Colorado Republicans Vote Out Party Chair Following Anti-Gay Posts

Colorado Republicans have voted to remove their party’s chairman amid mounting internal criticism of his leadership, including over recent posts that attacked the L.G.B.T.Q. community and accusations that he had fueled divisions within the party.

Dave Williams, a hard-line state representative who was elected to helm the Colorado Republican Party last year, was ousted on Saturday, two months after dozens of state Republican Party members signed a petition to hold the vote. Party members selected Eli Bremer, a former chairman of the party in El Paso County in Colorado, to serve out Mr. Williams’s term.

According to Michael J. Allen, a Republican district attorney in Colorado Springs, about 88 percent of the 182 or so eligible members voted for the motion at the Saturday meeting to remove Mr. Williams.

“There has been an open revolt to his leadership of the party across the state,” Mr. Allen said in an interview. “It has been an accumulation of things at the expense of party unity and real electoral progress.”

Mr. Allen, who prosecuted a 2022 mass shooting at an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs, said he was particularly sensitive about what he criticized as Mr. Williams’s “hate-fueled” posts and emails that vilified the L.G.B.T.Q. lifestyle, which included a call to burn all Pride flags.

In an email Sunday night, Mr. Williams denounced the meeting, which was held at a church in the municipality of Brighton, near Denver, as a “sham,” noting that it was “illegitimate” based on procedural grounds.