An anti-LGBTQ activist who lost her write-in campaign this month for a county clerk position in Utah previously resigned as a teacher over misconduct involving her relationships with students.
Patricia Kent, the founder of the right-wing Liberty Action Coalition, resigned from her teaching job in 1996 over her inappropriate and overly familiar relationships with female students, but more recently she has claimed drag shows were grooming children for immoral purposes, reported The Salt Lake Tribune.
“Those are children, teenagers at best [who are] being promoted to the ideology of same-sex transgender,” Kent said last month during her group’s meeting. “This is supposed to be the new exciting lifestyle and everybody’s supposed to love it. They are grooming our children for immoral satanic worship.”
“I don’t watch Hallmark movies anymore because I never know when they’re going to sneak in that homosexual couple,” she added. “They’re not good family movies anymore. We know Walt Disney is no longer family-friendly and hasn’t been for a long time.”
Kent’s teaching certificate was eventually revoked in 1998 for unprofessional conduct, which included intimate personal relationships with students and inappropriate discussions of religion, and she filed a federal lawsuit against the state school board that was settled in 2000 and dismissed with prejudice, which means it cannot be filed again.
“It’s absurd that 26 years later, people are making a big issue out of this,” said Kent, who is national chair of the Independent American Party. “If I was guilty of what I was accused of, I would have been put in jail, okay. I wasn’t … I was paid off, and that should be the end of it. I am not one to live in the past. Like I said, I’ve moved on with my life. I continue to do what I need to do to live a normal life.”