Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a secret address to an infamous anti-LGBT hate group which advocates for criminalizing homosexuality. (And against many other civil rights for LGBT citizens.) The DOJ repeatedly declined to release the transcript of Sessions’ speech, which only appeared later in the week on a right wing site after a Freedom Of Information Act demand had been filed.
Just in from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
This week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lent the credibility of his office to a group committed to legalizing discrimination against the LGBT community. In a major speech to Alliance Defending Freedom at the group’s “Summit on Religious Liberty” in Dana Point, California, Sessions expressed sympathy for the group’s contention that its religious freedom is jeopardized by laws and court rulings that protect the rights of LGBT people.
SPLC President Richard Cohen noted the irony that the attorney general “would suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the law to the LGBT community.”
The ADF is, in fact, not about defending freedom, as its name says. Rather, it’s a hate group that cloaks itself in religion as it spreads demonizing lies about the LGBT community in this country and seeks to criminalize it abroad. If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail.
The group supports the fraudulent practice of gay-to-straight conversion therapy. Its first president, Alan Sears, has argued that pedophilia and homosexuality are “intrinsically linked” (a dangerous falsehood long employed by anti-LGBT hate groups). In 2003, its lawyers argued against the eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said sexual conduct between consenting adults is protected by the Constitution, a decision that struck down state laws criminalizing gay sex.
The ADF is representing the Colorado baker in his upcoming case before the US Supreme Court.