"Visionary" Religious Right Activist Mike Farris Takes Over Alliance Defending Freedom

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By Peter Montgomery | January 10, 2017 5:36 pm

Alliance Defending Freedom, the nation’s largest Religious Right legal group, announced today that veteran Religious Right activist Mike Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) will be the group’s new CEO, president and general counsel. Farris will continue to chair HSLDA’s board, and told HSLDA supporters via video that the change is God’s will. ADF Founder Alan Sears said he is happy to pass the torch to “a bold and dynamic leader” and “visionary” after 23 years at the group’s helm.

Farris worked for Phyllis Schlafly opposing the ERA in the 1970s and then as a state director for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. During the controversy over an Indiana “religious freedom” law designed to permit anti-LGBT discrimination, Farris said resistance to religious exemptions to nondiscrimination laws would turn America into Nazi Germany. In 2015, he said that the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling threw out “the entire institution of our courts and our judiciary and respect for the law” in pursuit of a “rainbow utopia.” He has said marriage equality is leading American Christians into the “dark ages” of religious intolerance.” In 2006, HSLDA lobbied for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex couples from getting married.

Ideologically, Farris seems like a good fit for the ADF, which opposes LGBT equality in the U.S. and around the world. At home, ADF promotes anti-transgender legislation and school board policies. ADF was featured in a People For the American Way report on groups that are “weaponizing” religious liberty:

ADF supported criminal sodomy laws in the U.S. before they were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003, and works to defend laws in other countries that criminalize homosexuality. ADF also supported anti-marriage state constitutional amendments before the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. ADF worked on Arizona’s SB 1062, in what was the first major battle of the recent wave of state-level “religious liberty” laws.

In 2007, ADF attorney Mike Johnson said the group would oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the proposed federal law that would ban discrimination in employment based on LGBT status, even with broad religious exemptions, calling the bill an “effort to silence people of faith” and an attack on free speech, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience. ADF President Alan Sears called ENDA “a dangerous, blatantly unconstitutional bill that would pit the government directly against the free exercise of religion.”

Sears co-authored the 2003 book “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.” In it he professes compassion for those who are “ensnared” in the “deadly grip” of “homosexual behavior” while portraying the gay-rights movement as an enemy of religious freedom. The book warned that hate crime laws would lead to the censoring of churches and opposed a law against anti-gay discrimination in the workplace, even with religious exemptions. It said that Christians who support or are ambivalent about such legislation are “signing a death warrant for religious liberty.”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/visionary-religious-right-activist-mike-farris-takes-over-alliance-defending-freedom/

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1. As homeschoolers, we belonged to the HSLDA.

We appreciated their work on behalf of the rights of homeschoolers.