![]() Matt Sharp, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the ADF disagrees with Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification. ![]() “Since the election of President Trump, ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights,” SPLC officials wrote in their file for the alliance. Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. According to its website, it focuses on the issues of “religious freedom, sanctity of life and marriage and family.” The Alliance Defending Freedom is an Arizona-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that focuses on advocacy, training and funding legal cases. Legislation modeled by Alliance Defending Freedom helped bill spreadĮhardt credited the Alliance Defending Freedom with helping spread the bill they worked on together from state to state via model legislation, where the substance of a bill remains the same, but certain language - such as the name of the state - is changed. “That’s where the Alliance Defending Freedom decided to get involved and help craft some better legislation,” Ehardt added. That precedent, Ehardt said, was her foot in the door and ticket forward.Īt that point, Ehardt reached back out to the alliance’s legal counsel to look it over and suggest alterations. But she said somebody at the Alliance Defending Freedom found House Bill 632 from the 2012 legislative session, a law that set out new concussion, head injury and return-to-play protocols that applied to middle school, junior high or high school sports, including those overseen by the Idaho High School Activities Association. ![]() One of the original roadblocks Ehardt faced is she didn’t think the Legislature could write policy for the Idaho High School Activities Association, which is a private group. “I contacted somebody at the (Alliance Defending Freedom) and the one thing they helped me find is there was a path forward through the Idaho Legislature,” Ehardt said. Then she said she began reaching out to as many as 12 to 15 conservative groups focused on “traditional family values” for help and direction. She said it was one of the first bills she began working on.Īt first, Ehardt said she couldn’t figure out how to get the bill off the ground. “I realized if we don’t do something about this, we all see where this is heading.”Įhardt, who was first appointed to the Legislature in December 2017, contacted Idaho Legislative Services Office for help drafting her idea into bill form. “I thought that was wrong biological boys should not compete against biological girls,” Ehardt said. Gaona-Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the Idaho House as a Democrat in Canyon County in 2020.Įhardt enlisted help from Alliance Defending Freedom, other groupsĮhardt said she came up with the basics of the idea that became HB 500 in 2018 when she heard about high school state track meets in Connecticut that two transgender girls won. “You can’t legislate people out of existence, but you can create a lot of harm in doing that.” “That erasure is so deeply painful and so deeply troubling,” Gaona-Lincoln said in a telephone interview. Gaona-Lincoln said these bills and bans create a standard of othering and erasure against young people who are just trying to belong and find a supportive home in sports and at school. Legal Voice joined ACLU Idaho in suing over Idaho’s law last year. Gaona-Lincoln is the Idaho programs manager for Legal Voice, a nonprofit Northwest firm working for equality and the protection of rights for the LGBTQ community and women. “In short, HB 500 is entirely unnecessary, was prompted by a campaign targeting transgender and intersex persons and can be explained only as impermissible and baseless discrimination.”Ĭhelsea Gaona-Lincoln said it has been hard to watch the bill pass in Idaho and advance to other states. ![]()
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