Thank You, Yale Law School, for Denying Support to Anti-LGBT Hate Groups
Yale Law School will no longer extend fellowship funding to students wishing to participate in internships at anti-LGBT groups like Alliance Defending Freedom.
LeGaL, The LGBT Bar of NY, applauds the Law School’s Outlaw group and members of the LGBTQ community for pushing to see that the school’s non-discrimination policy is enforced. Promoting anti-LGBT policies that harm queer people, attempt to ban transgender people from public life, and defend harmful conversion therapy are NOT in the “public interest.”
This is the announcement email to the student body from Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken:
We write to announce that the Law School’s nondiscrimination policy will extend to the Summer Public Interest Fellowship (SPIF), Career Options Assistance Program (COAP), and our post-graduate public interest fellowships. …Nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression is a key component of the Law School’s nondiscrimination policy. …
We are grateful to members of the LGBTQ for their leadership, their friendship, and their intellectual engagement. And we reaffirm our commitment that these students, faculty, and staff should not experience discrimination inside or outside this Law School.
We appreciate the leadership of Outlaws for raising the issue of the applicability of our nondiscrimination policy to student employment opportunities funded by the Law School.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which at one point benefited from Yale Law School fellowship money, is designated as a Hate Group by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has:
Supported the recriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and criminalization abroad
Defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad
Linked homosexuality to pedophilia
Claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society
