Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke claimed during a high-energy stump speech in Iowa that he would be afraid to be a “trans woman of color, who could be killed with complete impunity in this country right now, with no one to follow up or investigate.”
O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, has been an outspoken advocate of transgender rights since the beginning of his campaign and featured a story on his official Facebook that highlighted the deaths of four trans women in Texas, all of which were being actively investigated. Police in the report vowed to solve the cases and have also asked the FBI to assist them in the investigation.
In O’Rourke’s speech on Saturday, he doubled down on his campaign promise to ban AR-15 and AK-47 rifles while further saying he was not afraid of the National Rifle Association. “I would be afraid if I were a schoolteacher in a kindergarten classroom and those kids for whom I had already sacrificed so much were up against a gunman with an AR-15, because we didn’t have the courage to stop them while we still had time,” O’Rourke said to raucous applause. “I would be afraid if I were the son of an immigrant who went to work early this morning and never came back, detained and deported back to a country he had not seen for 20 years.”
O’Rourke mentioned a plan in June to offer more protections for gay and transgender Americans. “I want to make sure part of the way we commemorate those victims and acknowledge the hatred and homophobia that still exist in this country is to take decisive action to protect the full rights of every single one of our fellow Americans,” he said at the time. A four-hour LGBT town hall with the Democratic candidates is slated to air Oct. 10.
