Republican sobs as she claims LGBTQ+ activists are ‘training’ children to use butt plugs and dildos

Republican Erin Mazzoni tears up as she gives a speech in front of the Franklin Board of Mayor and Aldermen

A Republican aide has claimed that LGBTQ+ organisations are training eight-year-old children how to use butt plugs and dildos.

In a recently resurfaced speech, Erin Mazzoni, who reportedly works for the campaign of Franklin, Tennessee Republican mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson, alleged that children are being given sex toys by LGBTQ+ activists.

Mazzoni told a meeting of the Franklin Board of Mayor and Aldermen earlier this that she’d moved to Tennessee from Bucks County, in Pennsylvania, after apparently discovering that an LGBTQ+ organisation was teaching children how to use sex toys, which, she claimed, caused the community to “fall apart”.

Between sobs, she said: “It started out as Pride coming in, and I thought everything would be OK. It ended with a Rainbow Room where eight to 12-year-old kids were given butt plugs and dildos and trained.

“It was like watching a bad car accident for three years straight.”

Her claims referred to the Lower Bucks Rainbow Room, an LGBTQ+ youth organisation that caters for people aged between 14 and 21. The group holds weekly meetings in a church and reportedly offers game nights, life skills and sexuality education, but there is zero evidence about butt plugs.

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The speech resurfaced and went viral last month, leading social media users to criticise the wild claim. 

“I actually work in Bucks County, and this is the first I’m hearing about free butt plugs and dildos,” one person wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mazzoni’s speech is just part of a movement to paint the queer community as “groomers” or “pedophiles”, with research showing the use of the “groomer” slur has been increasing on X

In 2022, a report by the Human Rights Campaign and Center for Countering Digital Hate found that a rise in use of the word could be linked to the passing of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay legislation

The owner of Colorado queer bar Club Q, in which five people were shot dead in November, even blamed the slur for a rise in real-life violence aimed at LGBTQ+ people.

A few months ago, New York politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described the slur as disgusting, and pointed out that most of the perpetrators of sexual assaults and harassment are straight men.

“If you ask a lot of women about the first time they encountered [sexual harassment], they will often say 11, 12, 13, 14 years old,” she said.

“When you actually look at who is committing this abuse, it’s majority straight men.

“Many of these disgusting and insinuating attacks on trans and LGBT people are actually projections of what predatory cisgender, and often straight, men do when left in the presence of women.”