“So I, I just, I really don’t care for them,” he said in 2013. “You know what, you want to be gay? Fine. Do it over in your own corner.”

Mr. Higbie, a former Navy SEAL who served two tours in Iraq, also said that those getting government assistance “at any given time during any election cycle” should “not get to vote at the subsequent election.” He said that 75 percent of people with post-traumatic stress disorder don’t have it, and “they’re either milking something for a little extra money in disability or they’re just, they honestly are just lying.”

Mr. Higbie also expressed disdain for Muslims several times.

“People say, ‘You know, you’re so harsh,’” he said on Warrior Talk Radio in August 2014. “I was called an Islamophobe and I was like: ‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m not afraid of them. I don’t like them. Big difference.’ And they were like, ‘Well, you’re racist.’ I was like, ‘Fine, if that’s the definition of it, then I guess I am.’”

In 2013, Mr. Higbie was fresh out of the Navy, and transitioning back to civilian life, he said on Saturday.

“When I came out of the military, I struggled with how to accept Islam because of my experience overseas, as do a lot of veterans,” he said. “Those comments were directed at the faction that was either radicalized or tolerant of the radicalized ones.”

As for his views about homosexuality, Mr. Higbie said that he had recently developed some “very close friends” who are gay, and had learned that “it’s a live-and-let-live thing.”