Screenshot : RNC in Cleveland ( YouTube )

A Republican Trump supporter running for Congress informed her Twitter followers last week that a new law protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community only passed because black people in Cleveland are illiterate and don’t attend weekly worship services.


That’s the gospel according to Beverly Goldstein, the Republican candidate for Ohio’s 11th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Goldstein took to Twitter to boost her congressional campaign and promote the Republican anti-gay, “religious freedom” ministry by asking everyone in the Cleveland area to turn to their neighbor and say something homophobic.

According to the Plain Dealer, on Tuesday, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Council joined 20 other municipalities in Ohio that have passed ordinances banning discrimination of the basis of sexual preference and gender identity or expression. T he new laws “target equal access to employment, housing, and public accommodations, including access to public bathrooms and locker rooms” and creates a three-person Commission on Human Rights to levy fines and order protections in cases of discrimination.


But Goldstein, a self-described MAGA-Ohioan running against black Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH) suggested that the pro-LGBTQ rights legislation is directly tied to illiteracy in Cleveland’s inner city and pleaded for a legal challenge to the newly-created law that simply extended the same legal protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people that had already been afforded to the already protected classes of race, color, religion, military status, national origin, disability, age, ancestry, familial status and sex.

“If CCC [Cuyahoga County Council] had LITERATE inner-city church-attending Black voters following this issue=entirely opposite outcome,” Goldstein tweeted, apparently using the Donald Trump Stylebook for Grammar and Capitalization.

Goldstein, who the Plain Dealer notes is mounting her second run against Fudge (“Run against fudge,” coincidentally, is also a rarely-used euphemism for diarrhea) is a longtime advocate for adult literacy, although she has curiously neglected to define Trumpisms like “covfefe” and “anonynynynymous.”


Goldstein was unavailable to comment because she was attending the Midwest Regional Conference for the National Action Network, the activist organization founded by one of America’s most prodigious users of multisyllabic exclamations, Rev. Al Sharpton. In her absence, the candidate’s campaign manager and husband issued an explanation of the tweet:

“If most of them understood that this ordinance would allow transgender males, or sex offenders who masquerade as transgender males, to use women’s bathrooms regularly used by mothers and daughters, thereby endangering the safety of girls and women, they probably would have brought pressure to bear on their elected county representatives not to bring the resolution in the first place,” Michael Goldstein said. “But those who cannot read cannot be expected to know about the negative effects of the resolution.”


Goldstein’s opponent, Congresswoman Fudge called Goldstein’s tweet “ill-informed, racist and homophobic,” and refused to dignify it with a response, while Phillip Robinson, a black state representative, said that “the majority of Americans including residents here in Cuyahoga County agree with me that this is a matter of equal rights and basic human decency.”

In response, the Apostle Paul issued a statement that may not have been read by the Beverly Goldstein and the legion of functionally literate, white Christian Conservatives who elected Donald Trump: