In 1993, with gay-rights issues increasingly being contested in the courts, a coalition of 35 Christian Right groups founded the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). Key founders included D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, and James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

ADF President Alan Sears was a culture-war veteran, having served as executive director of Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography during the Reagan Administration.

Sears believed the fundamentalist right needed to get serious after years of liberal court victories: "They hit and they hit and they hit, and finally we're defending." Sears claims that the ultimate goal of the gay-rights movement is to "silence" Christians.

In 1994, ADF solicited funds on Christian radio with an ad claiming, "Pro-life demonstrations may soon be illegal. ... Religious broadcasting may soon be censored. Hiring homosexuals in Christian schools, churches, and even as Sunday School teachers may soon become the law of the land. ... Don't let Christianity become a crime."

In 2003, Sears and ADF Vice President Craig Osten expanded on that theme in The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom, which ties homosexuality to pedophilia and other "disordered sexual behavior."

In 2000, the ADF helped defend the Boy Scouts of America's ban on openly gay scoutmasters, which was upheld by a narrow 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The ADF has also mounted legal challenges to gay military service, marriage, adoption and foster-parenting, as well as to domestic partner benefits around the nation.

It trains other attorneys "to battle the radical homosexual legal agenda" in free, week-long National Litigation Academies, whose participants commit to "provide 450 hours of pro bono legal work on behalf of the Body of Christ."

American Family Association
TUPELO, Miss.
www.afa.net

Best known for leading boycotts of advertisers who support "indecency" in the mass media (including the supposedly cocaine-snorting Mighty Mouse), the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a former Methodist minister, has led a series of religious-right groups since 1976.

Appointed by Alan Sears (see Alliance Defense Fund) to the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1985, Wildmon successfully urged the removal of Playboy and Penthouse from some 17,000 convenience stores. But another favorite target has been homosexuality.

In the 1980s, Wildmon succeeded in getting ads pulled from shows like "Thirtysomething," added to Wildmon's list of "Trash TV" because its plot included a gay romance. The American Family Association (AFA), created by Wildmon in 1977 as the National Federation for Decency but renamed AFA in 1988, has built an empire — a 200-station radio network, about 100 employees and a monthly AFA Journal sent to 180,000 people — largely on the basis of anti-gay appeals.

In one October 2004 article, the AFA Journal suggests that gay influences are leading to a "grotesque culture" that will include "quick encounters in the middle school boys' restroom." In its 1994 booklet Homosexuality in America, the AFA claims "[p]rominent homosexual leaders and publications have voiced support for pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism, and even bestiality."

AFA's direct-mail appeals are particularly shrill. "For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery!" says one such recent fundraising letter. "Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to 'breed' is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!"

AFA has 21 state directors, including California's Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika, a book that claims "homosexuals are the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities" (see also Making Myths).

In late 2004, the AFA called for a boycott of Proctor & Gamble, calling it "one of the largest promoters of the homosexual agenda," partly because it advertises on TV shows "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." By late January 2005, AFA claimed more than 380,000 people had signed its boycott petition.

With Wildmon reportedly in shaky health, his son, Tim, now serves as AFA president.

American Vision*
ATLANTA, Ga.
www.americanvision.org

Founded in 1978 by Gary DeMar, one of America's most prominent proponents of Christian Reconstructionism, American Vision produces a wide variety of "educational resources" designed to "restore America's Biblical foundation." Like R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Reconstructionism (see Chalcedon Foundation), DeMar contends that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation" and that its democracy should be replaced by a theocratic government run by Christians who will strictly impose certain Old Testament prohibitions, including passages they interpret as opposing homosexuality and abortion.

"The Bible is clear on moral issues that are culture-killers: homosexuality, homosexual marriage, and abortion," says DeMar, who is closely allied with D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, where he frequently speaks.

While DeMar insists that homosexuals wouldn't be rounded up and systematically executed under a "reconstructed" government, he does believe that the occasional execution of "sodomites" would serve society well, because "the law that requires the death penalty for homosexual acts effectively drives the perversion of homosexuality underground, back into the closet."

Another "long-term goal," he writes elsewhere, should be "the execution of abortionists and parents who hire them."

DeMar is also down on anti-poverty programs. "Nowhere in the Bible is civil government given authority to help the poor by raising taxes on the rich," he insists in the American Vision Web site essay. "In fact, as history shows, the 'war on poverty' became the war on the poor."

DeMar is tightly linked to other Reconstructionists, including Gary North, with whom he co-authored Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn't.

In 1993, American Vision helped county commissioners in Cobb County, Ga., pass an anti-gay resolution so strongly worded that it sparked a national controversy. Cobb County Commissioner Gordon Wysong spoke at American Vision's annual fundraising banquet the following year, saying of gay people, "We should blame them for every social failure in America."

Chalcedon Foundation*
VALLECITO, Calif.
www.chalcedon.edu

The late Rousas John Rushdoony, known as the "father of Christian Reconstructionism," established the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. The think tank's name refers to the Council of Chalcedon, which in 451 A.D. proclaimed the state's subservience to God.

Rushdoony's message, articulated in his massive 1973 opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, is similar: fundamentalist Christians must take control of governments and impose strict biblical law on America and the world. That would mean the death penalty for "practicing homosexuals," among many other "abominators."

Rushdoony, whose book is revered by Reconstructionists as their foundational document, was also a racist. He opposed "unequal yoking" — interracial marriage or even "enforced integration" — insisting in the book that "[a]ll men are NOT created equal before God... . Moreover, an employer has a property right to prefer whom he will in terms of 'color,' creed, race or national origin."

The Bible, Rushdoony wrote, "recognizes that some people are by nature slaves." In fact, American slavery was "generally benevolent" despite misguided attempts to make whites feel guilty about it.

Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier, attacking the "false witness" that some 6 million Jews were murdered in World War II.

In the early 1990s, Rushdoony was reportedly a member of the board of governors of the secretive Council of National Policy Board, an exclusive group of arch-conservative leaders, where he was feted on his 80th birthday by Howard Phillips (Phillips ran for president twice on the extremist Constitution Party ticket).

Although most fundamentalist leaders now deny holding Reconstructionist beliefs, several — including Beverly and Tim LaHaye (see Concerned Women for America), Donald Wildmon (see American Family Association) and D. James Kennedy (see Coral Ridge Ministries) — did serve alongside Rushdoony and other Chalcedon associates on the Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1981 to "reclaim America."