Michael Knowles attacks Tim Walz for being the faculty adviser to the gay-straight alliance when he was coach of the football team

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the August 

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Tim Walz, before he was a governor, before he was a congressman, he was a teacher. He was a high school teacher. He founded the first gay-straight alliance at Mankato West High School way back in 1999. So all the way back in 1999, this guy was a pioneer when it comes to talking about weird sex stuff, desires, and behaviors with 14-year-olds. Little strange, isn't it?

And what's ironic is — I haven't even used the word weird because of this irony — the libs have attacked JD Vance for being weird because he — I don't even know exactly why they called — because he says that people should get married and have kids. That pretty much that was the main attack. They said, you don't think you think people should get married and have kids? You're a weirdo. You don't think we should murder all the babies. You're a weirdo. You don't think a man can become a woman. You're a weirdo. And it was actually Tim Walz who lobbed that attack. He's the one who popularized that line of attack. Tim Waltz — tampon Tim. He's the guy who did that. Really odd.

As the Star Tribune reported in 2018:

Tim Walz was an enlisted soldier in the Minnesota National Guard in 1999 and defensive coordinator of the Mankato West High School football team. A student at the school, where Walz taught geography, wanted to start a gay-straight alliance.

This was three years after the president, a Democrat, signed a law forbidding same-sex marriage. Soldiers suspected of being gay in Walz's own unit could be discharged from the military. But Walz, now Minnesota's Democratic candidate for governor, had seen the bullying some students endured and agreed to be the group's faculty adviser.

“It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz said. In other words, he would be a symbol that disparate worlds could coexist peacefully.