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AN 10 26

Fundamentalist legal group dives into church fight with Native Americans

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Founded in 1989 during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the Christian fundamentalist legal group Liberty Counsel has a long history of representing white evangelicals in far-right causes. The Florida-based nonprofit has a new client: Foundations for Nations, a Wyoming church being asked to leave a Native American reservation. And Liberty Counsel is representing the church on a pro bono basis.

According to WyoFile reporter Maya Shimizu Harris, Foundations for Nations is "facing demands to leave the Wind River Indian Reservation after its pastor delivered a sermon urging Native congregants to renounce Northern Arapaho traditions has a formidable ally in its corner as tensions continue to simmer."

"Last month," Harris explains, "the Foundations for Nations church lodged a complaint with state and federal agencies against the Food Bank of Wyoming, alleging the organization unlawfully cut off its support on the basis of religious, political and racial discrimination. According to Foundations For Nations Pastor Sarah Lucas, Food Bank of Wyoming ended the partnership after her controversial sermon, telling her that it was in response to a call claiming her message was discriminatory, the Ranger reported."

Liberty Counsel, Harris reports, "filed the complaint on the church's behalf" and "is providing legal services to the church for free."

Richard Mast, senior litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel, is claiming that Foundations For Nations' situation is a free speech/freedom of religion battle.

Mast told WyoFile, "When a matter arises in their local area, we reach out to them, offer them an opportunity to participate, and we are frequently taken up on that. We appreciate our local counsel in Wyoming … People have reached out to us from Wyoming. We've come to their assistance, and at least one of those cases I recall was successful."

Over the years, Liberty Counsel has repeatedly clashed with liberal and progressive attorneys — many times, in cases involving gay rights and abortion.

"In addition to filing the discrimination complaint," Harris notes, "Liberty Counsel sent a letter to Northern Arapaho Business Council Chairman Keenan Groesbeck in July after the council had adopted a resolution stating that outside organizations should consult with the council before initiating or expanding recurring organized activities on lands governed by the Northern Arapaho Tribe. While stating that the church believes it's in compliance with the resolution, the letter asserted that the church 'requires no authorization' from the Northern Arapaho Business Council 'to conduct religious activities on its own private fee simple property,' and that the church 'will not be leaving its property.'"

Harris continues, "Following Lucas' sermon, the Northern Arapaho Business Council told church officials to leave the reservation, and some called on the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to use the 'bad men' clause in their treaties with the U.S. government to oust the church from the reservation. But in an August 31 resolution, the Northern Arapaho Business Council stated that it doesn’t regulate activities on the church’s private property, and that it hadn't designated the church or any person as 'bad men.'"

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11/12/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Liberty Counsel’s petition to overturn the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling in Obergefell. Mat Staver, who heads the anti-LGBTQ group, insisted the next day that “it’s not if, but when, Obergefell will be overturned.”

While large majorities of Americans support marriage equality, religious-right groups are determined to destroy it. Staver has called the marriage equality ruling a “cancer” on the Constitution.

Liberty Counsel has spent the past decade representing Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court overturned state marriage bans.

The case that Liberty Counsel asked the Supreme Court to hear was about the specific question of whether Davis could be held personally liable for damages for denying a gay couple the license to which they were entitled. A federal judge ruled against Davis, awarding the couple damages and attorney fees, and an appeals court upheld that ruling.

Liberty Counsel appealed and asked the Supreme Court to go well beyond the legal question at hand and take the opportunity to overturn marriage equality altogether. The Court declined.

It’s good news that the Court rejected Liberty Counsel’s appeal. But Liberty Counsel and other religious-right groups are certainly not going to drop their efforts to overturn marriage equality.

“I have no doubt that Davis’ resolve will serve as a catalyst to raise up many more challenges to the wrongly decided Obergefellopinion,” Staver wrote. He vowed that his group “will continue working with state legislators and individuals to overturn Obergefell and to return the issue of marriage to the states.”

Liberty Counsel has powerful allies who want to see marriage equality eliminated.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-equality legal giant that led the legal effort to overturnRoe v. Wade,views reversing marriage equality as another of its “generational wins” goals. ADF drafted the state law that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe, and it's nearly certain that ADF is working on a similar strategy to undo Obergefell. ADF was not involved in Kim Davis’s case, but it is active at the Supreme Court this term.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is headed by Ryan Anderson, who published a road map for overturning marriage equality when he was still at the Heritage Foundation. EPPC fellow Nathanael Blake wrote earlier this year that same-sex couples' ability to get legally married reflects liberalism’s “hatred for human nature.” Another EPPC fellow, Andrew Walker, wrote that same-sex marriage reflects “moral lawlessness.” He mocked gay parents and their families, writing, “If you’re anything like me, the sight of gay and lesbian couples and small children cosplaying in idyllic family settings is proving to be too much.”

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10/06/2025 RWW

by

Kyle Mantyla

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RWW

09/30/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Religious-right activist Mat Staver sent followers an email Saturday blaming Charlie Kirk’s murder on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 pro-marriage-equality ruling in Obergefell. Staver is founder and chairman of the anti-LGBTQ religious-right organization Liberty Counsel, which is pushing the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.

Liberty Counsel represents Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court’s ruling. A federal court held her liable for damages in a suit brought by a couple she turned down, and an appeals court upheld that ruling. Liberty Counsel is using its latest appeal on her behalf to urge the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell altogether and strip same-sex couples of the right to marry.

Staver wrote in his fundraising email that “we are asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell ruling that abolished gender, and in doing so, created this entire mess — from Kim Davis’ persecution to Charle Kirk’s assassination.”

Five lawyers on the Supreme Court may have tried to abolish the historical and biological FACT of gender, via Obergefell,but the American public did not. As a result, Christians have lost their jobs and livelihoods, while others have been murdered in cold blood for refusing to conform to another person’s mental illness.

The Obergefellruling, Staver claimed at the top of his email, “didn’t just spark the rise in trans, it sought to abolish gender itself.” That is an absurd claim, of course. But Staver was just getting started:

“Charlie’s killer and the killer’s ‘partner’ are, sadly, the result of the destructive LGBTQ ideology that seeks to abolish gender—the cancer underlying Obergefell…Once five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court removed gender from a strictly gender-based relationship, the natural next progression is the destruction of gender itself.”

Staver has a history of making inflammatory claims about LGBTQ people. When Congress was considering the Respect for Marriage Act last year, Liberty Counsel made wild accusations about the law, claiming that it would “allow pedophiles to marry children.”

Staver’s email comes amidst a flood of false anti-trans disinformation and propaganda that has intensified since Trump’s return to power and has reached a fever pitch since Kirk’s assassination. On Monday, Liberty Counsel pushed out a release suggesting that bans on conversion therapy are to blame for mass shootings and asserting, “We simply cannot afford to lose one more life to the antichrist’s gender-confusion LIE.”

Staver’s email blaming Obergefell for Kirk’s murder also makes bogus blanket assertions that are grounded in stereotypes and do not reflect the reality of many same-sex couples’ relationships.

When men or women enter into a same-sex relationship, one assumes the personification of the opposite sex, making a mockery of gender.

In a lesbian relationship, one of the biological women assumes the masculine role. Often this is exhibited through manly haircuts and clothing or gruff and “tough” demeanor.

In male-male relationships, one of the men assumes the feminine role, assuming girlish vocalization and gestures, and quite often the cattiness embodied by some ungodly women, among other things.

Staver and Liberty Counsel have influence that stretches beyond litigation through its working relationship with religious-right groups like the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Staver’s radio commentaries run on hundreds of stations. Liberty Counsel reported nearly $28 million in revenue in fiscal year 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic turned Staver into an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist; he claimed, for example, that the COVID-19 vaccine was designed to “prevent people from procreating” as part of a globalist plot to depopulate the Earth.

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RWW

10/01/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Workers at one agency were given unhinged, partisan language to use when setting out-of-office replies.

Alongside his Christian rockstar status, revenue to Feucht’s ministry also skyrocketed, jumping from $243,000 in 2019 to $5 million in 2020 — the last year his ministry filed a Form 990 with the IRS. It’s that deluge of money, Feucht’s and his ministry’s amassing of expensive real estate in its wake and their lack of financial transparency, which has former ministry staff and volunteers now accusing the worship leader of mismanaging ministry funds.

Some MAGA Christians see Charlie Kirk’s killing as the start of a “revival”—and the moment for remaking America.

The Republican will run for Florida’s 19th Congressional District, where a seat is open because Rep. Byron Donalds (R) is seeking the state’s governorship.

A Florida teen's segment during morning announcements became fodder for the Christian outrage machine.

Historian Seth Cotlar discusses how far-right Republicans like William F. Buckley and Ben Shapiro embrace authoritarianism and conspiracism.

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RWW

09/18/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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Via press release from the Liberty Counsel:

The Honorable Byron Donalds will be the keynote speaker at Liberty Counsel’s Annual Gala, A New Birth of Freedom, on Saturday, April 5 at 6 p.m. at the Waldorf Astoria Orlando.

Erika Donalds, a former elected member of the Collier County School Board and advocate for high-quality school choice, will introduce her husband.

Congressman Donalds has been endorsed by President Donald Trump to run as Florida’s next governor. Because of his value-based policy positions, Congressman Donalds was invited to speak before he declared his intent to run for governor and prior to President Trump’s endorsement.

Liberty Counsel and Liberty Counsel Action do not endorse political candidates, but they do address legal and policy issues relevant to their respective missions.

Erika Donalds is the Founder and Chairman of OptimaEd, an online virtual charter school, and the Chair of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity.

Erika has met with President Donald Trump and offered her expertise to help further the expansion of school choice options and to improve accountability and governance in America’s schools.

Erika is an advisor for Heritage Foundation Advisory Council on Education Reform, Classical Learning Test, Moms for Liberty, and the Independent Women’s Forum Education Freedom Center.

Read the full press release.

As longtime JMG readers know, the Liberty Counsel has filed countless lawsuits seeking to overturn same-sex marriage, ex-gay torture bans, and laws protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.

They claim that the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v Hodges legalized pedophilia, incest, and bestiality.

They also claim that hundreds of thousands have died from COVID vaccinations, which they say contain graphene nanobots intended to “connect people to the internet” for mind control purposes.

Tickets for the gala run from $125 to $2750 for a “preferred table.” The Waldorf Astoria is a Hilton brand.

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111424-matt-gaetz-is-not-qualified-to-be-us-attorney-general-1

matt Gaetz Is Not Qualified To Be U.S. Attorney General

Nov 14, 2024

Matt Gaetz is neither morally nor professionally qualified to become the United States Attorney General. This is the highest law enforcement position in the country. America deserves much better.

Professionally, Matt Gaetz graduated from law school in 2007, and briefly worked for a law firm in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida before being elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2010. He served in that role until 2016, and was then elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017. Gaetz has three years or less experience in the practice of law, hardly enough to serve as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Morally, Gaetz has been under a cloud of sex and drug allegations. On Wednesday, as soon as he was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump, Gaetz immediately resigned from Congress, thus ending the Ethics probe into his sex parties that includes allegations of paying an underage girl for sex. Gaetz will face tough questions during any confirmation hearing and will likely not be confirmed. His immediate resignation raises serious questions as it occurred just two days before the U.S. House Ethics Committee was scheduled to vote to release what is expected to be a damaging report.

Numerous news articles have catalogued the serious allegations involving Gaetz, including using Venmo to pay women for sex, text messages, attending sex parties, and paying a minor for sex. Witnesses have testified that they have seen Gaetz at these sex parties taking drugs. And his close association with former Seminole Country Tax Collector, Joel Greenburg, adds to these serious allegations. Greenburg is now serving time in prison for using his position for illegal gain and arranging sex parties for his friends, including Gaetz.

During a speech Gaetz delivered to a group of conservative leaders, mostly Christian, on three occasions he dropped “jokes” laced with sexual innuendo. The jokes were shocking to those in attendance and were met with silence. He later admitted his sexual jokes fell flat. This is not the character of the nation’s highest law enforcement officer who is entrusted to uphold the rule of law and prosecute sex traffickers and sex crimes.

When Gaetz served in the Florida House he was a regular opponent of pro-family leaders and policies. He formed an alliance with LGBTQ activists and spearheaded the removal of Florida’s law prohibiting same sex adoptions, which left faith-based adoption agencies exposed to legal challenges.

:{Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated, “President-elect Donald Trump has quickly named many good choices to serve in his cabinet. But Matt Gaetz is not one of them. The nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General is shocking and disappointing to those who have followed this man and the lurid scandals and serious allegations of sex parties and drugs during his tenure in the U.S. Congress.

The resignation of Gaetz immediately after his name surfaced for Attorney General is inexplicable except for the fact this resignation now ends the U.S. House Ethics probe. Obviously, Gaetz does not want America to know the result of the Ethics investigation. Matt Gaetz has neither the experience nor the moral character to serve as the highest law enforcement officer of the United States of America. Gaetz should do President Trump and all of America a favor and withdraw his name from consideration. This will save him considerable embarrassment. America deserves better.”}:

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August 13, 2024

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GOT BEAT

Kim Davis ordered to pay over $260,000 after denying same-sex couple marriage license - Alternet.org

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July 24, 2024 rww

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religious-right leaders who oppose legal equality for LGBTQ Americans have never accepted the Supreme Court’s 2015marriage equality ruling as legitimate, and they immediately began planning to seek its reversal. Their hopes were given a huge boost when the Supreme Court’s Trump-fortified right wing overturned Roe v. Wade last year. This week, the anti-equality legal group Liberty Counsel told supporters in an email that it’s about to go to trial with a case that it hopes the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority will eventually use to overturn the Obergefell decision.

Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver and Holly Meade discussed the possibility that overturning Obergefell could be “on the horizon” and “coming soon” back in January.

Liberty Counsel represents Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk whose case has been in and out of the courts since she refused to allow her office to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Davis claimed it was a religious freedom issue, describing marriage equality as a “Heaven-or-Hell decision” for her. A federal court ruled last year that Davis had violated the constitutional rights of two couples she had refused to provide with a marriage license. The trial set to begin in September is to determine whether Davis is liable for damages and the couples’ legal expenses. Staver hopes to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

When Congress was considering the Respect for Marriage Act last year, Staver made wild accusations about the law, claiming that it would “allow pedophiles to marry children.” After it passed Congress and was signed into law, Staver said that LGBTQ people would have a “short-lived” celebration, expressing confidence that Trump’s justices would join the three Obergefell dissenters still on the court to reverse the marriage equality ruling. Staver noted that Justice Clarence Thomas used his opinion in the Dobbs case—which overturned Roe v. Wade—to say the court should reconsider the marriage equality ruling.

Staver has predicted since passage of the Respect for Marriage Act that it would be “the undoing” of Obergefell. His reasoning is that the law would actually make it easier for the Supreme Court to reverse marriage equality and allow states to ban same-sex couples from getting married, because couples who are already married would be “grandfathered” in, preventing the kind of legal and social upheaval that might otherwise be an argument for maintaining Obergefell.

Earlier this year, Staver urged administrators at Christian schools to ban children of same-sex couples from attending, because other students’ “personal experiences” with those families might weaken their commitment to “biblical doctrine” opposing marriage equality.  Exposing kids to families with same-sex parents was like putting them “in a viper pit,” he said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Staver and Liberty Counsel branched out into anti-vaccine conspiracy mongering, with Staver charging at one point that the COVID-19 vaccines were designed to “concentrate” in reproductive organs to “prevent people from procreating.”

Tags: Holly MeadeKim DavisMat StaverAnti-GayAnti-LGBTQDobbs v Jackson Women's Heath OrganizationMarriage EqualityObergefell v. HodgesSupreme CourtLiberty Counsel

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August 11, 2023 

Tags: John StirrupMatthew MaddockRoger GannamRon DeSantisRound-UpLiberty Counsel

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homophobe

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mat-staver-bar-children-same-sex-families/

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http://clarelocke.com/defamation/

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https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/liberty-counsel-data-breach/

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/6/2108801/-Christian-fascist-groups-have-had-their-hands-in-the-Supreme-Court-for-decades

peggy Nienaber may provide her own downfall thanks to hubris. **Rolling Stone**revealed on Wednesday that the Christian fascist, who serves as vice president of the nonprofit anti-abortion group Faith & Liberty and serves as hate group Liberty Counsel’s executive director of D.C. Ministry, was caught bragging about praying with Supreme Court justices. While appearing on a livestream she didn’t realize was being recorded, Nienaber confirmed that she prays with some of the justices inside the Supreme Court itself. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them,” Nienaber said, adding with a laugh that, “Some of them don’t!” This claim was backed up by the founder of the ministry that ultimately got absorbed into Liberty Counsel. Rob Schenck, who used to work alongside Nienaber, has since renounced his actions. Yet from the late 1990s onward, he prayed with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia in the Supreme Court itself.

The prayers never directly mentioned cases, but clearly worked their manipulative magic, though Schenck seems shocked by this. “I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck told Rolling Stone. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.” Rolling Stone also points out the conflict of interest in this practice that Nienaber has continued, as her group, Liberty Counsel, “frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court.” An amicus brief from the group was even cited in the majority opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Liberty Counsel, a 501 tax-exempt organization allegedly dedicated to litigating cases regarding religious freedom and the so-called sanctity of life, has already been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist group pushing an anti-LGBTQ agenda. It’s clear from its website that abortion is the cause du jour for the organization, which pushes outlandish talking points that reproductive rights somehow, say, constitute eugenics. And Liberty Counsel’s influence isn’t just a Supreme Court problem, either. Nienaber’s influence in politics cannot be understated: Per Rolling Stone, she’s been seen with Republicans like Sen. Lindsay Graham and former vice president Mike Pence, along with—of course—justices like Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.

The bad news, as Rolling Stone points out, is that there are few ways to address the Supreme Court’s outright bias and impartiality. The Constitution offers minimal guidance on matters like these and a federal statute on justice recusal doesn’t offer much, either. The good news? We don’t have to let the court stand as it currently does. What are y’all doing to get more involved as we look toward the midterms? I’m looking forward to hearing y'all’s responses.

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the cut no lnx

what happens when the Supreme Court engages in a conflict of interest? I am asking this sincerely because, as best as I can tell, the answer is absolutely nothing — and this troubles me. If, for example, certain justices were meeting privately in their chambers or even in general with members of a religiously motivated lobbying group that was actively involved in its cases, would that not qualify as somewhat inappropriate? If the Court’s conservatives were praying with the same anti-abortion activists whose amicus briefs they’d cited in an opinion overturning federal abortion protections, wouldn’t that constitute a fairly clear breach of ethics?

I am thinking yes, but then the Court did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment on a recent conflict-of-interest report, nor has it returned the Cut’s. Therefore, it is presently unclear what the official policy would be on justices praying with Faith & Liberty, an evangelical ministry that sits under the umbrella of the Liberty Counsel, a right-wing legal organization the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. According to Rolling Stone, Faith & Liberty vice-president Peggy Nienaber claimed on a hot mic that she prays with members of the Court. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” a livestreamer called Connie IRL reportedly asked Nienaber outside the Court on June 27, days after the justices handed down their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “I do,” Nienaber replied, according to Rolling Stone. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” Asked where the prayer occurs — at their homes, in her office — Nienaber stated, “We actually go in there.” Apparently meaning inside the Supreme Court.

The Dobbs decision represents a real win for anti-abortion activists and presumably for the Liberty Counsel in particular: It filed an amicus brief in support of Mississippi’s position. In a statement to the Cut, Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said that “the Rolling Stone article is false” and “sensational.” Formerly known as Faith and Action, the Faith & Liberty ministry has operated across the street from the Supreme Court’s chambers since the 1990s, Rolling Stone reports. It became part of the Liberty Counsel under its current name in 2018. Since that time, Staver said, “There has been no prayer with the Justices.” His statement continued:

    This prayer ministry prays for the Justices, not with them. And the prayer ministry is not just for the Justices and the Court but includes all three branches of government, the nation, and also includes international prayer. The instances referred to in the article go back many years prior to when Liberty Counsel assumed the Faith & Liberty prayer ministry.

But Rolling Stone spoke with Faith & Liberty’s founder, Rob Schenck, who confirmed that he ministered to Samuel Alito (who drafted the majority opinion in Dobbs), Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia in their chambers from the late ’90s until the mid-2010s. Schenck went on to renounce his anti-abortion activism and evangelical political work but described the justices as key targets for conversion. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them,” he said, “but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” While ministers would purportedly try to avoid getting specific about topics pertaining to cases under the Court’s consideration, Rolling Stone reports that prayers to end abortion did occur even as Faith and Action signed an amicus brief in (for example) Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood, which upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

Nienaber, meanwhile, has been involved since about 2005. And though she insisted to Rolling Stone that she does “not socialize with the justices,” her social-media footprint suggests otherwise. She has reportedly called Thomas a “friend” and described him “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.” She received an invitation to Brett Kavanaugh’s swearing-in. She has been photographed with both men as well as with Senator Lindsey Graham and former vice-president Mike Pence. The Liberty Counsel did not account for that apparent discrepancy in its statement, but both Staver and Nienaber have pointed to COVID restrictions in arguing against Rolling Stone’s allegations. “Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID,” Nienaber told the magazine. “It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”

“It should be obvious that since early 2020, the Supreme Court has been on lockdown due to COVID,” Staver said in his statement to the Cut. “There is no way anyone could have entered the Court to pray with the Justices or the staff over the past 2½ years.”

But Nienaber’s claims that she has never socialized with justices contrast with her own posts on social media and with her admission that she has in fact prayed with these men. Staver did not account for Nienaber’s hot-mic comments, but arguably the most troubling thing about all of this “isn’t whether they’re praying,” as Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles, put it to Rolling Stone, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”

It isn’t a violation for the justices to keep whatever faith they choose, to practice it privately, to pray; it is (or should be) a violation for those beliefs to color their interpretation of the law. If their current cases were to come up in these prayers, Winkler said, that may present an ethical conflict. Unfortunately, it is apparently up to the justices to decide on their own partiality. And as this term’s batch of decisions — on prayer in schools, on gun rights, and certainly on abortion — indicates, the Court’s conservatives have no problem ruling in support of their own personal interests. You can read Rolling Stone’s full story here.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/roe-supreme-court-justices-1378046/

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at?  an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.

This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.

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In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.

Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!”The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”

Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for theOrlando-based Liberty Counsel,which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.

The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment.Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver,strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”

But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s.Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito,Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.

Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”

Barbara Abshire, center, of Baltimore, and Peggy Nienaber of Lorton, Md., unpack flowers for use in the "Encircle the Court in Prayer," event led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama's health care legislation, in Washington, Sunday, March 25, 2012. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012.

In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.

The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.

The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)

At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)

To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.

Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

:{:{Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda.No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret.“Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.}:

“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.”}:

When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades  litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)

“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.

Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”

:{:{}:

In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coachwho recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”}:

Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.

Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.

Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,”he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”

In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”

But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”

Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.

Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court.He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.

:{:{}:

Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”}:

In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”

When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”

Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.

But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”

That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”

For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”

===

722 rww

the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and reversing 50 years of precedent by eliminating the constitutional right to abortion, dozens of companies announced that they could provide coverage or reimbursements to employees who may now need to travel out of state to obtain an abortion.

Appearing on VCY America’s “Crosstalk” program Tuesday, religious-right legal activist Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel likened those companies to those who cooperated with the Nazis in Germany during World War II and accused them of treating their employees like “slave labor.”

“These employers say they will give money to the mothers in order for the mothers to kill their children so you won’t miss any time off from work rather than give you time off from work, which is what’s required by federal law,” Staver said. “They don’t want to give you the time to be a mother. They don’t want you to be away from the place of work. They would rather kill your children—pay you to do so—so you could jump back into the workplace and you can go through their eight-hour day or however long they’re going put you at the at the wheel so that they can make a profit.”

“That’s the despicable nature of what’s happening,” he continued. “Women and others across the country ought to just really cry out and say, ‘You despicable companies!  You’re paying to kill the children of these mothers so that you can continue their slave labor and continue your profits off of them.”

“These companies and the states that go down this road, they will not be blessed,” Staver warned. “They will ultimately be complicit with the shedding of innocent blood, and we’ll look back on those companies just like we look back on some of the things that happened duringNazi Germanyand say, ‘Shame on you. How in the world did this ever happen?'”

===

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/mat-staver/

Mat Staver is the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group that is associated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Until 2014, Staver served as the dean of Liberty University School of Law.

At the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which he founded in 1989, Staver works to amplify cases of what he claims is the persecution of conservative Christians in America. He gained national notoriety in 2015 when he defended Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis, who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision. Staver compared Davis’ plight to that of a Jew living in Nazi Germany. Staver has a long history of anti-LGBT rhetoric, much of it shared on his daily “Faith and Freedom” radio program.

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1021

devout evangelical Christian friend of mine recently texted to explain why he was not getting the COVID-19 vaccine. “Jesus went around healing lepers and touched them without fear of getting leprosy," he said.

This story that St. Luke tells in his gospel (17:11-19) is not the only Bible verse I have seen and heard evangelical Christians use to justify anti-vaccine convictions. Other popular passages include Psalm 30:2: “Lord, I called to you for help, and you healed me."; 1 Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?"; and Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of a creature is in the blood."

All of these verses have been lifted out of context and repurposed to buttress the anti-vaccine movement. As a historian of the Bible in American life, I can attest that such shallow reading in service of political and cultural agendas has long been a fixture of evangelical Christianity.

Bible in the hands of ordinary people

In the 16th century, Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers translated the Bible from an already existing Greek text into the languages of common people. Prior to this, most men and women in Europe were exposed to the Bible through the Vulgate, a Latin version of the Old and New Testaments that only educated men – mostly Catholic priests – could read.

As people read the Bible – many for the first time – they inevitably began to interpret it as well. Protestant denominations formed around such interpretations. By the time Protestants started forming settlements in North America, there were distinctly Anglican, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Lutheran and Quaker reading of the Bible.

The English Calvinists who settled the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay built entire colonies around their reading of the Bible, making New England one of the most literate societies in the world. In the 18th century, popular access to the Bible was one way that the British – including the North American colonies – distinguished themselves from Catholic nations that did not provide such access.

American evangelicals

In the early 19th-century United States, biblical interpretation became more free-wheeling and individualistic.

Small differences over how to interpret the Bible often resulted in the creation of new sects such as the Latter Day Saints, the Restorationists (Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ), Adventists and various evangelical offshoots of more longstanding denominations such as Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Quakers.

During this period, the United States also grew more democratic. What the French traveler and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville described as “individualism" had a profound influence on biblical interpretation and the way laypeople read the sacred text.

The views of the Bible proclaimed from the pulpits of formally educated clergy in established denominations gave way to a more free-wheeling and populist understanding of the scriptures that was often dissociated from such authoritative communities.

But these evangelicals never developed their approach to understanding the Bible in complete isolation. They often followed the interpretations of charismatic leaders such as Joseph Smith (Latter Day Saints), Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell (Restorationist), William Miller (Adventists) and Lorenzo Dow (Methodists).

These preachers built followers around innovative readings of the Scriptures. Without a church hierarchy to reign them in, these evangelical pied pipers had little accountability.

When large numbers of Irish and German immigrants arrived on American shores in the middle decades of the 19th century, evangelicals drew on longstanding anti-Catholic prejudices. They grew anxious that these Catholic newcomers were a threat to their Protestant nation and often based these fears on perceptions of how Catholic bishops and priests kept the Bible from their parishioners.

While this fear of Catholics was mostly rhetorical in nature, there were a few moments of violence. For example, in 1844, nativist Protestants, responding to rumors that Catholics were trying to remove the Bible from Philadelphia public schools, destroyed two of the city's Catholic churches before the Pennsylvania militia stopped the violence.

These so-called “Bible riots" revealed the deep tensions between the individualistic and common-sensical approach to biblical interpretation common among Protestants and a Catholic view of reading the Bible that was always filtered through the historic teachings of the Church and its theologians. Protestants believed that the former approach was more compatible with the spirit of American liberty.

Vaccine opposition and the Bible

Today this American approach to reading and interpreting the Bible is front and center in the arguments made by evangelical Christians seeking religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination mandates. When they explain their religious objections to health officials, employers and school administrations, evangelicals select verses, usually out of context, and reference them on exemptions forms.

Like they did in the 19th century, evangelicals who refuse to get vaccinated today tend to follow the spiritual leaders who have built followings by baptizing political or cultural propaganda in a sea of Bible verses.

Megachurch pastors, televangelists, conservative media commentators and social media influencers have far more power over ordinary evangelical Christians than those local pastors who encourage their congregations to consider that God works through science.

When I ask those evangelicals who oppose vaccines how they come to their conclusions, they all seem to cite the same sources: Fox News, or a host of fringe media personalities whom they watch on cable television or Facebook. Some others they cite include Salem Radio host and author Eric Metaxas, the Liberty Counsel and Tennessee megachurch leader Greg Locke, to name a few.

Social media allows these evangelical conspiracy theorists to become influentialthrough their anti-vaccine rants.

From my perspective, the response of some evangelicals to the vaccine reveals the dark side of the Protestant Reformation. When the Bible is placed in the hands of the people, void of any kind of authoritative religious community to guide them in their proper understanding of the text, the people can make it say anything they want it to say.

John Fea, Professor of American History, Messiah College

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superspreaders who beleive in small gov't take covis bailout $?!

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trumps-religious-right-backers-get-millions-in-covid%e2%80%8b-19-relief/

Conservative evangelical churches and advocacy groups led by vocal boosters of President Donald Trump have received millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds, marking a new milestone in the religious​ right’s long campaign to take a wrecking ball to the wall separating church and state.

The Paycheck Protection Program included in coronavirus relief legislation was designed to help small businesses and other organizations stay afloat and keep people working during the pandemic. Religious-right leaders worked with​ ​their allies in Congress and the ​Trump administration to make sure that churches would be able to receive direct government funding to support clergy salaries and other operational expenses. The program is administered by the Small Business Administration, which waived normal requirements that participants in its loan program abide by nondiscrimination standards.

On June 22, the SBA hosted a “Recovery & Resilience for Faith Based Communities tele-townhall” for leaders of churches and religious nonprofits to urge them to participate in the program by applying before the June 30 deadline—and to lavish praise on Trump for supporting the program. The call was promoted by the White House and religious-right figures like Gary Bauer.

Paula White, who oversees the Trump administration’s faith-based outreach from her perch at the White House, began the call by praying for the president. “Put a hedge and wall of fire around him that no weapon formed against him would be able to prosper,” White prayed.

White praised Trump and his administration’s extensively, saying​, “it has always been his heart to make sure that houses of worship and people of faith have been protected.” She continued:

You heard that from way back, he was saying, ‘We’re going to put Merry back in Christmas,’ or talking about the Johnson Amendment. But he’s done so much to accomplish that. Things with religious freedom, like removing restrictions on grants. The PPP is one way that we begin to see this. There are so many others, but there are departments everywhere that have grants, and for years and decades, they’ve had restrictions that people of faith have had very, very difficult time. Well, our president made sure to remove those restrictions on grants, ensuring faith-based has equal access to capital, equal access to grant money.

White’s own City of Destiny church got between $150,000 and $350,000 in PPP funds, according to SBA records​.

To overcome the skepticism some conservative Christian leaders might have about getting directly involved with the federal government, officials invited several prominent religious-right leaders to praise the program. While PPP funds could be a lifeline to smaller congregations and nonprofits, it turns out that staying afloat has not been a problem for some megachurches that had online worship and fundraising abilities​. Instead, some of those megachurches have used money freed up by paycheck protection to expand their influence in their local communities.​

Jentezen Franklin, a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, is pastor of the multi-campus Free Chapel megachurch, based in Gainesville, Georgia. Franklin was effusive on the SBA call​, marveling that his church received a “tremendous amount of money” within three weeks of applying for it. Data released by the SBA Monday make it clearer how “tremendous” that amount was—in the $1​ million to $2 million range. With payroll covered by government funds and the ability to “catch up online,” Franklin said his church distributed $340,000 to small churches in his community.

Franklin has urged evangelicals to help reelect Trump or​ be prepared to face tragic consequences. Trump publicly announced that he was watching Franklin’s worship service on March 15, which Trump had declared a national day of prayer.

Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor who prayed at Trump’s inauguration and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said PPP money​ was “like manna in the desert of this pandemic.” Rodiguez said the church was “made for this hour,” adding that “for this administration to recognize the church and the faith community as essential is a game​ changer.”

Rodriguez’s New Season ​Church in Sacramento​, California, received between $150,000 and $350,000. He said the money has helped his own church not just survive but help other churches and expand community outreach. Rodriguez, who recently denounced the Democratic Party as “hostile to our Christian worldview,” ​called the program a “powerful resource” and a “blessing.”

“This is Uncle Sam helping us do the will of our heavenly father,” Rodriguez said. “So the PPP enabled us to cover payroll for our staff that is right now praying for interceding for the needs of our community, not just physical, spiritual, but in mental and emotional needs, literally saving lives.”

Also on the SBA call was another member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and longtime opponent of reproductive choice and LGBTQ equality. Dobson said that his organization, the James Dobson Family Institute, “has literally been kept solvent this spring and summer by the Paycheck Protection Plan.” Dobson said that thanks to the money his organization had received, ​adding, “We have not asked for a cent from anybody in six months.”

Other Trump-supporting leaders and organizations have done quite well. Here’s a sampling, drawn from our own research and other reporting on the SBA records:

Initially, the idea of tax dollars directly supporting clergy and church operations was defended as an extraordinary response to the unique situation caused by the pandemic. But on a phone call organized by Paul​a White’s One Voice Prayer Movement in May,former Rep. Randy Forbes ​of Virginia, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, celebrated ​that​ “precedents for religious freedom” that ​are​ being set during the pandemic—specifically the unprecedented use of federal tax dollars to directly fund clergy and churches—“are going to endure long after this coronavirus has gone.”

Marcus Harris, director of faith and community initiatives in the office of Entrepreneurial Development at the SBA, told people in the call, “One thing I’m able to say in my role as the faith-based leader here at SBA is that I know for many of you this is your first interaction with SBA, but we do not want this to be your last,” a sentiment that was repeated by SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza.

Tags: Donald TrumpJames DobsonJentezen FranklinJim BakkerPaula WhiteRick JoynerRobert JeffressSamuel RodriguezChurch-StateCoronavirusElection 2020Trump AdministrationAmerican Center for Law and JusticeFirst Baptist Church DallasLiberty CounselTrump Administration

==

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/an-amped-up-war-on-christmas-why-trumps-evangelical-fans-think-god-wants-them-to-defy-lockdowns/

rAW STORY

Many of President Donald Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters believe that it is their God-given duty to defy lockdown orders during the coronavirus pandemic, as they believe obeying restrictions will result in the establishment of an anti-Christian dictatorship.

**:{Daily Beast:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: columnist Eleanor Clift**writes that pandemic restrictions have become yet another heated culture war for evangelicals who distrust scientists and who believe it’s part of abroader conspiracy to take away their religious freedom.

“This is an amped-up version of the War on Christmas theme that conservatives trot out every year,” Clift explains. “Trump gave voice to it recently when he said without any evidence that Muslims celebrating Ramadan, which which begins on Thursday, would not be facing the same restrictions that Christians did on Easter.”

In fact, notes Clift,Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Matt Staver this week compared Christians living under stay-at-home orders to Jews living in Nazi Germany.

“This happened before in history,” he said. “We’ve seen people being targeted with a particular symbol that you have to wear. And then you get targeted with your business, you get terminated from your job, and eventually you get ghettoized.”

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, tells Clift that Trump-loving evangelicals see Trump’s potential loss this fall as an existential threat to their livelihoods, and they want to do everything in their power to deflect attention from his bungling of the crisis.

“They’re concerned about this crisis and his mismanagement of it and they’re going to do everything they can to support his efforts to deflect attention from his failings, to smear his critics and shift blame to governors and elsewhere — and re-elect the guy God put in charge for this moment,” he said.

===

==

popehat

https://www.popehat.com/2017/06/29/how-the-southern-poverty-law-center-enraged-nominal-conservatives-into-betraying-free-speech-values/

JUNE 29, 2017 BY KEN WHITE

Last week I argued that the *legal* outlook for free speech in America remains bright: the Supreme Court's defense of speech is consistent and robust. But the cultural outlook remains grim.Free speech, as a value, is under cultural assault — and feckless, politicized, and unlikely-to-be-effective legal assault — from across the ideological spectrum. Case in point: conservatives suing over mean, unfair, or unprincipled characterizations of their positions.

The latest culprit is Liberty Counsel, a group that litigates in pursuit of what it identifies as Christian values. Liberty Counsel has sued GuideStar, a database of charities, over GuideStar's controversial adoption of the Southern Poverty Law Center's "hate group" designation of entities including Liberty Counsel, which GuideStar later retracted. Liberty Counsel's complaint — which you can read here — is simply vexatious and unethical. It is — to abandon my pretense of decorum for a moment — a thoroughly contemptible and un-American piece of shit, and the lawyers who filed it deserve scorn. Liberty Counsel has filed a frivolous, censorious lawsuit against Guidestar in a cynical and craven attempt to avoid the more well-funded and ready-to-litigate PLC.

The complaint, filed in federal court in Virginia, accuses Guidestar of a violation of the Lanham Act — that is, it accuses Guidestar of false advertising based on Guidestar offering its opinion that Liberty Counsel is a hate group. It also accuses Guidestar of defamation and of interfering with its prospective economic advantage. These frivolous theories boil down to one idea: you're not allowed to repeat the SPLC's negative opinion of us.

There are many reasons to criticize the modern SPLC,:{1:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: which has sadly fallen from a group that once fought Klansmen and Nazis to protect rights down to the level of a shrill, doctrinaire, orthodox-leftist flailing denouncer of miscellaneous petty thoughtcrime. It is no longer to be trusted or taken seriously. If you want your money to support people protecting the powerless from violent bigotry rather than funding the sophomoric assembly of tendentious enemies lists, you should donate elsewhere.

But the SPLC's conduct is core, classic political speech. Ranting political generalizations about other people and groups and parties is exactly what the First Amendment protects. The SPLC's classification of a dizzying array of entities as "hate groups" may be unfair, unprincipled, immature, and even immoral. But it's also opinion absolutely protected by the First Amendment. Only provable statements of fact can be defamatory. It's certainly possible that the SPLC could make a false and defamatory statement of fact about a group in the course of classifying it as a "hate group" — for instance, by falsely attributing a statement to the group, or falsely claiming the group participated in some specific act. But that's not what's at issue in Liberty Counsel's cowardly-indirect attack on the SPLC. Their complaint says the defamation is the "hate group" classification. "Hate" and "hate group" are not provable statements of fact. They're opinion. You may think the opinion is stupid and without basis, but that doesn't magically turn it into a fact. You may think that having such an opinion expressed about you is very harmful, but that doesn't turn it into a fact either. "Hate group" occupies a place in the American lexicon with "SJW" and "cuck" and "fake news" and "far left" and "extremist" and "death party" and "party of death" and "libtard" and "wingnut" and anything else you'll see people shout at each other on Twitter. "Hate" and "hate group" aren't factually provable, because they're based on opinion. The opinion that being against gay marriage or affirmative action or generous immigration makes you a "hate group" may be stupid, but it's inescapably an opinion.

Were this not true, American political discourse would be cramped, chilled, and constantly hazardous. Want to start a list of professors you think are too liberal? Better get a lawyer first if your opinion classifying them can be defamation. Want to give letter grades to politicians based on their voting records? Better have deep pockets if your argumentative interpretation of their actions is subject to litigation. Want to make lists of politicians as "liberal" or "conservative"? You may think that's safe — but if opinion-based classifications are fair game for litigation, then it's not. Want to engage in political hyperbole and elbow-throwing rhetoric? See you in court.

Liberty Counsel knows this. These are not stupid lawyers. These are unethical lawyers, abandoning core American civic virtues to indulge in politics by other means. Liberty Counsel is part of the "do it to them because they did it to us" movement — the belief that, because some liberals someplace supported restrictions on free speech, it's acceptable to abuse the system to go after the free speech rights of these liberals here.

They aren't alone. Take Maajid Nawaz. SPLC was roundly criticized — reasonably— for calling Nawaz, a Muslim, an "anti-Muslim extremist." Nawaz has now announced — to the fawning approval of the loathsome Bill Maher — that he's crowdfunding a lawsuit against SPLC for that characterization. His site reveals just how broadly he wants to police political speech he doesn't like through litigation:

Legal action will, ideally, create a precedent, and provide a warning to those who think they can throw around damning labels like "Islamaphobe" "racist" and "Nazi" without any evidence and simply get away with it.

If nothing else, perhaps Nawaz's broad policy of censorship of hurtful opinions will win him support amongst Islamic extremists. He should target cartoons next. But someone needs to tell Nawaz that if he sues in speech-unfriendly United Kingdom courts, any judgment he secures will be worthless against the America-based SPLC. Under the SPEECH Act, foreign defamation judgments are not enforceable in America unless they are secured using America's speech-protective laws.

If the SPLC told factual lies about Nawaz — for instance, by claiming he said things he didn't — then that's potentially defamatory. But calling him an "anti-Muslim extremist" simply means "he's a guy who, in our narrow ideology-addled opinion, holds views that are unacceptable." That may be stupid, but it's not defamatory. The remedy for it is more speech, calling out the SPLC as hacks — and indeed, condemnation of the SPLC about its comments on Nawaz have been widespread and bipartisan. It's the same with Liberty Counsel. Guidestar dropped the SPLC "hate group" classifications in response to criticism. In its press release about the lawsuit, Liberty Counsel said that GuideStar "has lost all credibility." That's a very odd admission by a party seeking to prove that Guidestar's words hurt it, but it's also a spark of honesty in an otherwise dishonest campaign of political litigation: Guidestar offered an opinion, critics responded, and Guidestar suffered reputational consequences for its actions. That's how free speech is supposed to work.

I express no opinion in this post about whether Liberty Counsel's policy positions make it a "hate group" — though the SPLC saying it certainly is not a reason to believe it, and Guidestar showed questionable judgment in adopting the SPLC's term. But I do believe that Liberty Counsel's conduct in filing this case demonstrates that it is a foe of core American values and ought to be shunned on that basis.

However secure the First Amendment is under current Supreme Court precedent, there's a cultural war over free expression in America. People who pick the side of censorship and seek to undermine free speech rights are not worthy of your support or respect.

  1. Please join me in sympathy for the :{wonderful and principled}::{ Student Press Law Center}:, which is now the target of a lot of the Southern Poverty Law Center's bad press.  ▲

Last 5 posts by Ken White

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lc not on doc

http://lc.org/PDFs/Attachments2PRsLAs/2018/061818SPLCFinal-Executed-Settlement-Agreement.pdf

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-nawaz-v-splc/562646/

The e Southern Poverty Law Center, the venerable civil-rights organization, has issued a formal apology to British political activist Maajid Nawaz and will make a $3.4 million payment over his inclusion in a 2016 list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”

The settlement is the culmination of a bitter battle between the two sides that has stretched nearly two years. As I wrote when SPLC’s original report, A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists, was published, Nawaz’s inclusion was baffling and difficult to defend. SPLC did not grant Nawaz’s demand for a retraction, but it did make some edits to his entry while defending his inclusion. Then, in April, the group removed the guide altogether.

On Monday, however, SPLC President Richard Cohen posted an apology to Nawaz and to the Quilliam Foundation, his think-tank.

“Given our understanding of the views of Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam, it was our opinion at the time that the Field Guidewas published that their inclusion was warranted,” Cohen said in a statement. “But after getting a deeper understanding of their views and after hearing from others for whom we have great respect, we realize that we were simply wrong to have included Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam in the Field Guide in the first place.”

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On the merits, SPLC seems to have made the right choice. Nawaz’s inclusion made the report look more like an attempt to police the discourse on Islam than a true inventory of anti-Muslim extremists, of whom there is no shortage, and opened SPLC up to charges that it had strayed from its civil-rights mission at a time when it's more important than ever. But the terms of the settlement are troubling at a time when free speech and the free press are under fire, sometimes from the very same people who threaten civil rights.

SPLC also posted a video apology. It said that the payout will go toward Quilliam’s work and will be paid for by insurance. “It was the right thing to do in light of our mistake and the right thing to do in light of the growing prejudice against the Muslim community on both sides of the Atlantic,” Cohen said. The statement does not specify which elements of the field guide were incorrect. SPLC did not respond to a request for further comment.

There was no lack of irony to SPLC labeling Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist,” because Nawaz has described himself as a former extremist—but an Islamist one. A British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent, he joined the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir as a teenager, and eventually ended up in an Egyptian prison. Nawaz came to see Islamism, the ideology that combines the religion of Islam with politics, as a dangerous problem, and one that is separable from the religion. Back in the United Kingdom, he opened Quilliam, named for an early British convert to Islam, to fight Islamist extremism.

Nawaz is undoubtedly controversial. To what is broadly his left, critics find him to be far too strident in his criticism of Islamism and too apt to align himself with right-wing politicians. To the right, critics view him as too much of an apologist for Islam still. Nawaz has also said he receives death threats.

Yet even some of Nawaz’s critics were perplexed by SPLC’s choice to include him. Unlike other figures on the list, including Frank Gaffney or Pam Geller (or some figures who aren’t, like Donald Trump), Nawaz does not argue that Islam itself is the problem. There’s also the small problem that he is a Muslim himself, which separates him from figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another controversial figure, included in SPLC’s report, who was raised Muslim but now identifies as an atheist.

SPLC cited four particular reasons for Nawaz’s inclusion on the list. As I noted at the time, the first two—his tweeting of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad and visiting a strip club—were both tacky at worst. SPLC said Nawaz wanted to criminalize the niqab, or face veil; Nawaz countered that he favored a “policy” against the veil, not a law against it. SPLC and Nawaz also quarreled over a list of Islamist groups compiled by Quilliam, which SPLC said enabled government targeting and which Quilliam said was intended to defend the listed groups.

But this devolution into quibbling risks obscuring the larger point: It’s possible to disagree with much or some of what Nawaz says, and the way he says it (as I in fact do) without concluding he is an anti-Muslim extremist. In its statement, SPLC seemed to agree.

“Although we may have our differences with some of the positions that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have taken, we recognize that they have made important contributions to efforts to promote pluralism and that they are most certainly not anti-Muslim extremists,” Cohen said.

The list that included Nawaz became a central bone of contention in a broader debate over SPLC in general. While the fabled nonprofit has long had its critics, many of them hatemongers like Gaffney, the new chorus included sympathetic observers and fellow researchers on hate groups, who worried that SPLC was mixing its research and activist strains. “Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way?” *Politico Magazine*asked.

Nonetheless, the settlement, and especially its size, are somewhat surprising because SPLC might well have prevailed in court, albeit at great cost. Defamation lawsuits are famously difficult to win in the United States. A plaintiff who is a public figure must show not only that what is written about him is factually untrue, but also that it was published with “actual malice,” which is to say that whoever published knew or suspected it was untrue.

“The words ‘anti-Muslim extremist’ certainly sounds and indeed must be a matter of opinion,” the noted First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams told me. “The language that someone is an extremist may not in and of itself be a defamatory statement of fact. The argument would be it’s not defamatory—it’s not even a statement of fact!”

Even if Nawaz could prove a factual statement, he would then have to prove actual malice. “If it was a mere overstatement or thoughtless or any of those characterizations, then the defendant would start out in pretty good position,” Abrams said.

Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer and blogger, wrote Monday that the result was troubling. The firm representing Nawaz, Clare Locke, has sued a long list of media organizations. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to make it easier to sue the press. While White criticized SPLC for having transformed itself from a bulwark against bigotry into a policeman for political correctness, he said the surrender could set a bad precedent:

The threatened lawsuit appears to be part of a trend of suing the SPLC for its opinions and characterizations. The settlement will embolden that trend. The trend will not stay confined to the SPLC — that's not the way the law works. Especially in such bitterly divided times, suing over opinions is deeply censorious and corrosive of free speech. Nawaz — who has himself been the target of attempted censorship — should know that.

If White’s prediction is correct, that makes the episode all the more disappointing. SPLC’s work is especially important in this moment, as President Trump rolls back civil-rights laws, targets marginalized communities, and offers encouragement to white supremacists. By overreaching in its description of Nawaz, SPLC undercut its own reputation and the noble goal of fighting against anti-Muslim sentiment, and by settling, it risks undercutting free-speech protections at a time when they are already under threat.

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popehat

The Southern Poverty Law Center Surrenders Unconditionally To Maajid Nawaz. We Should Be Concerned.

JUNE 18, 2018 BY KEN WHITE

The Southern Poverty Law Center has surrendered, completely and unconditionally, in the face of a threatened defamation lawsuit by British activist and politician Maajid Nawaz. That surrender includes a $3.375 million payment to Nawaz "to fund work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism" and prominent written and video apologies.

This is a rout by Nawaz, a crushing victory on a scale I don't remember seeing in a threatened defamation suit. Though it inspires good feelings about fairness and truth, it ought also inspire concern about free expression and our broken court system.

The case begins with the SPLC's October 2016 "Field Guide To Anti-Muslim Extremists," which listed Nawaz. Nawaz is Muslim and spends a considerable amount of his time calling out anti-Muslim bigotry. The SPLC put him on the list for, among other things, printing a cartoon of Mohammed, advocating a ban on wearing a veil in some public places, and — most significantly — providing British law enforcement with a list of Islamic organizations and saying that "the ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics." The SPLC's stance was met with rather broad criticism. They sent the "Field Guide" down the memory hole.

Nawaz did not take this characterization lightly. He attacked it repeatedly and publicly, threatened a defamation suit, and eventually crowdfunded a legal team to pursue that lawsuit. This settlement, reached in advance of any suit being filed, is the result.

The SPLC's agreed-upon apology is both complete and oddly vague:

The Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong to include Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation in our Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Since we published the Field Guide, we have taken the time to do more research and have consulted with human rights advocates we respect. We’ve found that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism. Although we may have our differences with some of the positions that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have taken, they are most certainly not anti-Muslim extremists. We would like to extend our sincerest apologies to Mr. Nawaz, Quilliam, and our readers for the error, and we wish Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam all the best.

The SPLC has fallen from being a justifiably respected warrior against bigotry and brutality to an unreliable, sophomoric, flailing orthodoxy-cop that struggles to distinguish organized hate groups like the Klan from trolls, idiots, or social conservatives. I would like to see them be more responsible. But I am worried — and you should be too — about the abuse of defamation law.

One of the most basic principles of defamation law, mandated by the First Amendment, is that pure opinion can't be defamatory. Only statements of provable fact — or statements that imply provable fact — can be defamatory. I write about this constantly.An opinion, however moronic or unfair, is absolutely protected by the First Amendment unless it implies that the speaker is relying on undisclosed provable facts. So, for instance, "look at what this guy wrote, he's a bigot" is by definition not defamatory; it's based on an interpretation of a disclosed fact, the thing the guy wrote. "I've listened to this guy's conversations and, let me tell you, he's a bigot" might be defamatory, because it implies undisclosed facts — whatever you claim you heard.

Here, the SPLC's fatuous Field Guide appeared to be classic opinion based on disclosed facts. The SPLC offered its opinion that certain people were "anti-Muslim extremists" based on facts it set forth and linked. Their conclusion appears unfair, narrow-minded, and uttered in bad faith, but opinions are absolutely protected whether or not they're unfair, narrow-minded, and in bad faith. It's possible that I have missed a textual analysis, but it appears to me that Nawaz' criticism of the piece was that it unfairly characterized him based on facts, not that it got specific provable facts wrong.

That impression is fortified by the negotiated apology. The SPLC's apology — the precise language of which is dictated by the settlement agreement — says that the SPLC was wrong to put Nawaz on the Field Guide list and that Nawaz has done valuable work against bigotry. That's all true, rationally and morally. But what it very conspicuously doesn't say is exactly what facts the SPLC got wrong. It sounds like an apology for drawing an irrational, unfair conclusion, which is simply not defamation. Moreover, Nawaz specifically said he was going to sue to fight people who use labels like "racist" and "Nazi." But such labels are classic opinion.

It's impossible to overstate the extent of the SPLC's surrender here — I can't remember one combining this level of money and apology, especially pre-litigation. So why did they do it? Maybe there are specific false statements of fact in the Field Guide that haven't come to light. Perhaps discovery would have revealed ugly things about the SPLC's process of writing such lists. Perhaps the lawsuit would have resulted in sustained terrible publicity for the SPLC, undermining whatever credibility it has left. Maybe they're actually contrite.

But though I celebrate an apology for wrongdoing, I can't celebrate a surrender at swordpoint that encourages censorious litigation. Bad opinions are, and ought to be — must be — absolutely protected. If the SPLC surrendered because we've got a broken judicial system that makes litigation ruinously expensive and fails to protect free speech, the result is bad, not good. The threatened lawsuit appears to be part of a trend of suing the SPLC for its opinions and characterizations. The settlement will embolden that trend. The trend will not stay confined to the SPLC — that's not the way the law works. Especially in such bitterly divided times, suing over opinions is deeply censorious and corrosive of free speech. Nawaz — who has himself been the target of attempted censorship — should know that.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

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hmmn

https://www.lc.org/newsroom/details/062718-media-matters-partners-with-splc

Media Matters Partners with SPLC

Jun 27, 2018

MONTGOMERY, AL – Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz and his organization, the Quilliam Foundation, recently settled claims against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) regarding its false reporting. The $3.375 million settlement refers to the SPLC’s “co-publishers,” which includes Media Matters for America, regarding the publication of false statements that accused Nawaz and Quilliam of “savaging Islam.”

Media Matters states it is a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media…Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions.”

Media Matters uses the SPLC “hate group designation” as a source for defamatory statements on its website about  pro-family and conservative organizations like Liberty Counsel and many others. The SPLC claims it is “fighting hate and bigotry,” but its “hate group” list is a farce. While listing non-violent groups, like Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Family Association and Liberty Counsel, the SPLC does not include groups that advocate the violent overthrow of the United States, like the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

“Rather than correcting ‘misinformation’ and rebutting ‘false claims,’ as Media Matters claims to do, it published false information from the Southern Poverty Law Center,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “No reputable media source should rely on the false information of the SPLC. The SPLC is not dedicated to truth but rather dedicated to destroying its political enemies. The ‘hate group’ label as applied to nonviolent and peaceful organizations is false, defamatory, and dangerous,” said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

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anita whackjob

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/paranoia-rama-obamas-white-genocide-plot-satanic-lgbt-rights-alex-jones-loses-it/

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Mat Staver

Mat Staver is the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group that is associated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Until 2014, Staver served as the dean of Liberty University School of Law.

At the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which he founded in 1989, Staver works to amplify cases of what he claims is the persecution of conservative Christians in America. He gained national notoriety in 2015 when he defended Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis, who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision. Staver compared Davis’ plight to that of a Jew living in Nazi Germany. Staver has a long history of anti-LGBT rhetoric, much of it shared on his daily “Faith and Freedom” radio program.

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Conservative legal group defends clerk's stand against gay marriage ...

https://www.reuters.com › article › us-usa-gaymarriage-kentucky-lawyers

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:{Sep 2, 2015 - The thrice-divorced :{Davis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is an Apostolic Christian who announced ... Christian group, :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: have been involved in a ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The controversial group at the center of the Pope Francis-Kim Davis ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com › news › acts-of-faith › 2015/09/30 › pope...

Sep 30, 2015 - The story behind the group representing Kim Davis. ... ideological position than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was litigating the case.

Anti-gay marriage clerk Kim Davis takes her fight from Kentucky to ...

https://www.theguardian.com › world › oct › romania-anti-gay-marriage-c...

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1.

:{Oct 13, 2017 - Anti-gay marriage clerk :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: takes her fight from Kentucky to ... groups, including Liberty Counsel and :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, have ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Did Liberty Counsel do right by Kim Davis? - Courier-Journal

https://www.courier-journal.com › story › news › local › 2015/09/03 › kim-...

Sep 3, 2015 - Video | Vatican Doesn't Want You To Think Pope Endorses Kim Davis. 0:00. 0:00. AD. 0:00 ...... based Alliance Defending Freedom. But Greg ...

Bevin's lawyers: Kim Davis should pay legal bills for marriage fight ...

https://www.kentucky.com › news › politics-government › article225247295

Jan 30, 2019 - Matt Bevin publicly supported Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis during ... This case was initially instigated by Alliance Defending Freedom (an ...

Kentucky … again! Supreme Court hears homophobe's T-shirt case ...

https://www.patheos.com › blogs › thefreethinker › 2019/08 › kentucky-a...

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:{1 day ago - Image via YouTube/:{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... court rulings on Friday concerning Kentucky's :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: was the case of Blaine Adamson, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

:{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The religious right lost the fight over gay marriage in the U.S., but it ...

https://www.latimes.com › la-fg-romania-referendum-20181005-story

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:{Oct 5, 2018 - To that end, the :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has held conferences and ... the U.S. group that defended Kentucky court clerk :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: when ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Religious Right's Romanian Anti-LGBTQ Referendum Fails | Right ...

www.rightwingwatch.org › post › religious-rights-romanian-anti-lgbtq-ref...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Oct 9, 2018 - :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Liberty Counsel's Harry Mihet on tour promoting marriage ... As we have noted, the :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, the European ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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