The College Republican Federation of Virginia is calling for a Republican Party chair in Central Virginia to apologize or resign over a Facebook post in which he claimed homosexuality was linked to pedophilia and largely caused by trauma.
Melvin Adams, chair of the 5th District Republican Committee, said on Sunday that he was attempting to defend an earlier poster, whom he said was a victim of child abuse.
Adams claimed last week that the majority of people “trapped” in homosexuality were abused by men as children, had dominant mothers, or were severely bullied.
“What is so shocking and sad to me is how this behavior is now being normalized and even experimentation is being encouraged right in our schools,” Adams wrote.
Adams was responding to an earlier poster, who claimed that the majority of people “lured to homosexuality” did so because they were “led by the hand of an older man.”
“Normalizing homosexuality also helps normalize pedophilia and articles in the Research Community have already written about it,” the poster wrote.
“I absolutely agree with that statement,” Adams said in the “Virginia's 5th Congressional District GOP Voters” Facebook group.
In response, the College Republican Federation of Virginia called Adams’ comments “abhorrent” and demanded that he apologize or step down. That call followed similar ones from college Republican groups at The University of Virginia and Longwood University. The groups said the comments were out of line with the values of the party.
Adams and the Republican Party of Virginia did not respond to requests for comment.
But in a Facebook post on Sunday, Adams wrote that the poster he was responding to was a victim of child abuse, and his comments were intended to support that person.
“However, some didn’t see that and only saw what they considered an attack on the LGBT community,” Adams wrote. “That was not my intention. To those who were offended, I’m sorry.”
Courtney Britt, a University of Richmond law student and chair of the federation, said she had spoken to Adams about his posts, and asked him to make his most recent post public.
“I also expressed disappointment in the substance because it didn’t acknowledge the agreement with a comment that suggests similarities between homosexuality and pedophilia, or the way the comment victimized the LGBTQ+ community,” Britt said.
The controversy is part of a broader debate among conservatives in the district sparked by its GOP Congressman, Denver Riggleman, who angered some Republicans when he officiated a gay marriage this summer.
In July, members of The 5th Congressional District Republican Committee introduced a motion to censure Congressman Riggleman for officiating the marriage of two gay Republicans. Adams said the motion was out of order, according to the Roanoke Times, and it ultimately failed to pass.
In recent days, former Republican Governor George Allen and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. have voiced their support for Riggleman.
