Influential anti-LGBTQ+ Christian activist caught admitting secret plan to defund public schools

The Republican-led, anti-LGBTQ+ “parents rights” movement was started in the 1980s by a deeply religious conservative Christian evangelical lawyer named Michael Farris. Farris began his crusade advocating for the rights of Christian homeschoolers who said that school readings of Rumpelstiltskin, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and other materials that “undermined their religious beliefs.”

But these days, Farris has an even bigger goal: encouraging parents to file lawsuits accusing public schools of violating their rights by teaching students about racial and LGBTQ+ issues. These lawsuits could eventually secure a U.S. Supreme Court victory that would redirect billions of taxpayer funds from public schools to religious homeschools and charter schools.

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Farris — who served as president and chief executive of the anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) from 2017 to 2022 — believes that public schools are “a godless monstrosity” “indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amount[s] to a godless religion,” according to The Washington Post. He also supported former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and opposed the 2003 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex nationwide.

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“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” Farris has said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”

In a recently unearthed, private July 2021 call with members of the Christian millionaires group Ziklag, Farris outlined his “uphill battle” plan to “take down” the “giant” public school education. Ziklag’s members want to expand Christian influence over U.S. culture and government. This includes creating schools that incorporate “a conservative, biblical worldview in science, humanities, and the arts,” one of the group’s documents states.

During the call, Farris said that school officials are “directly attacking the Christian worldview” and that “parents are being forced to choose: either pay for themselves for a form of education that is consistent with [their] moral worldview or send their kids into a system where they will be deliberately undermined.”

In 2007, Farris and other home-schooling leaders founded Parentalrights.org, a group that wants a U.S. Constitutional amendment stating that parents have a fundamental right to “direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”

He has also helped establish the Center for Parental Rights at ADF. ADF has been behind multiple anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ lawsuits, including the cases that helped overturn abortion rights nationwide and one that allows website designers to discriminate against LGBTQ+ customers. It has increasingly filed lawsuits on behalf of students and professors who oppose their schools’ LGBTQ+-inclusive anti-discrimination policies as well as amicus briefs that call trans-inclusive policies “unconstitutional.”

ADF gave $444,249 to Ziklag in 2021 and $514,491 in 2022, tax records show.

It’s also no surprise that Farris advised current Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to adapt the “parents rights” platform that helped him win office in 2021.

“Farris said he was among those who urged Youngkin to promise ‘to get rid of all the politics in the public schools,’” The Washington Post wrote. “’Say that a thousand times,’ Farris recalled advising Youngkin. ‘You’ll be governor of Virginia.’”

Youngkin has since revised his state’s school policies to force students to use bathrooms, pronouns, and names that align with their sex assigned at birth. While these policies go against “parents’ rights” to support their transgender kids, Farris said, “Parents who engage in a behavior that causes long-term harm to their children — that crosses the barrier of what parental rights protects.”

Farris believes the best way to ensure that the children of religious parents are protected from such “indoctrination” is to funnel taxpayer dollars into “universal voucher programs.” Such programs have already begun in a few conservative states and force taxpayers to fund religious and private schools that have traditionally been allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion and LGBTQ+ identity.

Considering the current conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, some worry that Farris, ADF, and other anti-public school advocates may succeed. If they do, it’ll be a significant blow towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and viewpoints in the public square.