Audrain County Republicans held their annual Lincoln Day dinner on Thursday, April 27, with Missouri State Rep. Kent Haden, Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin, and Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft as keynote speakers.

With the legislative session coming down to the final weeks an update about what’s been going on was at the forefront of each speech with the theme centered around cultural and social issues.

The biggest of those cultural issues are transgender bills to ban different treatments and medications along with banning transgender athletes from sports not associated with their sex at birth.

Haden told the crowd of more than 100 that most of this year’s session's focus has been on things he never imagined the body would be debating.

“It’s a frustrating situation, to be honest with you,” Haden said. “We have a lot of social issues that probably I never thought we would be talking about. I never thought we’d be talking about cutting parts off of little boys and girls.”

Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin,  the Republican majority leader of the senate, also spoke about transgender issues and took issue with some of the terminology those on the other side of the issue use to describe surgeries.

“We have a lot of cultural issues that then translate into problems otherwise,” O’Laughlin said. “They always want to call it gender-affirming and I go ‘You know mutilating children is not an affirming thing to do.’

“We don’t think men should be competing in women’s sports. We passed a bill to put an end to that,” O’Laughlin added.

O’Laughlin said she believes many girls have autism or “are not satisfied with themselves” which leads to gender dysphoria. She said it’s not that lawmakers don’t care about the emotional stresses the children go through. She said children are being exploited.

“If you go to a gender dysphoria clinic they’ve been doing some pretty terrible things and we think that is wrong so we passed some bills to stop that,” O’Laughlin said.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was the keynote speaker for the event and also weighed in on the transgender issue. Ashcroft urged those in attendance to contact lawmakers and tell them to remove a sunset to a bill recently agreed to in the Senate. Republicans made a deal with Democrats to have the law sunset in four years to end a filibuster on the bill.

“We’ve got to get a handle on the fact that kids are being abused by surgeons,” Ashcroft said. “We’ve made some steps but we cannot allow our step to be a law that has a four-year sunset. 

“It’s either right or it’s wrong,” Ashcroft added. “And I’m here to tell you it’s wrong. You cannot make a man out of a woman or a woman out of a man. We need to stand up for kids.”

Haden and O’Laughlin also focused on the family. Haden said the family is being disintegrated and some people want to destroy the family structure.

“We have to keep our powder dry and be prepared and fight this,” Haden said. “They call it dysphoria. It is deep and it is wide and we need to get a hold of it.”

O’Laughlin agreed with Haden and also said a deep look needs to be taken into public schools. She said certain things are not being taught.

“It seems like things are going the wrong way,” O’Laughlin said. “We need to have children grow into adults who can read and do math and understand they have to go to work every day and be responsible for themselves. I don’t think we’ve taught children to be resilient as they should be.”

O’Laughlin also said the senate had recently completed work on the budget which included fully funding the expansion of Interstate 70.