Wealthy Foundations Seek To Suppress Religious Liberty

The Arcus Foundation’s website lists a 2014 grant of $100,000 to the American Civil Liberties Foundation supporting “communications strategies to convince conservative Americans that religious exemptions are ‘un-American.’” A two-year Arcus grant to the ACLU in 2013 gave $600,000 to support the ACLU’s Campaign to End the Use of Religion to Discriminate. Arcus Foundation tax forms describe this as a “multi-pronged” effort to combat “the growing trend of institutions and individuals claiming exemptions from anti-discrimination laws because of religious objections.”

…The Ford Foundation’s 2013 tax forms and website indicate it has committed $650,000 to the same project, which the foundation says will “counteract religious exemption and conscience-based carve-outs to laws securing sexual and reproductive rights.” The grant money also supports “a symposia series on LGBT rights.”

—Kevin J. Jones, Are Wealthy US Foundations Paying To Suppress Religious Freedom? (HT: @MZHemmingway)

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5 comments

  1. I was watching the news last night and a certain bill is being pushed that as one lgbt activist put it, “No one in California will be able to hide their prejudice behind a cross, no one!”

  2. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?type=funder

    This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines the immensely wealthy charitable foundations that provide financial backing for leftist groups and causes. These foundations — sometimes called endowments or charitable trusts — are nongovernmental, nonprofit entities whose assets are provided by donors and managed by their (the foundations’) own officials, who earmark portions of their assets each year for what they consider to be socially useful purposes.

    The DiscoverTheNetworks database currently identifies and profiles more than 125 major foundations whose political and philanthropic orientations are generally leftist, and whose combined assets exceed $100 billion. Some of the foundations described in this section are so large that they have single-handedly shaped entire cultural and political movements. (See, for example, the Ford Foundation’s role in underwriting The Open Borders Lobby.)

    Several of the massive, tax-exempt entities profiled in this section — most notably the Tides Center, the Liberty Hill Foundation, and the Proteus Fund — are pass-through operations designed to mask the relationship between donor and gift. That is, they take money from donors who specify the precise groups and causes for which they want it earmarked, and in turn funnel that money to those recipients, allowing the donors avoid being publicly associated with the groups being funded. The funds transacted in this manner are called donor-advised funds. (The JEHT Foundation, which closed its doors permanently in 2009, was yet another pass-through.)

    As of 2003, America’s top left-leaning foundations held $51 billion more in assets than their conservative counterparts (those that consistently funded groups promoting individual rights, a pro-market stance, and limited government). Moreover, the leftist foundations made grants whose combined value was 26 times greater than all the grants awarded by their conservative counterparts. With many billions of dollars at their disposal, the foundations profiled in this section of DiscoverTheNetworks are positioned to permanently shift America’s political dialogue to the left through their grant-making power. Leftist activists commonly hold key positions on the staffs and governing boards of these foundations, and often they serve on multiple boards.

  3. Well, they already have Christians who seem to be of the same persuasion. Those who wish to get rid of religious exemptions can point to not only liberal Protestant types, they can also find self-described theological conservatives for support.

  4. America and the western world has become Rome and the left likes it so much (and helped very much to cause it) that they are blind to it.

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