Mike Pence is as serious as a heart attack about running for president in 2024 and he’s collected quite a cast of characters to serve on his advisory board, all the way from Kellyanne Conway to Callista Gingrich to Larry Kudlow. The latest addition to this unholy alliance is Mike Farris, the president and CEO of the group Alliance Defending Freedom, which was named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016. ADF may be an alliance to defend somebody’s freedom, but it most assuredly is not the gays. Forget about sending them back to the closet, he wants to send them back to the middle ages. And Mike Pence slid this guy under the wire, intriguingly enough.
*SCOOP* The CEO of the religious right hate group Alliance Defending Freedom @AllianceDefends has been added to the list of Advisory Board members for @Mike_Pence new Advancing American Freedom group. @michaelfarris was not listed when the organization was launched on Wednesday pic.twitter.com/Nk3Y3tQopn
— Nick Surgey (@NickSurgey) April 9, 2021
ADF has spread lies about the LGBTQ+ community. It has, for example, linked being LGBTQ+ to pedophilia and claimed that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy society. ADF tries to couch its rhetoric in benign-sounding phrases, but the truth is that it works to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and restrict their rights for being who they are. […]
“The SPLC lists ADF as a hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex,” SPLC explained. “It has also supported laws that required the forced sterilization of transgender Europeans.” […]
ADF has played a role in the passage of religious exemption laws that lead to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, such as Mississippi’s HB 1523, and has litigated lawsuits that target transgender students in public schools by denying them access to bathrooms in accordance with their gender identities and attempting to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports. ADF is one of the groups pushing legislation on the state level — including Idaho’s HB 500, which was signed into law by Gov. Brad Little in March 2020 — as part of a nationwide campaign to exclude transgender girls and women in school sports and deny their identities. ADF is not only attempting to erase transgender people through its litigation and policy work but by deliberately misgendering them in media and on its website.
Anti-LGBTQ hate groups, like ADF, often try to justify their opposition to LGBTQ+ rights with rhetoric and harmful pseudoscience that demonizes LGBTQ+ people as threats to children, society and, often, public health.
In 2019, the SPLC documented a sharp increase in the number of anti-LGBTQ hate groups — a 43% increase over 2018.
The SPLC defines a hate group as an organization that, based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities, has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity — prejudices that strike at the heart of our democratic values and fracture society along its most fragile fault lines. The FBI uses similar criteria in its definition of a hate crime.
This is who Mike Pence is telling us that he is. This is who he has always told us that he is. Even Donald Trump said, in a conversation about gays, “Don’t ask that guy. He wants to hang them all.”
Dragging the RWNJ Republicans, kicking and screaming, back into the 19th Century from 1/5th of the way through the 21st.
Or trying to.
Oh, unfortunately I don’t think they’re all kicking and screaming. I think way too many of them are totally on the bandwagon.
There default position IMHO, is kicking and screaming about anything they can.
Amazing how many of these disgusting, hate-based groups always have to stick trigger words into their names: Freedom, Liberty, Patriot, Homeland, etc. They are none of those things, but insist on co-opting the words. Also, I’ve noticed the bigger the hypocrite, the bigger the flag they carry or display on their monster-sized trucks. Teeny peenys!
It’s just so damn sad that the most vocal idiots always seem to be cutting through all the gains our Nation has established over many years of confrontations and smear campaigns, along with actual violence against young people … concentration camps of mental washing systems, designed to convert the, “confused youth”, to a normalcy impossible for them to accept, when indeed, they are trying to express love and companionship to a partner of their choice … it is like Pence wanting to control every woman’s sexual activity, female, “healthy”, attitudes about birth control, never any reason to abort, and of course, showing results of periods and miscarriages, a sickness dwells in the Pence family …
This perverted clown needs forced sterilization for himself, no need to risk more Pence mentality out there ….
R’s have a real hard time with live and let live. They want to control anyone’s body that doesn’t conform to their notions of missionary-style-sex-in-marriage, even though a review of R scandals show they don’t practice what they preach. They don’t trust people enough to accept that people know who they are and how they want to live.
Whatever happened to the idea of ‘Christian’ purity? The hooded clean white sheets & the burning ‘sacred’ cross of jesus? Seemed such a good fashion choice for raping, murderous, ignorant, demons headed to church 2morrow after we castrate, beat, burn, & kill this n*gger.