What You Need to Know About The Lawyers Who Helped Overturn Colorado's Conversion Therapy Ban
Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter
“Supreme Court sides with therapist in challenge to Colorado’s ban on ‘conversion therapy’” was SCOTUSblog’s headline after the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar, where they sided with a Christian counselor.
Another accurate headline would have been: “Supreme Court sides with notorious anti-LGBTQ hate group to re-legalize conversion therapy in Colorado.”
It’s true: SCOTUS agreed with the arguments put forth by the lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.
Missing from much of the media coverage was ADF’s history on LGBTQ rights. To fill that space, here’s what you need to know:
In 1994, six influential evangelical men founded ADF. The mission of the organization was to bolster the legal power of the Christian right. “People of faith were being outgunned in court,” ADF co-founder and former CEO Alan Sears would later tell the New York Times.
Nine years later, Sears would co-author a book called “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.” The book aims to “expose the goals of the homosexual movement and its rising legal activism” and talks about how the saddest part of “the homosexual agenda” is that “it is working.”
Sears’ perspective is reflective of ADF’s legal work. Over the last three decades, the group and its leaders have relentlessly tried to dismantle LGBTQ rights in the U.S. and abroad. Their former CEO, Michael Farris, wrote an amicus brief in 2003 where he defended the criminalization of gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas. ADF has also been counsel in infamous anti-LGBTQ lawsuits, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that protected anti-LGBTQ discrimination and two ongoing Supreme Court cases litigating trans athletes. Additionally, their lawyers helped draft and defend the Mississippi bill that led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The group is also powerful abroad: ADF international has set up shop in Europe’s hubs for international human rights institutions, where they push anti-LGBTQ legislation. In 2012, their former senior legal counsel spoke at a conference in Jamaica advocating for maintaining a law that criminalizes gay sex, which remains in effect today. In 2013, members of ADF were in Belize, where they worked to defend a statute stating that “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”—LGBTQ sex—could be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The group has also litigated dozens of cases in front of the European Court of Human Rights, including one that would force trans people to physically transition in order for their gender to be legally recognized.
A key reason I started Uncloseted came after I wrote an investigation about ADF for Rolling Stone, where I discovered that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had worked with them for nearly a decade.
It’s frightening that their efficacy, their ability to reach the highest levels of power in the American government and their influence over the Supreme Court continues to devastate LGBTQ Americans.
That is most evident in Uncloseted’s latest story by Sami Tacher, a gay Coloradan who says conversion therapy nearly led them to suicide. I’ll finish this article with a quote from Tacher about the effect he thinks ADF’s work, and SCOTUS’ decision, will have on LGBTQ kids:
“Words taught me to hate myself. Words made me suicidal. So when I learned that the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of messaging should be protected, that adults should be free to tell children that queerness is sickness, dangerous, shameful or sinful, I do not hear an abstract constitutional principle. I hear the beginning of a tragedy for kids like me.”
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FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center (Ken Klippenstein)
President Trump’s budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.
Appeals court allows Iowa to enforce book bans, restrictions on LGBTQ topics in classes (The Hill)
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“It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump administration.”
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Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:
🆕 SATURDAY: Transgender youth in foster care often face abuse, neglect, and constant instability, with protections varying wildly by state. Sam Donndelinger investigates and highlights the story of Hayden Dawson, a 20-year-old from Kansas who spent over a decade moving through more than 150 homes.
🆕 TUESDAY: While more than four out of five LGBTQ men voted against Trump in 2024, some gay men are still proudly MAGA. Why? Emma Paidra investigates.
🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I’ll be speaking with Matt Bernstein—or Mattxiv—a progressive commentator with 2.2 million Instagram followers who OUT Magazine has called “one of social media’s most prominent political voices.”
Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!
Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com
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