GOP Senate candidate touts endorsement from official who called LGBTQ people 'filth'

North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Mark Walker is highlighting a glowing endorsement from his state’s bigoted lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson (R). In a video shared by the former representative on Wednesday, Robinson praises Walker as “a fighter” who stood by him even after Robinson gave a sermon in which he called LGBTQ people “filth.”

“RETWEET this if you agree with Mark Robinson. #markwalkervictory,” Walker tweeted on Wednesday.

He attached a clip of Robinson speaking at a recent joint appearance.

In the clip, Robinson says:

When I got in — quote — “trouble with the press” it was very few people… All the people that was ringing my phone of the hook wanting me to this and that and come to this event and come… when I turn around to see who was with me, very few was back there. Very few. But I can tell you who one of the ones that came running from the beginning. That man sitting right over there. From the very beginning, he came running. Like one of them old Western movies, when the bad guys come to town and everybody scatters and the sheriff turns around and looks, ain’t but one guy standing there with him, with his rifle on hand, saying “Which where we need to go? Where we need to do? Where’s the fight?” That was Mark Walker.

Robinson’s “trouble” came last year when he repeatedly demeaned LGBTQ people in public speeches.

In a June sermon in Seagrove, North Carolina, Robinson alleged it was “child abuse” that children were being forced to attend schools where they are taught about “how to hate America,” “why they are racist,” and “transgenderism and homosexuality.”

“Those issues have no place in a school. There’s no reason anybody, anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it ‘filth.’ If you don’t like it that I called it ‘filth,’ some see me and I’ll explain it to you,” he claimed.

Amid widespread bipartisan criticism and calls for his resignation, Robinson doubled down and delivered another sermon in November in which he objected to men kissing on television, said homosexuality served no purpose and asserted that heterosexual relationships are superior to homosexual ones because they can reproduce.

“These people are superior,” he said of opposite-sex couples, “because they can do something these people can’t do because that’s the way God created it to be.”

Robinson has also come under fire for attacking Muslim people as “invaders” who “refuse to assimilate to our ways while demanding respect they have not earned” and for intentionally misgendering former First Lady Michelle Obama as a man.

Walker, a former Southern Baptist pastor who served in the U.S. House from 2015 to 2021, backed Robinson’s anti-LGBTQ screed. “Lt. Governor Mark Robinson is 100% accurate in describing the sexualization of our children in public schools. The content is filth, and the agenda is no less filthy,” he wrote on Facebook.

Walker has also made his share of controversial comments in the past.

In 2014, he openly attacked the Muslim people as a threat to America. “You know what the No. 1 name now is in Great Britain? … Muhammed. And that’s where they’re headed, this way,” he warned at a candidate’s forum. “I respect George W. Bush and some of the things he did, but I would beg to differ that Islam is a religion of peace because you can’t have a religion of peace when you’ve got nearly a billion people chopping off heads all over the country.”

As head of the Republican Study Committee in Congress in 2017, he praised conservative women in the group as “eye candy.”

Walker was one of just 23 House Republicans who voted against a 2019 resolution condemning antisemitism, anti-Muslim discrimination, and other bigotry as “contrary to the values and aspirations of the United States.”

During the 2020 campaign, he demanded the resignation of Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. for not living up to moral standards but said that the same code need not apply to then-President Donald Trump. “We’ll see what they [the American voters] say this November, but it’s not necessarily the moral content that makes a good leader.”

Last April, Walker hosted a “pro-life forum” with anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who has argued that only the male “head of the household” should vote on behalf of his wife and family.

Walker is one of several Republican candidates seeking his party’s nomination for retiring Sen. Richard Burr’s (R-NC) open seat. Former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley is considered the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination and the general election is expected to be competitive.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.