The Senator from Legislative District 9 continues to abuse her appointment by voting in lone opposition to her caucus in support of dangerous bills like HB2112.
Internet censorship bills like HB2112, for whatever they purport to be, have one unifying goal: to scrub every trace of LGBTQ+ life from the Web. Indeed, one of the lead sponsors of the Federal bill KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), Senator Marsha Blackburn, admitted that her top priority was “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture.” Here in Arizona, HB2112 mimics the language of Project 2025, which threatens teachers and librarians with aggressive criminal charges and calls for the elimination of any website that gives trans people a voice or acknowledges their existence. Read it in their own words:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Like Project 2025, HB2112 is backed by the Heritage Foundation — in fact the only two organizations publicly signed in on our state legislature’s Request to Speak system to support the bill are Heritage Action for America and the arch-conservative Center for Arizona Policy, an affiliate of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the nation’s leading anti-trans hate-group-cum-legal-firm.
Now at this point you might be asking, isn’t it possible that Kiana Sears was simply uninformed or unaware of these issues? Isn’t it possible that she took the bill at face value and just made a snap judgment? Do we really have to conclude that she voted for this bill because she is more aligned with the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom than with the half-dozen pro-LGBTQ+ civil rights and community advocacy groups signed in against the bill via Request to Speak? Isn’t it possible that she’s just bad at her job and not that she hates trans kids? If only. Let’s roll the tape, and watch Senator Sears stand awkwardly in the foreground (watch for her to enter the frame around 0:30) while her colleague, Senator Ortiz, explains the dangers of the bill in detail:
It’s shameful. And it doesn’t end there.
On HB2195, with two Republicans absent, Senator Sears cast the deciding vote in favor of yet another Internet censorship bill that could be used to target LGBTQ+ content. Had she voted with the rest of her Democratic colleagues, the bill would have failed; a rare opportunity thrown away for no clear reason.
Over the course of her short term in office, she’s voted against her caucus again and again. She was the lone Democrat to vote for HB2109, a bizarre and xenophobic conspiracy theory bill about organ harvesting; one of only two Senate Democrats to vote for HB2611, a completely unnecessary bill with disastrous consequences designed to redirect accountability away from the prosecutors and police who mishandled the Preston Lord case; one of only three to support HB2880, a bill that would criminalize protests on university campuses in the same way the Trump administration has targeted pro-Palestinian speech; and again the sole Democratic vote for SB1461, a bill that exists only to make it harder to fire police officers, as if that were somehow too easy. And the trend persists across a myriad of bills, with the appointed Senator Sears voting with the Republican caucus time after time.
Kiana Sears is a failed politician squandering her constituents’ votes in order to act out her transphobic and authoritarian fantasies. One can only hope that someone who doesn’t hate trans kids runs for Senate in the next LD9 primary.