Editor’s note: Watermark cautions this story includes anti-LGBTQ language. Robert Foster photo via his gubernatorial campaign’s website.
Former Mississippi State Representative Robert Foster, a Republican who represented House District 28 in Northwestern Mississippi from 2016-2020, tweeted out last week that transgender people and their allies need to be shot dead by firing squad.
Although Twitter deleted the post, pictured below, as well as Foster’s reply in the thread, he has continued to tweet transphobic remarks.
Foster, who campaigned for the governor’s chair in 2019 lists himself on his Twitter bio as a “Man of Faith, and Constitutional Conservative.”
Two days after the initial tweet Foster tweeted:
Spencer Ritchie, the former executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party from 2014 to 2017 and who is now on the Mississippi Ethics Commission, criticized Foster’s tweet and expressed his distaste with Foster’s blatant transphobia:
Mississippi Free Press journalist Ashton Pittman noted; Foster, who runs Cedar Hill Farm, an agritourism business in DeSoto County, Miss., served as a state representative from 2016 until 2020, where he authored the state’s current death penalty law in 2017, allowing for executions by gas chamber, electrocution and firing squad. He placed third in the 2019 Republican primary for governor after making national headlines for refusing to allow women journalists to ride along in his truck on the campaign trail despite allowing male journalists to do so.
The Mississippi Free Press requested an interview with Foster about his transphobic tweets but he sent a message declining the invitation.
“I said what I said,” he wrote, adding to what he had tweeted. “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”
Pittman also reported that Foster’s tweet followed anti-trans remarks from other Republicans in the state and across the country. Less than three hours before Foster’s tweet, his former opponent, Gov. Tate Reeves, mocked President Joe Biden and his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, for not answering a question related to gender and transgender issues.
In 2021, Gov. Reeves signed a bill into law banning transgender students from participating on school sports teams that match their gender.
