Christian Nationalism is Cancer: Episode 1: The Alliance Defending Freedom
Christian Nationalism is Cancer: Episode 1: The Alliance Defending Freedom
My New Series Detailing the Christian Nationalist Hate Groups Across the U.S. and the Globe
Have you ever wondered who is behind the anti-trans laws in the United States?
Do you ever wonder what groups are behind the bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community as a whole across the world, preventing LGBTQ+ people from accessing affordable housing, adoption agencies, & access to education?
This series is for you!
For those who are interested in finding out who is behind these bills, I will give you a number of groups that are helping this assault on democracy and this assault on our trans children.There's a great article detailing the most sinister part about these bills, in that they are being written by a few white Christian nationalist groups, such as:
Alliance Defending Freedom
Heritage Foundation
Family Research Council (created by Tony Perkins, hate monger and David Duke acolyte)
Moral Majority (Jerry Falwell Sr)
American College of Pediatricians
Eagle Forum (created by Handmaid's Tale inspiration Phyllis Schlafly)
American Family Association (creator of the group One Million Moms, when in reality it's just one mom yelling about Hallmark Christmas Movies)
Focus on the Family (founded by James Dobson, Mike Pence's role model)
Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (aka Project Blitz, National Prayer Breakfast)
Christian Voice
Kelsey Coalition
Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (led by James Kennedy, a leader in conversion therapy)
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
Family Policy Alliance
American Principles Project
Concerned Women for America (founded by Tim Lahaye, creator of the Left Behind books with Kirk Cameron)
Liberty Counsel (Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's SuperPAC)
International House of Prayer (IHOP)
Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP, led by Bill Gothard friend of the Duggars 19 kids & counting, who was funded by Hobby Lobby)
Bethel Church (Bethel Music & Jesus Culture)
Pacific Justice Institute
My series aims to expose the different Christian nationalist organizations that viciously attack and legislate against LGBTQ+ people across the U.S. and the world. This post will not only attack how vicious and virulent they are individually, but it will also expose their hypocrisy and perfidy within their ranks. I will start off with number one on the list and hopefully work my way down to the last one, citing my sources for you to see and observe.
This opening post will go after one of the worst groups of the bunch: Alliance Defending Freedom.
The ADF is far from some run-of-the mill church; it is one of the most dogmatic and virulent anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry organizations in the world.
By end of this post, it should become clear why what I said is not mere opinion but a fact through and through. This article should expose this improperly named group that is one of the worst organizations not only in the United States but also the world.
Without further ado…
Note: I do not attack anyone's religious faith or anyone's spirituality whenever I create these posts. These posts are not meant to act as a hate thread on religion in any way. I know not all religious people agree with these groups, and I want to keep the attention heightened to these groups and the power & influence they wield in order to expose their virulent bigotry.
Who is the Alliance Defending Freedom?
This is what Alliance Defending Freedom says they are, in their own words:
In 1993, a group of 35 Christian leaders came together to build a ministry that would defend your religious freedom—before it was too late. These founders knew that it would take an alliance to keep the doors open for the Gospel in the United States.
Like the Body of Christ, the alliance is one body made up of many parts. Attorneys play different roles than pastors. Business leaders play different roles than legislators.
Each person must play his or her particular role (they totally disregard nonbinary people, don't they?), under one shared vision, to ensure that religious freedom thrives. For more than 25 years, ADF has been advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, freedom of speech, and marriage and family.
That's what they say they are.
Their slogan is For Faith. For Justice.
However, it really becomes evident upon studying the ADF that they are not for faith or for justice for everyone. It becomes blatantly clear that this is a group that only stands for Christian supremacy and for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
If your city, state, country, or nation is introducing an anti-LGBTQ+ bill, more than likely that bill was either written by or proposed by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
For some reason, you can see their anti-trans & anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda ads all over Youtube, monetizing while advocating for conversion therapy, banning LGBTQ+ kids from foster care, and banning gay adoption.
I didn’t post the actual reaction video, because I didn’t want them to be monetized from it. Sam Collins does a great job breaking down the errancies in the ADF’s video and shows their complaints to be rooted in nothing but bigotry.
Carlos Maza from Media Matters does a great job showing just what the ADF’s main interests are as a group. It’s none too pretty.
In addition to writing this 2021 North Carolina bill that would force teachers to out students who display "gender nonconforming behavior" and not allowing healthcare to our trans community to anyone under 21, over the last 28 years, the Alliance Defending Freedom has fought on cases involving:
Prohibiting marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for same-sex couples;
Attacks on LGBTQ non-discrimination laws, as well as bans on conversion therapy for minors;
Challenges to accessing contraception; and
Supporting the criminalization of abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
The group that fought for that cake baker who refused a gay couple? The ADF.
Hobby Lobby case of religious groups refusing to give healthcare contraception to its workers?—Alliance Defending Freedom!
Arizona's "Don't serve the Gays" law? —Alliance Defending Freedom wrote that!
One school attempting to implement an ADF-style bathroom policy sought to make trans students wear a bright green wristband so that school administrators could identify them and ensure they did not use the bathroom that corresponded to their gender identity.
(A federal appeals court found the school policy unconstitutional, and the school district settled for the case for $800,000.)
If you thought that the Alliance Defending Freedom’s work was only confined to the 50 States, you would be sadly mistaken.
ADF's work stretches beyond the United States; ADF has, for instance:
championed Belize’s archaic anti-sodomy law, which allows for the persecution and imprisonment of gay people.
They have also spent over $20 million in Africa in attempting to write bills that criminalize sodomy and LGBTQ+ existence in Africa, including the Uganda Bill to sentence gay people to death.
They worked in conjunction with Lou Engle and the International House of Prayer (IHOP) (who shall be discussed at a later time).
Uganda Ratifies Anti-LGBTQ Laws With Support From American Evangelicals
When GOP state legislators began to push “bathroom bills” in 2016 and 2017, it was ADF that ghostwrote the model legislation and lobbied for it behind the scenes.
The ADF didn't seem to care that not allowing a trans person to use the restroom actually increases the suicide risk for trans kids, harming the mental health of our children.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/transgender-bathrooms-suicide/483351/
Right now, they are fighting the trans health care laws in the UK, as well as the dignity to die laws in the UK, allowing for terminally ill patients who feel pain at end of life to choose euthanasia.
They have platformed people like Paul Conrathe, described here:
He (Conrathe) is also chair director of Eagle House Group, a “family run, independent provider of autism schools in London and Surrey” which uses practices like applied behavioral analysis (ABA) that are widely regarded as reparative by autistic self-advocates.
Eagle House Group, and by extension Conrathe, went under fire in 2007 when it was discovered that they rented the Banham Marshalls College grounds from George Robson’s estate.
Robson died hours after sentencing, as well.
Conrathe, of course, insisted that there was no contact between Robson and the students through Eagle House, falling back on their reputation (despite said reputation including, say, ABA).
Given the case’s heavy focus on fertility and informed consent, and transphobic parent groups wringing their hands about autism, it’s no wonder he was chosen for the job. But at whose expense?
To make his argument, Conrathe had to recruit “expert witnesses” of dubious backgrounds and “expertise.”
One such expert was the likes of Paul Hruz, an Associate Professor of Paediatrics, Endocrinology, and Diabetes at Washington University.
Hruz has presented at a number of far-right panels targeting trans youth, including at the Heritage Foundation, despite his own university denouncing his expertise.
So, they have openly endorsed a group of people that are discredited doctors and have ties to child abuse.
It only gets worse from there:
Many people may not remember the case of Terri Schiavo, a woman who in 2006 went on life support due to a tragic cardiac arrest that left her in a vegetative state where she was deemed never to recover from.
The case gained major media attention due to the fact that President George W. Bush and many right-wing Christian groups fighting Terri's husband’s rights to conceivably remove the tube from Terri for over 7 years.
Terri would end up dying in 2005 after the feeding tube was removed.
One of the groups that persistently fought against Terri's husband and subsequently any euthanasia rights was Alliance Defending Freedom.
In the high profile Terri Schiavo case, ADF reportedly gave six-figure funding to the attorney representing her parents in their efforts to keep Schiavo on life support.
They along with other groups like the Family Research Council tried to brand Schiavo's husband, Michael, as a murderer who caused Terri to go braindead.
The Family Research Council lied according to law enforcement.
They made Michael a villain for wanting Terri to die with Dignity.
One instance had a person threaten Michael Schiavo's sister if Terri Schiavo were to die.
(We'll talk about the Family Research Council at a later date.)
The ADF is targeting the UK right now in terms of Dignity to Die cases right now, with Paul Conrathe trying to target euthanasia bills in the UK under the guise of religious freedom.
Here's a tweet thread that speaks about who Conrathe is. All credit to @mimmymum for the info.
Alliance Defending Freedom supports one of the most controversial (putting it nicely) doctors, Steven B. Levine.
Steven Levine defended abusers during the Catholic church sex abuse scandal, arguing that some victims may have “psychologically consented” and musing as to whether or not it really had long-term impacts on their well-being.
So trans kids and their parents can’t consent to puberty blockers that have known positive effects towards the health of our trans youth, but they can consent to being assaulted.
Here's a full excerpt verbatim Steven Levine wrote on this. This is from p.368 of his journal article:
The public believes that any sexual contact with a priest ruins the life of the victim.
What the media hears from victims, victim groups, and lawyers who sue the dioceses for victims is that these pedophilic behaviors have ruined the lives of the adolescents. We know that psychological damage can be done to minors(and even older individuals) who engage in sexual activities with priests.
We clinicians who have dealt with victims, however, recognize that many variables come into play in determining the degree of life disruption and the duration of consequences caused by a specific trauma. Nowhere in this scenario is any public skepticism placed on the depictions of decades long suffering from one or two psychologically consensual nonviolent genital experiences with a priest.
The depictions of the consequences of these acts give the impression that there is something so destructive about what happened that gender identity, orientation, sexual function, and general mental health are inevitably jeopardized.
Many exaggerations abound, including that the gambling, drug abuse, depression, psychosis, and anxiety disorders of the victims were caused by the experience with the priest.
Is the sexual seduction of an adolescent minor more problem-producing than the family dysfunctions that led to personal friendship of priest and father abandoned adolescent?
Is the impact of the sexual encounters more powerful in producing lasting psychopathology than the social forces that led to adolescents residing in the orphanages where they first encountered a priest?
In our profound objection to sexual advantage-taking, we may be guilty of confusing our disapproval with the consequences of the act of which we disapprove.
So, as you can see, not only does he try to ameliorate the damages done by sex abuse by Catholic priests, he tries to turn the issues that come from it as originating from somewhere else, as if sex abuse is not that bad a problem.
Dr. Levine (I use the doctor term loosely) testified to the Pennsylvania state legislature his pseudoscience on conversion therapy with regards to trans youth.
He is an advocate for conversion therapy, despite the fact he said this on p. 17 of his report:
To my knowledge, there is no evidence beyond anecdotal reports that psychotherapy can enable a return to male identification for genetically male boys, adolescents, and men, or return to female identification for genetically female girls, adolescents and women.
So, Steven Levine is considered to be a top expert for the Alliance Defending Freedom, despite the fact none of his work has scientific evidence!
With all the proofs I stated in this post, it should be seen in plain view that Alliance Defending Freedom is not about defending freedom, but rather it's about stripping freedom from anyone who is not a conservative Christian.
Alliance Defending Freedom is a terrible organization, dedicated to harming LGBTQ+ people across the world, as well as removing the rights of anyone who lives their lives in what they deem as a "sinful" manner.
It should be plain and clear through this post that the Alliance Defending Freedom is a group so extreme in their views that they are ultimately deserving of title hate group, as stated by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Yes, the record of the SPLC is not perfect and spotless. However, it is oftentimes spot on in its assessments. This is one of those cases. The information in this report displays that the SPLC's designation of ADF as one of its hate groups is veritable.
The ADF’s overarching position on queer folk is that they should either be converted to heterosexuality or fired from their jobs and imprisoned because of being either a non-hetero sexual orientation or a different gender identity (and both likewise if a person happens to be both).
In my estimation, there is no one who is more deserving of that moniker of hate group than that.
So, if you are ever see an anti-LGBTQ+ bill being brought forth by any legislator, whether in the state legislature, Capitol Hill, or an international legislative body , it is reasonable to assume that in some way, shape, or form that the Alliance Defending Freedom is behind it as the perpetrator of mendacity.
It is not only up to everyone to call out the Alliance Defending Freedom as the hate group they are, but it is imperative that everyone call out any politician who accepts their help and/or pre-written legislation as complicit in bigoted authoritarianism.
—Songbird
Endnotes:
A few years ago, Youtuber Illuminaughtii did an amazing video detailing more morbid details about the ADF, including its current president, Michael Farris (who was recently busted trying to help overturn the 2020 election results) & his history with Patrick Henry College's sexual assault scandals (the same Patrick Henry College that Madison Cawthorn went to for one semester).
I also have an article highlighting the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s president Michael Farris and his connections to corporal punishment in homeschooling.
Christian Nationalists Exporting Child Abuse Through Homeschooling
Thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post. I hope you have an excellent day, wherever you are nested in the world.
Stay Fierce, Stay Fly.
—Songbird 💜♠️🏹🂡
