Danita Kilcullen
The co-founder of a Florida Tea Party group compared Log Cabin Republicans to gay “thugs” and complained they have taken control of the local party in Broward County and are pushing a progressive platform.
The New York Daily News reported Thursday that Danita Kilcullen wrote the slur in an email early in November as she expressed her displeasure at nondiscrimination legislation, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which was up for debate in Congress.
She denounced the bill that would force her to “hire someone with orange hair, body/neck/face covered with tattoos, multiple piercings, or a man in a dress … or for that matter, a demonstrative effeminate male or purposeful butch-looking female,” she wrote, according to an email obtained by the Sun-Sentinel.
Her scathing attack added, “The Log Cabins are the same lobbyist organization that has all but taken over BREC (Broward Republican Executive Committee) … Keep in mind, this is a thug organization with only their own ‘special interests’ in play.”
The message was denounced by Broward County Republican Chair Tom Truex, who complained about the Tea Party splintering the conservative movement with their aggression.
Kilcullen has been active in the local Tea Party effort since its founding in 2009, but has previously courted controversy, when she was arrested in 2011 for allegedly kicking a police officer with a 3-inch stiletto high heel.
The tea partier told the the Broward/Palm Beach New Times the run-in with the law came because she was fighting “injustice” and trying to use the bathroom at the Embassy Suites hotel in Boca Raton.
Police say she appeared intoxicated when she began screaming obscenities at security protecting a private function at the hotel. After a scuffle, police say she resisted arrest and kicked a police officer twice in the chest with her spiky heel.
She pleaded guilty to trespassing and a lesser charge of misdemeanor resisting arrest in October 2011 and was sentenced to 20 hours of community service. Then in 2013, she was accused of racism when she responded to a tweet by R&B singer Toni Braxton after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin’s murder.
“I too am embarrassed to be an American when our government and society fail to empower and protect all people,” Braxton tweeted in reaction.
Kilcullen took to her personal Facebook account in a message aimed at Braxton, “Yo, girl, you can’t take America’s justice system? Go be an African!!”
