They're Coming for Birth Control (BE VERY AFRAID)
(FUCK ALL THE GODDAMNED WOMAN-HATING CHRISTOFASCIST THEOCRATS)
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a nightmare
They’re Coming for Birth Control (BE VERY AFRAID)
10/12/2023 by Jill Filipovic
… and anti-discrimination laws, and gay rights, and the First Amendment.
Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 5, 2022—the day of oral arguments in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which a website design company in Colorado refused to create websites for same-sex weddings. In the end, the Court decided to green light what was previously understood as discrimination. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
If you want just a little taste of where the conservative movement is headed, look at the Alliance Defending Freedom—a right-wing legal organization that has spearheaded the fight against abortion rights. The ADF is the group that overturned Roe v. Wade, and ended the era of legal abortion in the United States. And they’re clear on what they’re coming for next: Trans rights. Gay rights. The separation of church and state. Secularism. Anti-discrimination laws. And contraception. Earlier this month, the New Yorker published an incisive profile of the group: “In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won 14 Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding,” David Kirkpatrick wrote.
. . . .
The ADF is only one of many right-wing groups agitating against women’s rights. But they’re a particularly powerful one. And understanding their agenda, which is an explicitly Christian one, is crucial to understanding where U.S. law may go in the next few years. The ADF and their many benefactors come out of the religious right, and what they ultimately seek is a Christian America in which their own conservative religious values dictate law and policy.
The ADF has supported laws that criminalize gay sodomy.
They have sued to allow prayer in schools.
They have argued in favor of conversion therapy, a practice now banned in many states because it’s so damaging, in which therapists try to un-gay children and adults alike.
They fight laws that attempt to prohibit discrimination against LGBT people, arguing that it should be a person’s right to discriminate as they see fit (or at least if they have a religious pretext for discrimination).
They’re active abroad, supporting efforts overseas to criminalize same-sex relationships. Homophobia in developing nations, including in countries that jail and even execute gay people, is being fueled by the ADF and other U.S. Christian organizations. Many of the ADF’s claims come down to “religious freedom,” which in their telling isn’t just the right of an individual to practice their own religion without state interference, but the right of an individual to decide that their religious beliefs should determine how other people live and what other people have access to (or don’t) in secular spaces.
. . . .
Amy Coney Barrett and Josh Hawley both lectured at the program—Coney Barrett five times. Both lectured the summer of 2013, when, according to Kirkpatrick’s reporting, the ADF distributed the following “lexicon” to participants, intended to guide how they spoke about various issues:
instead of “bigotry, anti-tolerance,” say “defending biblical, religious principles”
instead of “homophobia,” say “convictions against homosexual behavior”
instead of “hate crimes,” say “so-called ‘hate’ crimes”
instead of “sex education,” say “sexual indoctrination”
instead of “gay marriage” and its “advocates,” say “marriage imitation” and “opponents of marriage”
instead of “transgender,” say “cross-dressing” or “sexually confused”
instead of “gay and lesbian civil rights movement,” say “homosexual agenda.”
. . . . .
The birth control pill has saved millions of lives, including the lives of children who would not have survived if their mothers had not been able to plan or space their pregnancies. It has been one foundation upon which women’s freedoms have been built: Professor Claudia Goldin, who just won a Nobel Prize in economics, is perhaps most famous for her work demonstrating the birth control pill’s huge impact on women’s labor force participation. A world in which people agree the birth control pill was a mistake is a world in which people agree that women’s liberation was a mistake—that women should not be in control of our bodies or our lives, should not work, should not chart our own paths, should not be free. And that is the world that the ADF, and the many conservatives who fund them and support them, are trying to build.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/12/alliance-defending-freedom-birth-control-trans-gay/