Kristen Waggoner, The Lawyer Who Helped Overturn Roe v. Wade, Is Coming For LGBTQ Rights
In 2008, Lucas Wilson moved to Lynchburg, VA to attend Liberty University for an evangelical education.
Wilson knew he was gay from the age of four. But as he got closer to religion, he remembers being taught that his queerness was something to fix. He says his time at Liberty University—the world’s largest evangelical college, which asks students to sign an honor code that prohibits any expression of LGBTQ identity—was awful. “Honest to goodness, I don’t think I’ve met such mean-spirited, nasty, nasty people in my life,” he told Uncloseted Media.
In 2021, nine years after Wilson graduated from Liberty, he joined a lawsuit alongside 39 other LGBTQ-identifying plaintiffs who also attended religious colleges. The lawsuit—convened by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project against the U.S. Department of Education—alleged that publicly-funded religious universities are unlawfully using religious exemptions to Title IX as a justification to discriminate against LGBTQ people. “Eliminating discrimination that targets LGBTQI+ students is a critical part of the Department’s mission," the Department of Education said in their motion to dismiss, arguing that the complaints should be transferred to regional departments or dismissed.
Amongst the legal defense was Kristen K. Waggoner, CEO and President of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group and a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.
Wilson, now 34, says he went to individual conversion therapy sessions with one Pastor on campus and also attended the university’s conversion therapy group known at the time as Band of Brothers. “I was meeting with this pastor once a week and he was telling me, ‘You're doing a good job, you're on the right track—you're going to overcome this,’” he says. “And so I always had this hope, this twisted hope … that I was going to be able to be straight.”
The Pastor and Liberty University did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.
At the end of August this year, Waggoner and her team succeeded in getting the case dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning that those with experiences like Wilson’s didn’t have a case. “Title IX’s religious exemption does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause,” the Court’s opinion states.
Meet Kristen Waggoner
Waggoner is a legal powerhouse in America’s conservative Christian landscape and is used to getting her way in the courtroom. She is renowned for her role in Dobbs v. Jackson which, in 2022, led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, rolling back abortion rights in over 14 states. Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban—for which Jackson Women’s Health Organization sued the state—is based on a model bill penned by ADF.
In a statement following the decision, Waggoner said the ruling was “a major victory for unborn children and their mothers,” and that ”today is a day of celebration, but the battle continues, as states either respect or shirk their responsibility to protect the life and health of women and children.”
On top of Waggoner’s work in rolling back women’s access to reproductive healthcare, she has over a decade of experience fighting against LGBTQ rights. She has argued three winning cases in the Supreme Court, and been counsel of record for at least six anti-LGBTQ cases over the span of ten years. As Vice President of Legal and now CEO of ADF, Waggoner’s employees are voicing support or testifying in favor of dozens of anti-LGBTQ cases currently sweeping through state legislatures.
“Waggoner is a new generation of effectiveness,” says Michelle Nickerson, a Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. “She can very professionally and with great political savvy and knowledge of the law advance ideas that would set us back decades, that would make this world very hostile to [the LGBTQ community].”
Uncloseted Media reached out to Waggoner multiple times for an interview and for comment. She did not respond.
As the country edges closer to a Republican trifecta, Waggoner’s power could become even more pronounced. She has been slated by some for a Supreme Court justice nomination from President-elect Donald Trump. “[Even] if she's not on the court herself, the courts will be a lot more friendly than they already are,” Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis, told Uncloseted Media. “And so arguments that [Waggoner and] ADF make will be much more feasible.”
Waggoner’s Early Days
Growing up, Waggoner was influenced by her father—Pastor Clint Behrends—who was superintendent of Cedar Park Christian Schools, an Assemblies of God Pentecostal congregation in Bothell, WA. By the age of 12, she said that she had decided “to become a lawyer to protect our First Amendment freedoms” to help people “live out [their] religious convictions in the public square,” adding that “these freedoms and our right to exercise them does not depend on cultural popularity or political power.”
For a year in the late ‘90s, Waggoner clerked for the Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders, a member of the Libertarian party who voted to uphold a ban on gay marriage. In 1998, Waggoner began practicing law for Elis, Li & McKinstry — with a focus on religious freedom. She worked there for 15 years until 2013 when she joined ADF as Senior Vice President of their U.S. Legal Division. From there, she worked her way up to become the organization's first female CEO and President.
ADF is a notoriously anti-LGBTQ Christian legal group. It was co-founded in 1994 by Alan Sears, who co-authored “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.” With over 450 staff and over 4,800 network attorneys around the world, ADF has litigated and lobbied against marriage equality and anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws, and in favor of conversion therapy, and of removing trans people’s access to bathrooms or trans kids' access to gender-affirming healthcare.
The group also has an international branch, ADF International, which holds Special Consultative Status within the United Nations. Their litigation spans beyond U.S. soil. They have voiced support or testified in favor of anti-LGBTQ bills in Eastern Europe and Caribbean countries, and in Belize, where they defended a law that attempted to keep in place the criminalization of gay sex.
ADF did not respond to a request for comment.
Success At The Supreme Court
Upon joining ADF in 2013, Waggoner used freedom of speech laws to defend a Washington-based florist after the store owner refused to supply flowers for a gay couple’s wedding. Shortly after, she defended Jack Phillips in the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop case that made national headlines. Waggoner argued that Phillips' religious expression was denied after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and in a 7-2 decision, Waggoner won.
“These laws are being used against real people, creative professionals who simply want to live peacefully and consistently and create custom work that is consistent with their religious beliefs,” Waggoner said in an interview with ABC News in 2016.
A few years later, in 2023, Waggoner won another Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based designer who didn’t want to produce a wedding website for a gay couple. However, The New Republic later uncovered that Stewart, the man named in the case, was actually heterosexual and never even requested a website. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart told TNR. “I’m married; I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from. But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document,” he added.
Despite Stewart’s claims, the ruling was not overturned and Waggoner’s wins at the Supreme Court set a new legal precedent when it comes to business owners having the right to use religious freedom to refuse services to gay people.
“[Waggoner] is just a really damn good lawyer,” says Ziegler. Her M.O. has become “the choice between pragmatism and absolutism,” she says, adding that Waggoner straddles being realistic with the types of cases she pursues and the strategies she uses to litigate them with her ultimate goals of rolling back LGBTQ protections at large.
“[But] since Dobbs, she’s become more aggressive,” Ziegler adds.
Using Mainstream Media as a Vehicle for Her Message
In 2018, Waggoner continued to move up ADF’s ladder and added Senior Vice President of Communications to her title. She started popping up as a legal expert on cable and network news like ABC, CNN and Fox, and even daytime talk shows like The View, moving her argument beyond the courtroom and into the public eye.
This gave Waggoner a key to a door out of the conservative Christian echo chamber and an ability to communicate to the mainstream American public that—within First Amendment law—it is acceptable to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on religious beliefs.
Even before her title change, Waggoner spoke in 2016 to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’ “This Week,” which has an audience of roughly 2.5 million. She defended efforts in North Carolina to exclude trans women from women’s bathrooms, citing safety concerns for cisgender women and girls. This “is a common sense provision that would restrict men from accessing girls' locker rooms,” Waggoner told Stephanopoulous, misgendering trans girls and women throughout the interview and being left unchecked by the host. “We don't want to have to undress in front of someone who is of the opposite biological sex.”
Promoting Conversion Therapy
After Waggoner’s successful Supreme Court run, she went on to defend Brian Tingley, a Washington State-based Christian therapist who challenged a law that disciplines healthcare providers for practicing conversion therapy.
In this instance, Waggoner didn’t win. In 2021, a judge dismissed the case, upholding Washington state laws that protect LGBTQ youth from “exposure to serious harms caused by conversion therapy.” The law was struck down again in 2022, when the judge ruled that healthcare providers should not be able to treat gay children by telling them that they are “the abomination [they] had heard about in Sunday school."
Outside of the courtroom, Waggoner has advocated for conversion therapists, promoting them in a 2021 public speech as a legitimate option to help people “overcome same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and live consistent with the beliefs of their faith.”
Waggoner cited Dr. David Schwartz as a good option for conversion therapy. Dr. Schwartz, a Brooklyn-based orthodox Jewish psychiatrist, sued the state of New York for passing local laws that prevented him from conversion therapy. ADF represented him in the case. In 2020, New York repealed the counseling ban and Schwartz and his attorneys dropped the case.
For Lucas Wilson and Andrew Hartzler, another gay man who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit against religious colleges that was defended by Waggoner, conversion therapy was nothing short of a nightmare.
Hartlzer says he experienced six weeks of conversion therapy at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which left him “walking around like a zombie” and “getting really depressed, being in [his] room crying.” Oral Roberts University did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.
“I was taught that if you like someone of the same sex … your relationship with Jesus is not as strong as it needs to be,” Hartzler told Uncloseted Media.
Waggoner’s Shift to Rolling Back Trans Rights
Over the past few years, Waggoner has increasingly shifted focus to legislation focused on rolling back transgender rights. In an interview last year with The New Yorker, she said the ADF’s next priority is fighting “the radical gender-identity ideology infiltrating the law.” She said she doesn’t believe in transgender identity, only in “gender dysphoria,” adding, “I believe there are people who are uncomfortable in their bodies.”
In 2019, ADF initiated their first suit aimed at banning trans girls from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity. From there, they have appealed two cases to the Supreme Court: B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education and Hecox v. Little, saying that it is not “fair for men to compete in women’s sports,” again misgendering trans women.
In 2020, they brought a case—which is still ongoing—against the Connecticut Association of Schools and two trans student athletes, targeting the inclusion of transgender girls in girls’ athletics. “It is so painful that people not only want to tear down my successes, but take down the laws and policies that protect people like me,” Andraya Yearwood said in a statement at the time of filing, “I will never stop being me! I will never stop running!”
In the case, for which Waggoner was counsel of record until April 2024, ADF attempted to have a judge removed when he told Waggoner and her team that “deliberately and repeatedly” misgendering trans people is bullying.
In 2021, ADF helped draft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which passed into law, prohibiting any classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity. Other states have adopted ADF-drafted legislation restricting gender-affirming care for minors.
Last year, Waggoner said liberal government officials are threatening to set up a new kind of police state—one in which dissenters who believe that marriage can involve only a man and a woman are forced to salute the rainbow flags flying outside every town hall, in which teachers are required to indoctrinate children into the belief that gender is not binary, and in which shelters for battered women must make room for trans women.
Waggoner Goes Beyond America
On Oct. 16, 2024, Waggoner broadened her reach and addressed delegates at the United Nations in a meeting convened by ADF International and the Permanent Mission of Paraguay— about the inclusion of trans women and girls in sports. In her speech, she called it a “violation” to allow trans women into “women’s intimate space.” Waggoner cites a boycott of the San Jose State women’s volleyball team claiming that, “The women’s team was forced to allow a biological male [referring to a trans woman] on the team, prompting some to raise serious concerns about their own physical safety.”
Kristen Waggoner Speaks at UN Event on Women’s Sports
When it comes to trans women, Waggoner leans on her role as a mother and identity as a cisgender woman. “What [Waggoner] manages to do by describing trans women as men is to claim that she’s representing victims, people who have less power,” says Nickerson.
“So much about feminism is about male violence…physical and otherwise…and so if she can describe trans women as men who are trying to access women, and if she can do it without yelling…she’s going to win so many people over who see her as a voice of reason.” says Nickerson, adding that this is “a weaponization of feminism.”
Waggoner’s Next Move
Since President-Elect Trump’s first term, Waggoner and ADF have benefited from a heavily conservative court system.
Ziegler says that ADF’s successive wins, particularly at the Supreme Court, have made the group bolder in the cases they will bring before a judge. “If you have the Supreme Court, you don’t need to convince Congress,” she says. This allows ADF to push for cases that may not be as popular with the American public, putting marriage equality, reproductive rights and trans rights at greater risk.
It is since Waggoner’s tenure that ADF has pushed into reproductive rights. Ziegler says the group is now “one of the biggest players in litigation around contraception and IVF,” while remaining the biggest anti-LGBTQ player.
“Right now, you have to see [reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights] as related, because the people who are trying to change policy through the courts are pursuing things that way.”
It’s not likely Trump will nominate Waggoner to the Supreme Court, mainly on account of her not having any prior judicial experience. “It would be easier for her to follow the kind of Amy Coney-Barrett path,” says Ziegler, “where she’s nominated to a federal court…for a little bit” before subsequently receiving a SCOTUS nomination.
In the meantime, Ziegler expects Trump to appoint a ton of conservative judges that will play in Waggoner and ADF’s favor. In Trump’s first term, he appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight.
“So I think what's next for Waggoner is to take advantage of that. If she's not on the court herself, the courts will be a lot more friendly [to her] than they already are.”
Additional reporting by Spencer Macnaughton and Sam Donndelinger.
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This both scares the hell out of me and equally makes me steaming mad.
Her life's mission is to turn the country into a theocracy. Unfortunately it looks like she's winning.