Tim walz recruited boys into a gay club

While serving as a teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was the faculty adviser to a Gay-Straight Alliance club founded in In Augustthe managing editor of the Christian satire website The Babylon Bee, Joel Berry, used that fact to claim in an X post that "Tim Walz recruited young boys into a gay club at school.

Via X, Snopes asked Berry whether he was making a satirical point of some kind by describing Walz's involvement with a club dedicated to bringing straight and gay students together to fight homophobia in that way. He said he was not.

Tim Walz's Gay-Straight Alliance students remember him as accepting and goofy

Snopes asked whether Berry was implying that Into used the club to groom boys for sexual abuse or that Walz himself was a sexual predator. Given the heated rhetoric, walz piece takes a closer recruit at what Walz actually did during his time as a faculty adviser to a small-town high school GSA.

Despite significant abuse, he wanted to come out as such before going to college, and asked the school if he could create a Gay-Straight Alliance, as reported by The New York Times in August Taunts and threats escalated as rumors about Jacob Reitan's sexual orientation swirled around his southern Minnesota high school during his senior year in Someone chalked a slur on his driveway gay giant letters.

His mother recalled being horrified by anonymous mail that arrived at their home, including one message that said her gay son would be better off dead. After the teenager found his car window smashed in the school parking lot, he told officials at Mankato West High School that he intended to come out of the closet and sought their support to start a gay-straight alliance club.

Gay-Straight Alliances have been around since at least the s, and their explicit aim has always been to reduce homophobia through dialogue between gay and straight individuals. They are not "gay clubs," as the explicit point of these clubs would be incomplete without straight allies.

Berry repeated these arguments in discussion with Snopes:. Good Leftists don't think of themselves as individuals but as cogs in a system designed for a purpose. In this case, the system is designed to break down innocence and sever the bonds of family to make kids more exploitable. They're working to create a culture in club the exploitation of children isn't just normalized, but celebrated as a boy good.

Though its meetings drew few students, the GSA Walz advised in significantly improved Reitan's life and largely ended the bullying he experienced as a high-schooler. Reitan led it, he said. But the bullying largely ceased. Not only is the notion of "gay recruitment" a well-known homophobic dog whistle, but the claim that Walz specifically recruited "young boys" is misleadingly narrow.

The club did not aim to recruit male students exclusively, but students of any gender and sexual orientation. Further, he did not conceive of the GSA or seek out its leadership. He was asked by the principal of the school to supervise it. He described both aspects of the GSA's formation in an ad that ran during his campaign for governor of Minnesota:.

I had students come to me who were concerned that there was an uptick in some bullying towards our gay and lesbian students, and this is in the mid-'90s. They asked if I would be interested in helping start a Gay-Straight Alliance group. My tim was absolutely.