By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives July 14, 2017
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In a closed-door speech to a right-wing legal advocacy group, Attorney General Jeff Sessionssaid religion is under attack, according to text of the speech the Department of Justiceappears to have released to the conservative website The Federalist on Thursday. Earlier this week, Sessions spoke to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was designated an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016, at their Summit on Religious Liberty in Dana Point, California. The event was closed to reporters, and both the Department of Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom declined to provide a copy of Sessions’ remarks to ABC News. . . . According to the civil rights watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy group founded by Christian right leaders in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1994 that “specializes in supporting the recriminalization of homosexuality abroad, ending same-sex marriage and generally making life as difficult as possible for LGBT communities in the U.S. and internationally.”
For Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen, the speech was a tacit endorsement of a group with extreme anti-LGBT views. "The ADF spreads demonizing lies about the LGBT community in this country and seeks to criminalize it abroad. If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail,” Cohen told ABC News in a statement. “It was inappropriate for Attorney General Sessions to lend his credibility to the group by appearing before it, and it was ironic that he would suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community."Now the story does include a response from the ADF that accurately describes SPLC as attacking "anyone who disagrees with its far-left ideology," but then it proceeds to balance the balance by quoting a lesbian Democrat senator who basically repeats the accusations against Sessions and the ADF. The thing you want to pay attention to is ABC's own descriptions of the parties involved. It describes ADF as a "right-wing legal advocacy group," which clearly indicates that ABC considers the group's ideological bent central to its identity. But it does not describe SPLC as "left-wing," choosing instead to use the term "civil rights watchdog."
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