Tom Sayers, Author at GAY TIMES https://www.gaytimes.com/author/tom-sayers/ Amplifying queer voices. Fri, 06 Dec 2024 18:30:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 Kristen Waggoner, the woman who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, is coming for LGBTQIA+ rights https://www.gaytimes.com/uncloseted/kristen-waggoner-overturn-roe-v-wade-lgbtq-rights/ Fri, 06 Dec 2024 18:30:40 +0000 https://www.gaytimes.com/?p=1412926           Waggoner is a legal powerhouse in America’s conservative Christian landscape and is used to getting her way in the courtroom. THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON UNCLOSETED…

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Waggoner is a legal powerhouse in America’s conservative Christian landscape and is used to getting her way in the courtroom.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON UNCLOSETED MEDIA A NEW INVESTIGATIVE LGBTQIA+ FOCUSSED NEWS PUBLICATION

WORDS TOM SAYERS
ADDITIONAL REPORTING SPENCER MACNAUGHTON AND SAM DONNDELINGER

In 2008, Lucas Wilson moved to Lynchburg, VA to attend Liberty University for an evangelical education.

Wilson knew he was gay from the age of four. But as he got closer to religion, he remembers being taught that his queerness was something to fix. He says his time at Liberty University – the world’s largest evangelical college, which asks students to sign an honour code that prohibits any expression of LGBTQIA+ identity – was awful. “Honest to goodness, I don’t think I’ve met such mean-spirited, nasty, nasty people in my life,” he told Uncloseted Media.

In 2021, nine years after Wilson graduated from Liberty, he joined a lawsuit alongside 39 other queer and trans-identifying plaintiffs who also attended religious colleges. The lawsuit – convened by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project against the US Department of Education – alleged that publicly-funded religious universities are unlawfully using religious exemptions to Title IX as a justification to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people. “Eliminating discrimination that targets LGBTQI+ students is a critical part of the Department’s mission,” the Department of Education said in their motion to dismiss, arguing that the complaints should be transferred to regional departments or dismissed.

Amongst the legal defense was Kristen K. Waggoner, CEO and President of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group and a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Wilson, now 34, says he went to individual conversion therapy sessions with one Pastor on campus and also attended the university’s conversion therapy group known at the time as Band of Brothers. “I was meeting with this pastor once a week and he was telling me, ‘You’re doing a good job, you’re on the right track – you’re going to overcome this,’” he says. “And so I always had this hope, this twisted hope … that I was going to be able to be straight.”

The Pastor and Liberty University did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.

At the end of August this year, Waggoner and her team succeeded in getting the case dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning that those with experiences like Wilson’s didn’t have a case. “Title IX’s religious exemption does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause,” the Court’s opinion states.

Meet Kristen Waggoner

Waggoner is a legal powerhouse in America’s conservative Christian landscape and is used to getting her way in the courtroom. She is renowned for her role in Dobbs v. Jackson which, in 2022, led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, rolling back abortion rights in over 14 states. Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban – for which Jackson Women’s Health Organization sued the state – is based on a model bill penned by ADF.

In a statement following the decision, Waggoner said the ruling was “a major victory for unborn children and their mothers,” and that ”today is a day of celebration, but the battle continues, as states either respect or shirk their responsibility to protect the life and health of women and children.”

On top of Waggoner’s work in rolling back women’s access to reproductive healthcare, she has over a decade of experience fighting against LGBTQIA+ rights. She has argued three winning cases in the Supreme Court, and been counsel of record for at least six anti-LGBTQIA+ cases over the span of ten years. As Vice President of Legal and now CEO of ADF, Waggoner’s employees are voicing support or testifying in favour of dozens of anti-LGBTQIA+ cases currently sweeping through state legislatures.

“Waggoner is a new generation of effectiveness,” says Michelle Nickerson, a Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. “She can very professionally and with great political savvy and knowledge of the law advance ideas that would set us back decades, that would make this world very hostile to [the LGBTQ community].”

Uncloseted Media reached out to Waggoner multiple times for an interview and for comment. She did not respond.

As the country edges closer to a Republican trifecta, Waggoner’s power could become even more pronounced. She has been slated by some for a Supreme Court justice nomination from President-elect Donald Trump. “[Even] if she’s not on the court herself, the courts will be a lot more friendly than they already are,” Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis, told Uncloseted Media. “And so arguments that [Waggoner and] ADF make will be much more feasible.”

Waggoner’s Early Days

Growing up, Waggoner was influenced by her father – Pastor Clint Behrends – who was superintendent of Cedar Park Christian Schools, an Assemblies of God Pentecostal congregation in Bothell, WA. By the age of 12, she said that she had decided “to become a lawyer to protect our First Amendment freedoms” to help people “live out [their] religious convictions in the public square,” adding that “these freedoms and our right to exercise them does not depend on cultural popularity or political power.”

For a year in the late ‘90s, Waggoner clerked for the Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders, a member of the Libertarian party who voted to uphold a ban on gay marriage. In 1998, Waggoner began practicing law for Elis, Li & McKinstry – with a focus on religious freedom. She worked there for 15 years until 2013 when she joined ADF as Senior Vice President of their U.S. Legal Division. From there, she worked her way up to become the organisation’s first female CEO and President.

ADF is a notoriously anti-LGBTQIA+ Christian legal group. It was co-founded in 1994 by Alan Sears, who co-authored “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.” With over 450 staff and over 4,800 network attorneys around the world, ADF has litigated and lobbied against marriage equality and anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination laws, and in favour of conversion therapy, and of removing trans people’s access to bathrooms or trans kids’ access to gender-affirming healthcare.

The group also has an international branch, ADF International, which holds Special Consultative Status within the United Nations. Their litigation spans beyond US soil. They have voiced support or testified in favour of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in Eastern Europe and Caribbean countries, and in Belize, where they defended a law that attempted to keep in place the criminalisation of gay sex.

ADF did not respond to a request for comment.

Success At The Supreme Court

Upon joining ADF in 2013, Waggoner used freedom of speech laws to defend a Washington-based florist after the store owner refused to supply flowers for a gay couple’s wedding. Shortly after, she defended Jack Phillips in the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop case that made national headlines. Waggoner argued that Phillips’ religious expression was denied after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and in a 7-2 decision, Waggoner won.

“These laws are being used against real people, creative professionals who simply want to live peacefully and consistently and create custom work that is consistent with their religious beliefs,” Waggoner said in an interview with ABC News in 2016.

A few years later, in 2023, Waggoner won another Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based designer who didn’t want to produce a wedding website for a gay couple. However, The New Republic later uncovered that Stewart, the man named in the case, was actually heterosexual and never even requested a website. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart told TNR. “I’m married; I have a child – I’m not really sure where that came from. But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document,” he added.

Despite Stewart’s claims, the ruling was not overturned and Waggoner’s wins at the Supreme Court set a new legal precedent when it comes to business owners having the right to use religious freedom to refuse services to gay people.

“[Waggoner] is just a really damn good lawyer,” says Ziegler. Her M.O. has become “the choice between pragmatism and absolutism,” she says, adding that Waggoner straddles being realistic with the types of cases she pursues and the strategies she uses to litigate them with her ultimate goals of rolling back LGBTQ protections at large.

“[But] since Dobbs, she’s become more aggressive,” Ziegler adds.

Using Mainstream Media as a Vehicle for Her Message

In 2018, Waggoner continued to move up ADF’s ladder and added Senior Vice President of Communications to her title. She started popping up as a legal expert on cable and network news like ABC, CNN and Fox, and even daytime talk shows like The View, moving her argument beyond the courtroom and into the public eye.

This gave Waggoner a key to a door out of the conservative Christian echo chamber and an ability to communicate to the mainstream American public that – within First Amendment law – it is acceptable to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people based on religious beliefs.

Even before her title change, Waggoner spoke in 2016 to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’ “This Week,” which has an audience of roughly 2.5 million. She defended efforts in North Carolina to exclude trans women from women’s bathrooms, citing safety concerns for cisgender women and girls. This “is a common sense provision that would restrict men from accessing girls’ locker rooms,” Waggoner told Stephanopoulous, misgendering trans girls and women throughout the interview and being left unchecked by the host. “We don’t want to have to undress in front of someone who is of the opposite biological sex.”

Promoting Conversion Therapy

After Waggoner’s successful Supreme Court run, she went on to defend Brian Tingley, a Washington State-based Christian therapist who challenged a law that disciplines healthcare providers for practicing conversion therapy.

In this instance, Waggoner didn’t win. In 2021, a judge dismissed the case, upholding Washington state laws that protect LGBTQIA+ youth from “exposure to serious harms caused by conversion therapy.” The law was struck down again in 2022, when the judge ruled that healthcare providers should not be able to treat gay children by telling them that they are “the abomination [they] had heard about in Sunday school.”

Outside of the courtroom, Waggoner has advocated for conversion therapists, promoting them in a 2021 public speech as a legitimate option to help people “overcome same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and live consistent with the beliefs of their faith.”

Waggoner cited Dr. David Schwartz as a good option for conversion therapy. Dr. Schwartz, a Brooklyn-based orthodox Jewish psychiatrist, sued the state of New York for passing local laws that prevented him from conversion therapy. ADF represented him in the case. In 2020, New York repealed the counselling ban and Schwartz and his attorneys dropped the case.

For Lucas Wilson and Andrew Hartzler, another gay man who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit against religious colleges that was defended by Waggoner, conversion therapy was nothing short of a nightmare.

Hartlzer says he experienced six weeks of conversion therapy at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which left him “walking around like a zombie” and “getting really depressed, being in [his] room crying.” Oral Roberts University did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.

“I was taught that if you like someone of the same sex… your relationship with Jesus is not as strong as it needs to be,” Hartzler told Uncloseted Media.

Waggoner’s Shift to Rolling Back Trans Rights

Over the past few years, Waggoner has increasingly shifted focus to legislation focused on rolling back transgender rights. In an interview last year with The New Yorker, she said the ADF’s next priority is fighting “the radical gender-identity ideology infiltrating the law.” She said she doesn’t believe in transgender identity, only in “gender dysphoria,” adding, “I believe there are people who are uncomfortable in their bodies.”

In 2019, ADF initiated their first suit aimed at banning trans girls from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity. From there, they have appealed two cases to the Supreme Court: B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education and Hecox v. Little, saying that it is not “fair for men to compete in women’s sports,” again misgendering trans women.

In 2020, they brought a case – which is still ongoing – against the Connecticut Association of Schools and two trans student athletes, targeting the inclusion of transgender girls in girls’ athletics. “It is so painful that people not only want to tear down my successes, but take down the laws and policies that protect people like me,” Andraya Yearwood said in a statement at the time of filing, “I will never stop being me! I will never stop running!”

In the case, for which Waggoner was counsel of record until April 2024, ADF attempted to have a judge removed when he told Waggoner and her team that “deliberately and repeatedly” misgendering trans people is bullying.

In 2021, ADF helped draft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which passed into law, prohibiting any classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity. Other states have adopted ADF-drafted legislation restricting gender-affirming care for minors.

Last year, Waggoner said liberal government officials are threatening to set up a new kind of police state – one in which dissenters who believe that marriage can involve only a man and a woman are forced to salute the rainbow flags flying outside every town hall, in which teachers are required to indoctrinate children into the belief that gender is not binary, and in which shelters for women impacted by intimate partner violence must make room for trans women.

Waggoner Goes Beyond America

On Oct. 16, 2024, Waggoner broadened her reach and addressed delegates at the United Nations in a meeting convened by ADF International and the Permanent Mission of Paraguay – about the inclusion of trans women and girls in sports. In her speech, she called it a “violation” to allow trans women into “women’s intimate space.” Waggoner cites a boycott of the San Jose State women’s volleyball team claiming that, “The women’s team was forced to allow a biological male [referring to a trans woman] on the team, prompting some to raise serious concerns about their own physical safety.”

When it comes to trans women, Waggoner leans on her role as a mother and identity as a cis-gendered woman. “What [Waggoner] manages to do by describing trans women as men is to claim that she’s representing victims, people who have less power,” says Nickerson.

“So much about feminism is about male violence…physical and otherwise…and so if she can describe trans women as men who are trying to access women, and if she can do it without yelling…she’s going to win so many people over who see her as a voice of reason.” says Nickerson, adding that this is “a weaponisation of feminism.”

Waggoner’s Next Move

Since President-Elect Trump’s first term, Waggoner and ADF have benefited from a heavily conservative court system.

Ziegler says that ADF’s successive wins, particularly at the Supreme Court, have made the group bolder in the cases they will bring before a judge. “If you have the Supreme Court, you don’t need to convince Congress,” she says. This allows ADF to push for cases that may not be as popular with the American public, putting marriage equality, reproductive rights and trans rights at greater risk.

It is since Waggoner’s tenure that ADF has pushed into reproductive rights. Ziegler says the group is now “one of the biggest players in litigation around contraception and IVF,” while remaining the biggest anti-LGBTQIA+ player.

“Right now, you have to see [reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights] as related, because the people who are trying to change policy through the courts are pursuing things that way.”

It’s not likely Trump will nominate Waggoner to the Supreme Court, mainly on account of her not having any prior judicial experience. “It would be easier for her to follow the kind of Amy Coney-Barrett path,” says Ziegler, “where she’s nominated to a federal court…for a little bit” before subsequently receiving a SCOTUS nomination.

In the meantime, Ziegler expects Trump to appoint a ton of conservative judges that will play in Waggoner and ADF’s favour. In Trump’s first term, he appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight.

“So I think what’s next for Waggoner is to take advantage of that. If she’s not on the court herself, the courts will be a lot more friendly [to her] than they already are.”

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Who is Timothy Mellon, the super-donor funding Trump’s anti-LGBTQIA+ attacks? https://www.gaytimes.com/uncloseted/who-is-timothy-mellon/ Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:44:35 +0000 https://www.gaytimes.com/?p=376264       In the last two years, Mellon has donated over $225 million to at least 30 Republican candidates, including a whopping $140 million to the pro-Trump super PAC,…

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In the last two years, Mellon has donated over $225 million to at least 30 Republican candidates, including a whopping $140 million to the pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA, Inc.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON UNCLOSETED MEDIA A NEW INVESTIGATIVE LGBTQIA+ FOCUSSED NEWS PUBLICATION.

WORDS BY TOM SAYERS
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SPENCER MACNAUGHTON AND SAM DONNDELINGER

On 16 October, Kamala Harris was “grilled” by Fox News host Bret Baier about her position on healthcare for trans people. In a gotcha moment, they played a recent Trump campaign ad that brought to the surface a clip of Harris discussing gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people. When pressed on what she might do in her presidency, Harris said she would follow the law. To show the scale of the issue, Harris told Baier that “Trump spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters,” calling the issue “remote” to the public.

Analysis by The New York Times found that Republican candidates have spent over $65 million on anti-trans messaging since Aug. 1. The Trump campaign has spent roughly $15.5 million on two ads, including one where the narrator says “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for You.”

But who exactly is footing the bill? Well, there are a handful of Republican mega-donors, including Jeff Yass, Richard & Elizabeth Uihlein, and Miriam Adelson. While all of them have given millions of dollars, no one has given as much to Trump’s 2024 campaign as Timothy Mellon. In the last two years, he has donated over $225 million to at least 30 Republican candidates, including a whopping $140 million to the pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA, Inc. His latest donation of $25 million was in September, according to the most recent FEC filings. And whether Mellon knows it or not, much of his money is likely funding the anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging that has taken centre stage in recent weeks.

This includes messaging from super PACs, which are political groups that can raise and spend unlimited money to support or oppose candidates as long as they don’t work directly with them, and candidates who are pushing anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and forcing anti-trans messaging front and centre in the lead-up to the 5 November election, which is on track to become the nation’s most expensive election in US history. 

Eighty-two-year-old Mellon is an heir to the Mellon Banking fortune, which is estimated at $14.1 billion. He’s now the biggest donor to the Republican party and has increased his spending since the 2016 election more than 5,000-fold. But he was not always an arch-conservative. A New York Times article from 1971 described him as “a quiet Yale graduate” who had “applied computer techniques to city planning.” At this time, he founded and endowed Sachem Fund, which donated to various progressive causes, including a corporation to help formerly incarcerated people start businesses and one of the first all-women “feminist collective” law firms. But as time passed, Mellon’s political perspectives – and donations – veered in the opposite direction.

Mellon’s cousin, Richard Mellon Scaife, who passed away in 2014, also used his money to power the conservative movement. He was a founding contributor, vice chairman and $34 million donor to The Heritage Foundation – the conservative think tank that penned Project 2025. He also donated to the Free Congress Foundation, which published “The Homosexual Agenda,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “an anti-LGBT call to arms that links homosexuality to pedophilia and other ‘disordered sexual behaviour.”

In the late 70s, when Mellon was in his 30s, he began sharing his cousin’s animosity toward the institutions of liberal America. He wrote in his 2014 memoir – panam.captain – that “Black people … [have become] even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations … They have become slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam. Slavery Redux. For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on.”

He also declared that “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, [and] LGBT Studies…have all cluttered Higher Education with a mish-mash [sic] of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with what he calls “the Dependency Syndrome.”

He writes that “Main Stream [sic] Media … is ”largely the propaganda arm of the Federal Government … [reporting] only that which supports the Dependency Message.” He adds that “MSNBC has become a caricature: Rachel MadCow, Ed “The Horse[‘s as$$]” Schultz, Chris “Haze,” and Chris “Trickle Down” Matthews, contending with one another for Chief Laughing Stock and gradually sinking their pathetic little cable station into oblivion.”

Mellon did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.

Before 2010, Mellon wouldn’t have been able to give $140 million of direct support to the pro-Trump super PAC to MAGA, Inc. But in 2010, a Supreme Court case in favour of Citizens United made it legal for corporations and other groups to spend unlimited funds on elections, and designated corporate spending on elections as free speech. Since this ruling and the subsequent creation of super PACs, these committees “can accept unlimited money from a corporation or an individual,” Andrew Mayersohn, the committee researcher at the political finance research organisation OpenSecrets, told Uncloseted Media.

But there’s a catch. “They can’t donate it to a candidate at the federal level, but [super PACs] can run ads explicitly saying vote for or vote against a candidate,” he says, adding that this is a “big upgrade” that has “opened the floodgates” for wealthy individuals and corporations to “play the money politics game.”

Unlike many countries like Canada, France, and the UK, which limit private funding through caps or source from public funding models, the US heavily relies on private donations, resulting in costly, privately funded campaigns. In this election cycle, for example, both Harris and Trump have raised hundreds of millions.

“I think there is reason for folks to be concerned about the role of large money in politics,” Conor Dowling, professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, told Uncloseted Media. “Certainly to an outside observer, meaning outside the United States, it’s different and it seems odd.”

According to a 2023 report by Pew Research Center, roughly seven in ten US adults say that there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organisations can spend on political campaigns.

One consequence of this structure is that this can put mass amounts of money behind a hateful message if a particular candidate is attacking another minority group in an effort to win.

When Trump first ran in 2016, Dowling says anti-immigrant rhetoric dominated the election cycle. But now, he says, this has broadened to include “trans [people], and perhaps the broader LGBTQIA+ community.”

“I think it signals that the Republican Party thinks that that’s an issue that they can sway some voters on,”  says Dowling, whose research focuses on elite political behaviour. “And I think that’s troubling,” he says, adding that “the idea behind a democracy is to provide protections for minority groups.”

As Trump’s transphobic rhetoric has intensified through the current election cycle, Mellon’s money is likely funding many of the anti-trans attack ads. In May of this year, Trump announced that on day one of his administration, he would rescind Title IX protections for transgender students. He has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that children are undergoing sex-reassignment surgery at school and, in a town hall with Fox News, said he will “absolutely stop” schools from allowing transgender athletes to play on sports teams that match their gender identity if he wins the 2024 election.

According to Accountable For Equality, a nonpartisan research group, roughly 40 percent of Trump’s TV ads attack trans healthcare. “Ohio, Wisconsin, Montana, and Texas are getting hit hard with anti-trans messaging,” a spokesperson for Accountable for Equality told Uncloseted Media.

Mellon – who hasn’t said much about the LGBTQIA+ community publicly – has also given $11 million since 2022 to Sentinel Action Fund, the super PAC arm of The Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote Project 2025, the 920-page book that is widely viewed as the most radically right-wing transition document in modern American history.

The document has been denounced by LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations in part because it conflates trans visibility with pornography, suggesting that the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.

In their launch video, Sentinel Action Fund’s president – Jessica Anderson – says it has “a renewed commitment to disrupting the swamp.” The committee fundraises for The Heritage Foundation’s policy arm “Heritage Action,” whose vision is to “organise communities of patriots all across the country and work directly with representatives to turn conservative policies into law.” Heritage Action stands against trans rights, stating that “instructing children to question their own gender and biology at young and developing ages is a radical new experiment in social engineering.”

Since The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, it has advocated against marriage equality, LGBTQIA+ people serving in the military and LGBTQIA+ Boy Scout leaders, and in favour of conversion therapy.

“One potential concern with these ads is that they’re leading to more hate and more violence against those groups,” Dowling says, adding that the ads are meant to instil fear. “If people are really taking those messages in the way that the people airing them seem to want them to be intended … There is certainly some reason to be worried about potentially some sort of a political violence as a result.”

In addition to Sentinel Action Fund, Mellon has donated to at least 11 other super PACs and hybrid PACs since 2022, including $25 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund who produced an ad that criticises Democratic state Senator David Min for voting in favour of California Senate Bill 357. Min argued that the bill would protect Black, Latino, and transgender Californians. Mellon also donated $5 million to Wisconsin Truth PAC who are connected to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) – who scored 7 out of 100 on Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard in 2022 for his anti-LGBTQIA+ track record. Sentinel Action Fund and Congressional Leadership Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

Mellon has also given directly to congressional and senate candidates at the federal and state levels. In the current election cycle, he has given almost $30,000 to some of the most anti-LGBTQIA+ elected officials in America, each at $3,300 apiece.

While this amount pales in comparison to what he’s given to Trump, Mayersohn of OpenSecrets explains that $3,300 is the maximum amount you can give this cycle, “You’ll see a lot of donations in that amount.”

In this cycle, Mellon has donated to Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who once boasted a 100% score on the vote scorecard by Family Research Council, which is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group. Her Congressional website declares, “Children should never be used as pawns to advance radical gender ideology. Permanently altering and disabling the physical bodies of children is never ok – and it is especially deplorable when done to gain cheap political points with the radical left.” Boebert regularly pushes for anti-trans legislation such as requiring “schools to notify parents if biological males are permitted to use women’s restrooms” and introduced legislation to honour Emma Weyant – who placed second – “as the rightful winner of the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s 500-Yard Freestyle,” in an attempt to strip Lia Thomas – a trans athlete – of her win. Boebert also “oppose[s] efforts to redefine marriage as anything other than the union of one man and one woman.”

Mellon also gave to Nancy Mace (R-SC), who – according to her congressional website – stands firm “against the radical agenda that seeks to impose divisive DEI policies.” Mace opposes any mention of the existence of trans people in the classroom and regularly targets protections for trans kids in school. Boebart did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment and a representative for Mace had no comment.

As Mellon continues to fund super PACs and Republican candidates with anti-LGBTQIA+ track records, Conor Dowling doesn’t believe laws around limits on campaign financing will change anytime soon due to First Amendment protections because expenditures of money are viewed as a form of freedom of speech.

Despite this, he believes the use of such money toward anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging could change in a post-Trump political landscape. “Nobody’s going to know the answer to this until after he’s no longer running for office,” he says. “How much of this is about Trump and Trumpism versus a more common part of American politics generally?”

“If elites are not talking in this way, perhaps we won’t see this at the mass level as well.”

Additional reporting by Spencer Macnaughton and Sam Donndelinger

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