Journalist Chris Rufo’s latest report shows the United States has joined an international trend of embedding queer activists and priorities into government agencies, with consequences that include targeting Christians for government harassment.
Rufo notes, for example, that President Joe Biden appointed to the State Department as “a special envoy to advance the human rights of LGBTI+ persons” a “gender activist” named Jessica Stern. Previously, Stern was executive director of OutRight Action International and helped found the LGBTI Core Group at the United Nations.
The United States is a leader in pushing foreign governments to put sexual activists like Stern on public payrolls. A recent report from the United Kingdom revealed coordinated campaigns between public officials and the country’s most influential LGBT group, Stonewall. The report found a “search and destroy” targeting of Christians in the U.K. resulting in loss of employment, unwarranted legal accusations, financial degradation, and harassment that has escalated in some cases to physical attacks.
“[T]here appears some evidence of a ‘search and destroy’ organisational approach by interest groups in education, business, banking, the health service, and even within government departments,” says the report from the Commission of Inquiry into Discrimination Against Christians. “Where this type of attack is experienced, there is very often an established link between the body in question and organisations such as Stonewall.”
Leftist Politicians Hire Queer Activists to Government Posts
The activists leftist politicians promote to taxpayer-paid positions are often politically extremist. U.S. activist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign, for example, maliciously link Christians with hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, said Tyler O’Neil, managing editor of The Daily Signal. In a book out in January 2025, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government, O’Neil examines the Biden-Harris administration’s deep ties to SPLC and HRC, noting that employees of both organizations have visited the White House at least 18 times each since January 2021.
The Biden-Harris administration has implemented at least 75 percent of HRC’s “Blueprint for Positive Change,” O’Neil said. The blueprint is a comprehensive wishlist for policies pushing transgenderism. They include rewriting federal civil rights law to force schools to let males compete in girls’ and women’s sports, cracking down on Christian therapists from providing talk therapy to help gender-confused kids come to peace with their innate sex, and promoting transgender medical treatments.
In an earlier book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, O’Neil describes the SPLC’s radical advocacy for transgender ideology. The group placed Christians on a “hate map” alongside KKK chapters, which prompted a terrorist attack at the conservative Christian nonprofit the Family Research Council in 2012.
“The SPLC uses this ‘hate map’ to raise money and to ostracize these groups from polite society, urging charitable organizations to blacklist them and presenting them as a potential terror threat,” O’Neil said. “The SPLC suggests opposition to transgender orthodoxy is a form of extremism and hate, and in doing so it smears all orthodox Christians who believe God created humans unalterably male and female as bigots.”
The U.S. State Department’s “latest annual LGBTQI+ progress report lists countless present and future efforts across all foreign agencies to make the world safe for queer theory, from ‘Pride Events at Headquarters’ to ‘Gender Equity in the Mexican Workplace,’” Rufo reports. “Among these is a department-wide partnership with the Global Equality Fund, a public-private entity ‘dedicated to advancing and defending the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world’ that has directed funds to 116 “grassroots” LGBTQI+ organizations in 73 countries.”
The Biden-Harris administration nominated Nancy Abudu, the SPLC’s deputy legal director, to serve as a top federal judge in 2023. That same year, the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, office relied upon SPLC’s framing of traditional Christians as domestic extremists, proposing to monitor Christians as potential violent threats merely for attending theologically conservative churches.
“The Biden administration’s position on trans issues is a blueprint for vast expansion of federal power, with the trans activists as the beneficiaries and Christians and other resistors as the most likely losers,” said Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute. Such support of radical transgender policies establish an anti-Christian orthodoxy that sends a chilling and threatening message to faithful Christians in the United States, O’Neil said.
Social Leftism Leads to Attacks on Christians
CatholicVote, a leading Christian advocacy organization, has documented at least 400 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and churches between 2022 and 2024. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, CatholicVote President Brian Burch requested that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate violence against pro-lifers in a 2022 letter, noting the administration’s apparent support of pro-abortion groups and dismissal of crimes against pro-life Americans.
The world’s largest grassroots movement, 40 Days for Life, has been banned from peaceful prayer and protest outside of abortion facilities in some U.K. countries. England’s ban went into effect this Halloween, following in the footsteps of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
“In the U.K., this has been, unfortunately, a long ongoing process with the LGBTQ community,” said Shawn Carney, 40 Days for Life president and CEO. “They are very militant. They absolutely hate Christians and any semblance of God in the country. [40 Days for Life] is in 64 countries and it was easier to work for free speech in China, downtown Berlin, and Moscow than in London. That is a fact of our experience on the ground. It’s outright bigotry.”
Still, Christians often prevail in courts when they challenge harassment based on their religious beliefs, he noted. To date the 40 Days for Life legal defense arm, the Institute of Law and Justice, has yet to lose one case in protecting pro-lifers, he said. Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Council, the Becket Fund, and Pacific Justice Institute all routinely defend Christians in court from political harassment over their beliefs.
In 2022, officials in Westchester County, New York passed an ordinance similar to the U.K. bans that criminalize silent prayer near abortion facilities. Forty Days for Life countered with a lawsuit, in a case that will likely advance to the Supreme Court.
“We won the first provision, we’re going after them hard and we are going to win the second provision and go to the Supreme Court,” Carney said. “We are going to [set a precedent] to end buffer zones in America.”
In October, the Napa Legal Institute published its annual “Faith and Freedom Index,” ranking religious freedom protections state by state. Many American citizens fear the loss of their freedoms, the report stated.
“Now is the time for states that do not have robust protections of these rights to move towards doing so,” said Mary Margaret Beecher, Napa Legal’s vice president and executive director, in a statement.
Legal cases against physicians who push cross-sex medical treatments on youth in America are mounting. Earlier this month Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against a pediatrician who violated Texas law by treating minors with opposite-sex hormones after the practice was outlawed in the state.
“Christians can defend their rights in a myriad of ways,” O’Neil said. “We can vote for candidates who represent our values or who do not demonize us. We can speak up if we see our banks, companies where we shop, or groups where we are members partnering with organizations like HRC and the SPLC.”
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
