MODESTO, California (LifeSiteNews) – The former executive director of a California LGBT organization was among more than a dozen men arrested in a recent sting operation for trying to solicit sex with children.

On January 8, the Modesto Bee reported the arrest of seventeen men, mostly from Stanislaus and Merced counties, as the result of a months-long, multi-agency operation headed by the Turlock Police Department to apprehend people trying to use internet chat rooms to “meet with underage children for the purpose of sexual activity.” The suspects were speaking online to undercover police officers they believed to be children as young as thirteen.

“I am proud of Detective Gina Giovacchini and our team for their efforts to intercept those looking to harm children in our community,” said Turlock Police Chief Jason Hedden.

Among the suspects was 42-year-old Gerad Slayton of Modesto, who is revealed in a follow-up Bee report to have been the recently-appointed executive director of the Modesto-based Rainbow Resource Center (RRC), a provider of LGBT “health” services that describes itself as a “Non-Profit Queer Resource Center serving Stanislaus County. Not Your Typical Pride Center!”

On January 9, RRC released a statement stating that Slayton’s alleged crimes occurred “outside working hours and off premises,” that it “take[s] these allegations with the utmost seriousness,” that they “do not represent our organization’s values or mission,” and that “we are addressing the issue within” the center.

On January 17, the group issued a follow-up statement revealing that Slayton “is no longer employed with the Rainbow Resource Center.”

Slayton’s interim replacement as executive director, Alex Gutierrez, told the Bee that Slayton had been in the role for just six weeks before the arrest, and had not been a subject of complaints up to that point.

“We’re obviously ready for, for whatever happens, but, you know, this was a personal decision made by one of our employees and it’s unfortunate,” Gutierrez said. “So, it is, you know, very impactful for us. We are trying to get through it.”

“He was new in that position and was working mostly with kind of staff roles,” he continued. “So I can’t say that he didn’t have, you know, any contact with people, with peers in general, you know, not to say zero contact, but we have definitely other layers of [contact] when you first come in, you don’t obviously meet the executive director.”

While the Rainbow Resource Center disavows Slayton’s “personal decision,” it has no similar ambivalence toward legally-permitted means of sexualizing children.

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It touts its “Legacy Literacy Library” as “a safe haven for banned books” in a “time when censorship is silencing diverse voices.” LGBT activists have falsely applied the “book banning” label to efforts to prevent children in public schools and libraries from being exposed to books with sexual content or an adult ideological agenda. Many such books in various jurisdictions around the country have been found to contain outright pornographic depictions of sex acts as well as permission and/or encouragement for minors to engage in promiscuity and sexual experimentation.

The group also calls to “protect all drag artists” against “protests,” without distinguishing between the content of the protested drag shows or the age of their target audiences. In recent years, drag has emerged as one of LGBT activists’ favored tools for exposing and acclimating children to the concepts of gender fluidity and sexual experimentation, via “family-friendly” drag shows at schools and community events, or Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) events in which crossdressers read books to children, often at public libraries.

DQSH organizers admit that the concept is intended to give children “unabashedly queer role models,” capture the “gender fluidity of childhood,” teach children to “defy rigid gender restrictions,” and mold them into “bright lights of change in their communities.”

Many of these events have exposed children to sexually perverted performances and drag queens who range from X-rated performers in their day jobs to convicted pedophiles and prostitutes, as well as materials promoting sexual promiscuity, including distributing condoms.

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