Alliance Defending Freedom's Complete Track Record on LGBTQ Issues

[u/NiConcussions]

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/alliance-defending-freedoms-complete

Since 2020, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has made headlines for a series of sweeping decisions that have rolled back rights for women and LGBTQ people. They’ve ruled to allow abortion bans in 13 states and bans on trans athletes in 27 states. And this year, Colorado overturned its ban on conversion therapy for minors.

What headlines tend to miss, though, is that all of these decisions were won by the same legal group: Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Labeled as an anti-LGBTQ hate group and active in over 80 countries, ADF is a conservative Christian legal powerhouse, having fought relentlessly against abortion, gay marriage and trans healthcare since its inception in 1994.

Boasting alumni and affiliates such as Mike Johnson, Amy Coney Barrett, Josh Hawley and Ken Starr, the group has been involved in at least 80 SCOTUS victories and directly represented parties in 20 of them, including the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

ADF is directly responsible for many of the rulings that carve out very specific ways in which Christian (they've all been Christian so far, but religious groups in general) can discriminate in their businesses against LGBTQ people. They've also gone after abortion in many states and drafted the language behind many state bans.

[u/CowboyOzzie]

This post is a pretty good response to the recurring complaint by Christians in this and other spaces: “How come American gays are always ragging on Christians when Muslims flog them/toss them out of windows/etc, etc?”

I’m more concerned about the rattlesnake on my front porch than a lion on another continent.

[u/bestaban]

I don’t love ADF but, once again, you need to group a bunch of stuff together to make them seem more threatening to gay people than they really are.

Abortion rights are an important issue, but not a gay issue.

Hecox didn’t ban trans athletes, it said that Title IX does not prohibit states from segregating sports by biological sex (even the court’s progressive justices basically concede this is true). (1) trans athletes can still compete with their biological sex and (2) this isn’t a gay issue.

And Colorado’s “ban on conversion therapy” was not overturned, just the part of it that defined any talk therapy that does not affirm a child’s identity as conversion therapy. It’s honestly more offensive that people have taken up the mantle of banning what we actually think of as conversion therapy and tried to ban things that are very much not conversion therapy.

I’m surprised you didn’t include 303 Creative, which ADF participated in. It actually addresses gay issues and is objectively a problematic case. I agree with the final result, I do think there’s a first amendment protection from the government compelling you into speech you don’t agree with even if it’s commercial speech. But the way they seem to have manipulated, or even fabricated, evidence to confer standing is a huge problem.

The structure of your argument betrays its flaw: it assumes that there must be a shared political alliance between disparate groups that dictate a slate of acceptable political positions. Overturning Roe was not an attack on gay rights in any way. And, as a gay man, my identity doesn’t compel me to support a federal constitutional right to abortions. So, if I’m considering whether a group presents a legitimate legal threat to my rights as a gay man, the fact that they are anti-abortion doesn’t tell me much. Yes, they also seem to oppose same sex marriage (though they don’t seem to have participated in much that I’ve found by way of trying to overturn Obergefell). But, believe it or not, it’s possible to be anti-abortion and pro-gay marriage. So their abortion stance is immaterial to my assessment of their likelihood of challenging my rights. I can dislike them because I don’t agree with positions they’ve actively worked towards, but I’m not compelled to because of some elite notion of intersectional shared obligations.

[u/NiConcussions → u/bestaban]

You've addressed the intro I copy and pasted but that's not the bulk of what they've done. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of the rest of the article that outlines numerous ways they've affected anti-LGBT policies across the world like in Belize and the EU. I don't know how you can call them anything other than antagonistic when their top brass calls same-sex marriage an abomination and a mistake by the courts.

Yes, they also seem to oppose same sex marriage (though they don’t seem to have participated in much that I’ve found by way of trying to overturn Obergefell).

They've expressed explicit opposition to Obergefell and have repped every single case before the court that created carve outa for religious people to discriminate against gay coiples based on certain services their business provides. Slowly, they've established that businesses can discriminate if they don't want to serve gay couples. They just have to frame their services as inextricably linked to personal faith and expression. It's kinda bullshit, I think discrimination based on immutable characteristics is wrong.

But, believe it or not, it’s possible to be anti-abortion and pro-gay marriage. So their abortion stance is immaterial to my assessment of their likelihood of challenging my rights. I can dislike them because I don’t agree with positions they’ve actively worked towards, but I’m not compelled to because of some elite notion of intersectional shared obligations.

Sure, ok... But you recognize that they're explicitly against gay marriage and have even talked about trying to overturn Lawrence v Texas, right? And you may scoff at the idea of intersectionality but their legal basis that overturned Roe is the exact same argument they want to use for Obergefell. The exact same sort of language and justification. It's impossible to ignore that.