On this day in both 2014, and in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted its first two profiles of Gordon Klingenschmitt, a.k.a. “Dr. Chaps” who in 2014, actually managed to get enough support to be elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in spite of the fact that he is, for lack of a better term, a complete goddamned lunatic. How much of a loon is he? Well, in our first profile, we went in depth on Klingenschmitt, a former military chaplain reprimanded and discharged by the Navy in 2006 for disobeying orders and attending a political protest in uniform. He also apparently while once counseling a rape victim on his vessel, discovered she was a lesbian and immediately stopped helping her through her trauma to restrain her and try to exorcise the demons out of her that were making her gay (I’m serious, he’s bragged about this). Klingenschmitt then took to the airwaves on a cable access show, where he has tried performing long-distance exorcisms on all sorts of famous people to remove demons from them, from liberal celebrities like Madonna, to politicians like President Obama and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. The latter makes sense when you consider he claims the Bible teaches us to defend ourselves against “left-wing crazies” (I don’t remember Jesus saying that, myself). He also thinks the FCC have loosened guidelines to help demons travel through televisions to “molest and visually rape your children”, that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us to discriminate against gays, and repeatedly has claimed “Obamacare causes cancer”. Klingenschmitt, despite being pants-s***ingly insane (speaking of which, he has claimed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” has made gay soldiers have to start wearing diapers from all the gay sex they’ve been having making them lose bowel control, because he’s that charming)… despite being that barking mad, decided to make a run for the Colorado House of Representatives. And just prior to the election, he claimed openly gay Democratic Congressman Jared Polis was “going to join ISIS and start beheading Christians” because seriously, at this point, could he really do anything to come off as more deranged? Within three months of being sworn into office, Colorado House Republicans refused to allow Klingenschmitt to participate in any committees in state government, for fear of what he might say on them. He’s called for the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, arguing that we should “push gay people back in the closet”, which doesn’t make any goddamned sense because the people who have come out of it can’t put that genie back in the bottleat this point. He’s still going on his cable access show daily, where he continues to insist President Obama is a secret Muslim, argues that God preached against gun-free zones in the Bible, compares same sex marriage to “the yoke of slavery”, and blames polling that shows Americans are starting to accept same sex marriage on what else? Massive demonic possession.
Since last October, good ol’ Gordo hasn’t let up:
- October 27th, 2015: Klingenschmitt makes his latest diagnosis of demon possession… in all the executives of Planned Parenthood, who he says, “have blood dripping from their fangs.” He really should just write some fan-fiction for the show Supernatural, at this point.
- November 2nd, 2015: Klingenschmitt responds to an interview with noted atheist Richard Dawkins asking some scientific proof of God’s existence by offering his own “scientific method” of how God exists. HINT: It’s not very scientific.
- January 4th, 2016: Klingenschmitt blames the Republican Party’s inability to defund Planned Parenthood on… demonic influence, of course!
- January 5th, 2016: Klingenschmitt has a hot take on a court ruling, chafing at the news that a Massachusetts court found that a Catholic school discriminated against a man when it rescinded a job offer to him after learning that he was gay and married, by declaring that the lawsuit demonstrates that gay people are driven by a “demonic spirit of lust” to persecute Christians.
- January 5th, 2016: Klingenschmitt comes out hard in support of Ammon Bundy and his militia after they seized of a federal building a in protest of the resentencing of Steven and Dwight Hammond for arson on federal property, even going as far as to call for the execution, as in killing of, the judge that served on the Hammonds’ trial.
- May 26th, 2016: Alright, don’t try and make any sense of this logic, but on his show, Klingenschmitt argued that allowing a female Muslim soldier at The Citadel to wear a headscarf would lead to non-Muslim female soldiers being raped, lying and claiming a passage in the Quran argues that soldiers can do so during times of war. Maybe it’s just me, but maybe a chaplain with a history of getting the content from the Bible wrong shouldn’t be trusted to properly interpret the Quran, either. Especially when he comes to the same conclusions about it as the monsters in ISIS.
- May 27th, 2016: Klingenschmitt calls for an exorcism to be performed on Caitlyn Jenner, who he says is specifically being affected by “a spirit of insanity”.
- June 28th, 2016: Klingenschmitt decides it’s a great time to also start declaring which children are demonically possessed, accusing an Alaskan transgendered track and field athlete in school as being afflicted with “a demonic spirit of cowardice”.
- August 1st, 2016: Klingenschmitt declares that California’s public school history curriculum containing LGBT history was subjecting students to a rare kind of demon, a “pedophile spirit of abuse”, warning that “children nationwide will be infected with this monstrosity”.
- September 26th, 2016: Klingenschmitt diagnoses Hillary Clinton, a life-long Methodist who once taught Sunday School classes, with being “possessed by a demonic spirit of hatred” for Christians.
That’s not even ALL the Gordon Klingenschmitt stories from the past year. Again, the website Right Wing Watch does a pretty damned good job of keeping tabs on Dr. Chaps. And, we’re a bit relieved to report that Gordon Klingenschmitt lost his bid at moving up into the Colorado State Senate on June 29th, 2016. We’re not positive that this means we’ll have seen the last of his political career, and the fact that actual GOP candidates for president like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee willingly met with him and sought out his endorsement. He’s enough of a fanatic that we’re thinking he’s going to keep on running for office while spouting insanity on his cable access show for years to come. Hopefully at some point, the GOP realizes they should cut ties with this deranged zealot before his toxic presence alienates any more sane potential voters they might want to win over.