Nebraska Family Alliance are a hate group

I wasn't aware of my local anti-LGBT, anti-choice conservative Christian activist organization, Nebraska Family Alliance, until quite recently. I think few people in Lincoln are aware of them. This should change.

UPDATE: this post is old and their website has changed. The NFA is far more transphobic than when I wrote the below.

A t-shirt reading: Nebraska Family Alliance is a Hate Group
In 2022, years after I wrote the original post (below) these t-shirts can be spotted in Lincoln and Omaha!

Nebraska Family Alliance writes government policy

In it's own words, "Nebraska Family Alliance exists to advance Family, Freedom and Life by influencing policy." Lets look at each of these three topics on their website.

Family

The Nebraska Family Alliance opposes legal gay marriage. They oppose it real hard. The entire Marriage & Family subject header on their website is exclusively about this issue; stripping legal rights from gay families appears to be their complete notion of family. They've been advocating against it for a long time: In 2006 the current Republican candidate for mayor of Lincoln, Councilwoman Cyndi Lamm represented them at a protest against same-sex marriage at the Capitol. (The 2006 article refers to Nebraska Family Alliance by its previous name, Nebraska Family Council).

Their page about gay marriage states "It is not bigotry to acknowledge what reams of scholarship confirm: Family structure matters, and children are more likely to suffer problems when they are not raised by their married mothers and fathers." The page lists a number of similar reasons that it would be entirely inappropriate to say the Nebraska Family Alliance are bigots. Seems like they're a little sensitive about it?

Freedom

There is a section of their website devoted to "religious freedom and the freedom of conscience". The text in this section also is wholly about opposition to same-sex marriage. The "freedom" they seek is exclusively about taking away rights from others.

You might have thought that religious freedom would include defending the freedom of churches who preform gay marriage, such as the Episcopal Church, to do so. Nope!

Life

The Sanctity of Life section of their website opens with "Pro-life people aren’t just anti-abortion". And then everything under that is about opposition to abortion. Sometimes pro-life does mean other things, like opposition to the death penalty, to some people. But I guess not to the Nebraska Family Alliance.

All their stated reasons for opposing abortion are dubious medical claims. (Also included is advocacy for the freedom of speech to make incorrect medical claims.) Does religion not factor into the control they desire over women's bodies?

Other stuff

The Nebraska Family Alliance uses the word "transgender" in quotes, presumably because they don't believe that transgender people exist. They haven't written a lot, yet, about the ways in which they might like to harm trans people. But "NFA is closely following this issue" so I'm sure that it's coming. They did call removing transgender people from the US military a common-sense policy.

They successfully passed a bill in Nebraska to issue birth certificates for miscarriages. Their website does not really say why they want to do this. I assume that it is an effort to get a foot in the door toward having fetuses declared legal people and thus have abortion outlawed.

The Gala

On October 26th, 2018, the Nebraska Family Alliance had a fundraiser gala the the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Lincoln. The keynote speaker was Kelvin Cochran, who wrote a book calling gay people unclean perverts, then got fired when he distributed the book to his employees. His bold contempt for his employees has made him a conservative Christian hero. He is a motivational speaker to others who wish impose their religion on the unwilling.

A sample of Who Told You That You Were Naked? by Kelvin J. Cochran

Lots of local notables come to the gala. It's a great place to enjoy your contempt for those different from you, together! After all, what is family for?

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts and state senators Steve Erdman and Joni Albrecht were there.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts and pastor Mariano Menendez enjoy a laugh about using the power of the government to oppress the vulnerable at the NFA Gala 2018. More event photos from Menendez's Facebook

My reasons

As things stand, if you search online for the Nebraska Family Alliance, you won't find a statement of their anti-LGBT and anti-choice positions other than what they've written themselves. I wanted that to change, so I wrote this.

Are they theocrats? Well, they advocate for religiously-motivated changes to government policy and export their policy-setting members to government jobs. Are they a hate group? They judge people as more or less worthy of political representation and protection under the law on the basis of sexual orientation and gender idenity, which are immutable conditions of identity. This is a common definition of a hate group, so, yes. The Nebraska Family Alliance is an anti-LGBT hate group.


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