|
The Secret Antigay U.S. Money Behind The WCF and the Global Evangelical War on LGBT Rights
[  image, left: "The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today" (B&H Publishing Group, 2003), which states "[homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany" and is currently distributed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the top American organizations participating in WCF events. The ADF is linked to anti-LGBT rights activism in nations spanning three continents, from the United States and Belize to Russia. In 2012, ADF received over 25% of its funding from the National Christian Foundation; also in 2012, ADF CEO and President Alan Sears told the World Congress of Families VI, in Madrid, "[I]n the course of the now hundreds of cases the Alliance Defense Fund has now fought involving this homosexual agenda, one thing is certain: there is no room for compromise with those who would call evil 'good.' "]
By its own description, the event known as The Gathering - whose attending nonprofit foundations give out, according to a Twocare.org analysis, over $1 billion dollars a year in grants - was launched in 1985 from a meeting at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of The Fellowship, which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Featured speakers have included Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Alan Sears (The Gathering 2013), Focus on The Family President Jim Daly (The Gathering 2011) Speakers scheduled this year for The Gathering 2014 include NYT columnist David Brooks, a frequent National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered and The Diane Rehm Show. Among those Joining Brooks at The Gathering 2014 will be Terry Parker, co-founder and board member of the National Christian Foundation, which since 2005 has given over $1.5 million dollars to the His Servants ministry of Don Schmierer, producer and vendor of a Fieldstead & Company-commissioned line of "ex-gay" books and curricula translated into dozens of languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Schmierer co-starred, along with Scott Lively, in a March 2009 Kampala, Uganda anti-gay conference widely credited with dramatically ratcheting up anti-LGBT hatred in that nation.
In 1997 at The Gathering [link to audio, link to transcript], Don Schmierer was part of a special team - assembled by Fieldstead & Company of Howard Ahmanson, Jr. (Ahmanson has been described at The Gathering as one of its original members, and his Fieldstead & Co. was the second biggest funder backing the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8) - that solicited funding from The Gathering's deep pocketed investors to finance a Fieldstead-commissioned master plan to combat "organized homosexuality". Masterminding the plan was former CIA analyst and author Herbert Schlossberg, husband of current Alliance Defending Freedom board member Terry Schlossberg. In 2006 Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told The Gathering that the "second greatest threat:" to America, besides "radical Islamists" was "radical homosexuals". In 2013 The Gathering advertised a special briefing from Alan Sears on the ADF's ongoing legal work, which has included providing legal support for Proposition 8 in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a major role in the cases that led up to the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, and also advocacy for the "religious freedom" bills that flooded into state legislatures in early 2014.
The Secret Antigay U.S. Money Behind The WCF and the Global Evangelical War on LGBT Rights | 0 comments ( topical, 0 hidden)
|
||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
print page
