ADF's David Cortman speaks to reporters outside the US Supreme Court on March 25, 2014, after oral arguments challenging the Affordable Care Act's mandate for birth control coverage.
When the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last week on the "The State of Religious Liberty in America," they brought in a representative of the notoriously anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom to testify. The group, armed with some $45 million to fund litigation, has helped inspire a wave of transphobic bathroom bills that have been introduced across the country in recent years. In fact, the group not only testified on behalf of a South Dakota bathroom bill targeting transgender students (and later vetoed by the GOP governor), it offered to provide pro bono legal service to defend the measure if it was enacted.
Finally, the ADF received the appropriate moniker this year of being labeled a hate group courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Media Matters has since assembled the top 10 "need to know" items about ADF, “the nation’s largest anti-LGBTQ hate group.” Here's a sampling from Rachel Percelay:
1. SPLC Labeled ADF A Hate Group Because Of Its Extreme, Demonizing Lies About LGBT People. SPLC added ADF to its list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups because ADF’s leaders and affiliated lawyers have “regularly demonized LGBT people, falsely linking them to pedophilia, calling them ‘evil’ and a threat to children and society, and blaming them for the ‘persecution of devout Christians.’” As SPLC has repeatedly clarified, it does not list organizations as anti-LGBTQ hate groups on the basis of “opposition to same-sex marriage or the belief that the Bible describes homosexual activity as sinful.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 2/15/17, 2/15/17] [...]
4. ADF Has Expanded Its Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBTQ Extemism Internationally. While ADF has largely run out of options for promoting the criminalization of homosexuality in America, the group has taken its anti-sodomy agenda overseas. ADF has actively worked to promote and defend anti-sodomy laws that criminalize gay sex in Jamaica, Belize and India. In 2010, the United Nations granted special consultant status to ADF, allowing the group to help shape international human rights policy and treaties. More recently, the group has become involved in the Organization of American States, where ADF’s mission has been battling “abortion and radical sexual agendas.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 2/15/17; Media Matters, 11/19/14]
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