BY TEDDY WARNER

This letter is primarily addressed to County Council candidate Gary Stradling, but I have chosen to use this format so that the voters of Los Alamos County can see my question too. I saw that Mr. Stradling posted a long and strange comment regarding LGBTQ+ individuals on Facebook and wanted to ask him to clarify his views. In this comment (available at the end of this letter), Mr. Stradling makes the following statements:

• “Mainstream nuclear family-forming, children-bearing and raising, heterosexual relationships, make up and enable most of our modern society.”
• “Some of our differences appear as limitations, keeping us from engaging in the full range of human experience. Some consider their own differences (e.g.: blind, deaf, gay, dwarfism) to be special, and their experience to be in a select, privileged community.”
• “People I know in this range of sexually-variant situations experience significant and lasting disturbance in their lives, and have had much unhappiness and dislocation. They do not have a clear path to the wonderful experiences I described of my family.”

I would like you (Mr. Stradling) to clarify a few questions that they bring up. I know you usually refuse to answer questions that you know you have unpopular beliefs on, calling them “national” or “irrelevant”, but you posted this comment on Monday as part of this campaign, so you should have no issues with these. Here are my questions:

• Why do you say that being gay is a limitation that prevents people “from engaging in the full range of the human experience”?
• In case you try to dodge the previous question with an answer such as “I meant it as other items in that list such as being blind”, why did you include “gay” with “blind, deaf, dwarfism”?
• Why do you think that LGBTQ+ individuals “experience significant and lasting disturbance in their lives”? What specifically do you mean by disturbance?
• Why did you delete your comment after I took a screenshot of it and shared it online? Was there something in there you did not want people seeing?

I hope to see your responses to my questions, and I hope to see no accusations of trolling, question dodging, or non-answers.