policies, LGBTQ Nation reports.
“You have intentionally denied my child restroom access in this building,” the 45-year-old mom said of being forced to bring her own folding table to change her son’s diapers because the public bathrooms lack adult-sized changing tables. In the past, she said state employees have callously told her to change him on the floor. Her son Max has spina bifida, a permanently disabling in which a person’s neural tube fails to develop or close properly, according to the Spina Bifida Association.
Almost full comment from her here pic.twitter.com/VZjoHcnssb
— Dylan Brown (@dylantbrown) April 25, 2024
But Beasley wasn’t done yet. After laying into the board for their seeming unwillingness to add reasonable accommodations for her disabled child, she took aim at the state’s anti-LGBTQ+ bathroom policy.
Beasley said that one of her children is “part of a sex and gender minority group” and is being discriminated against by a state law that requires trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth. Because Oklahoma couldn’t stop with just one anti-LGBTQ+ law, there is also a trans sports ban that forces trans students to compete on sports teams that match their gender identity.
“You make a fool out of yourself,” Beasley said to state superintendent Ryan Walter. “You come in here and you talk about Title IX and our president. You are making a complete fool of yourself…. It is none of your business what gender that child or what gender is on their birth certificate….”
Then, she shades Walter in the most satisfying way possible. “You are an embarrassment to Oklahoma,” Beasley said. “You are a downright embarrassment to Oklahoma. And you wear the same damn clothes all the time, too — why is that?”
Next up was her son Wesley, who had also signed up to make a public comment and was called to speak after Beasley finished speaking.
“Why are you bullying kids?” Wesley asked Walters and the board. “The disabled — my brother — the gay, the trans. Why?”
As he waited for a response from the board, Beasley kept her criticisms of Walters going as a group of state troopers came into the meeting to arrest her. A video of the event that is currently making the round on X (formerly Twitter) shows her arrest while her child can be heard crying in the background.
“Y’all are arresting me in front of my children because this man over here is a bigot and a bully, picking on trans kids, picking on disabled kids, picking on my kids,” Beasley said in a stunning show of support for her marginalized children as she was being handcuffed by armed state troopers. “My kids are crying, Ryan Walters.”
Beasley was charged with willfully disrupting state business/public meeting, and causing a disruption by willfully refusing to disperse or leave, KOCO reports.
Walters has a history of supporting anti-LGBTQ+ policies, including wanting to ban queer books in public schools and teach the Bible in history classes. But he has come under increased scrutiny in recent months because of his handling of the death of Nex Benedict, a transgender high school student who died in February after an alleged assault by three bullies.
“To watch a parent removed in handcuffs, in front of her children, for demanding answers from their superintendent was heartbreaking and, I hope, a call to action for the majority of Oklahomans who have had enough of his divisive and harmful rhetoric and actions,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote in a press release about the arrest. “If Oklahoma schools do not comply with federal civil rights laws, it is choosing to invest not in the future of Oklahoma students, but in Ryan Walters’s political career at their expense…. Nex Benedict deserved better. Oklahomans deserve better.”
Not only does he support book bans, but Walters said that Oklahoma schools should ignore new rules issued by the President Joe Biden Administration that require schools to allow students to use the bathroom and pronouns matching their gender identity; he pushed the transphobic conspiracy theory — which has been disproved — that public school had litter boxes in classroom for kids who identify as cats, he has supported Moms of Liberty — a far-right anti-LGBTQ+ “parent’s rights” group — by attending their events, and he appointed Chaya Raichik, an anti-LGBTQ+ activist and head of Libs of TikTok, as the state’s Library Media Advisor.
While Walters seems hellbent on dismantling all LGBTQ+ protections in Oklahoma, moms like Beasley give us hope by valiantly standing up for what’s right.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
