Anti-LGBTQ Movement and Who Funds It

What Is the Anti-LGBTQ Movement

The anti-LGBTQ movement is an organized political coalition that works to roll back LGBTQ+ rights and the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It is a network of advocacy groups, conservative legal organizations, political operatives, and donors who fund litigation, write model legislation, and run media campaigns. It is not a neighbor who disagrees about marriage or pronouns. Its current center of gravity is transgender rights, where public opinion is least settled.

The movement frames its work as protecting children, parents, faith, and tradition. The documented result is narrower rights for LGBTQ people, especially transgender youth.

Rowan County, Kentucky, July 6, 2015. Ten days after the Obergefell ruling, David Moore and David Ermold, a couple for 19 years, asked county clerk Kim Davis for a marriage license. She refused, saying she was acting “under God’s authority.” When Moore said she had likely licensed “murderer[s], rapists,” Davis answered that “was fine because they were straight,” according to the federal appeals court’s account of the record. A jury later awarded each man $50,000. Davis’s lawyers at Liberty Counsel, one of the groups on this page, then asked the Supreme Court to overturn same-sex marriage itself. On November 10, 2025, the Court declined.

Ordinary disagreement is not the subject of this page. A private religious or cultural view is not the same as an organization that drafts model legislation and funds court cases, and naming that difference is what keeps the criticism fair.

The pattern repeats: donors fund legal and policy groups, those groups write model bills and bring lawsuits, and state or federal officials turn them into enforceable rules.

Homophobia and Transphobia, Defined

Homophobia is fear, dislike, or prejudice against people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. It runs from open hostility to quieter assumptions, like treating straight as the default and anything else as a problem to explain. Transphobia is the same prejudice aimed at transgender people: the belief that a person’s gender must match the sex they were assigned at birth, and that living otherwise is false or threatening. There is no single word for opposing all of it at once. “Anti-LGBTQ” is the umbrella term.

Both work on more than one level. There is individual prejudice, the slur or the rejection. There is institutional prejudice, the law or policy that denies housing, healthcare, or recognition. And there is internalized prejudice, the shame a young person absorbs when everything around them says who they are is wrong.

The harm comes from what the prejudice does once it is organized and written into law, not from the disagreement itself. A private opinion affects one relationship. A statute affects every transgender teenager in the state.

This is why LGBTQ rights exist as a response, not a demand for special treatment. The right to marry, to keep a job, to get medical care, and to be recognized by the state are protections against a documented history of being denied those things for being gay or transgender. Rights are how a society stops prejudice from becoming policy.

Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric Runs on Coded Language

Direct opposition to equality is rare in the movement’s mainstream messaging. The public-facing language emphasizes children, parents, faith, speech, or women’s safety while advancing restriction. The same words recur across decades, and tracing them shows how a slogan becomes a statute.

The “groomer” smear is the clearest example. It revives the false grooming claim at the center of Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign, that gay people are a danger to children. NPR and extremism researchers tracked its return in the early 2020s as a coordinated online attack. The accusation has no basis in evidence, and it works because a charge of harming children is hard to answer calmly.

“Gender ideology” follows the same pattern. The phrase began in 1990s Catholic theology, was adopted by the European and U.S. right, and now appears in Heritage Foundation materials and in the title of a 2025 executive order. It reframes the existence of transgender people as a belief system that can be banned, rather than a group of people with rights. The critical race theory campaign used the same move: rename a set of ideas, then legislate against the new name. See our gender ideology explainer for how the term spread.

The movement also manufactures its own experts. The American College of Pediatricians claims more than 500 members. Its name invites confusion with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 67,000-member professional body it split from in 2002. Its briefs appear in court cases as “medical” authority. The older model is the Family Research Institute, whose founder Paul Cameron was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 and whose fabricated statistics about gay people still circulate. When a heading cites a medical-sounding group, check the name twice.

How a talking point becomes a law. Florida’s HB 1557, which opponents called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, shows the pipeline at speed.

The path repeats. A coded phrase builds public permission, the bill carries the phrase in its title, and a legislature moves it before opponents can organize.

Who Pays for the Campaign

The campaign is well financed, and much of the money is hard to trace. A donor-advised fund lets someone give to a charitable account, take a tax deduction, and recommend grants without their name reaching the final recipient. The largest channel on this issue is the National Christian Foundation, which made $2.6 billion in grants in 2024 and has given Alliance Defending Freedom at least $173 million over the years, according to Uncloseted Media’s review of its tax filings.

Alliance Defending Freedom is the engine. It won 303 Creative v. Elenis in 2023, a First Amendment exemption from anti-discrimination law, and Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2018. In March 2026 it won Chiles v. Salazar, which weakened state bans on conversion therapy. In 2003, its lawyers filed a brief supporting Texas’s sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The strategy is consistent: ADF uses free speech, religious freedom, and privacy claims to carve exemptions out of laws that protect LGBTQ people.

The model gets exported. openDemocracy traced more than $280 million spent abroad by U.S. Christian right groups backing campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights on five continents. The stakes overseas can be higher still. Uganda’s 2023 law carries the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

These groups are not fringe. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists several as anti-LGBTQ hate groups, a label the groups dispute. The table lays out the major organizations and what they are documented to have done.

A Long History of Organized Backlash

Anti-LGBTQ organizing is not new, and neither is the oppression it defends. For most of the 20th century, being gay was treated as a crime, a sickness, or a security risk. Each advance in rights was met by a backlash that recycled the same arguments. The timeline runs from the Lavender Scare through Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, marriage equality, and the current rollback.

1953: President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 made “sexual perversion” grounds for firing from federal jobs. The Lavender Scare cost thousands of people their careers and is the documented ancestor of today’s purges.

1969: A police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York met days of resistance. The uprising is widely marked as the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, and Pride commemorates it.

1973: The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Being gay was no longer officially a mental illness, which undercut a core justification for discrimination.

1977 and 1978: Singer Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign overturned a Miami-Dade anti-discrimination ordinance with the claim that gay people threatened kids. The next year, California voters rejected the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gay teachers, an early sign that the backlash could be beaten.

Bryant’s campaign year also marks the birth of the movement’s institutions. James Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority followed in 1979, fusing the Christian right into an electoral force. Focus on the Family helped launch the Family Research Council in 1983, and on January 31, 1994, more than 30 Christian right leaders founded Alliance Defending Freedom as the movement’s legal arm. The organizations in the table above are that infrastructure, two generations on. The Westboro Baptist Church, with its “God hates” pickets, made anti-gay hate visible on street corners. The durable losses for LGBTQ people came from the organizations that write bills and argue cases.

1981: As AIDS spread, official neglect and stigma let the epidemic kill tens of thousands before a serious federal response. The crisis hardened anti-gay attitudes even as it galvanized the community.

2015: Obergefell v. Hodges made marriage equality the law nationwide. Public opinion had shifted, and opposing same-sex marriage became a political loser, which is when the movement pivoted.

2022 and 2025: Florida’s classroom law opened a wave of education bills. In January 2025 the campaign reached the federal government: Executive Order 14168 defined sex as fixed at birth and ordered agencies to stop recognizing gender identity.

The Bill Wave Escalated After Marriage Equality

Once marriage was settled, the movement shifted its energy to transgender people, schools, sports, and “parental rights,” where public opinion is more divided. The first big test of the new ground was the bathroom bill, the culture war’s first post-marriage front. Months after the Obergefell ruling, North Carolina passed HB2 in 2016, barring transgender people from restrooms matching their gender identity. The backlash was immediate: canceled expansions, tournaments, and concerts that the Associated Press priced at $3.76 billion in lost business over 12 years. North Carolina partially repealed the law within a year, and the bathroom bills that followed got quieter, folding the same rules into broader school legislation.

The volume of anti-trans legislation since then shows where the energy went.

Anti-trans bills considered in statehouses grew almost sevenfold from 2021 to 2025, with the biggest jump in 2023.

Counts vary by who is counting and what they include. The Trans Legislation Tracker counts anti-trans bills: of the 1,022 considered in 2025, 126 passed. In 2026, through September, it counts 835 considered in 43 states and Congress, with 63 passed. The ACLU counts a different set, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the states, and tracked 531 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2026 as of September 24. The two numbers are not interchangeable, and neither is a count of laws.

Where the bills pass matters as much as how many are filed. Tennessee enacted 19 of the 63 anti-trans bills passed in 2026, more than the next three states combined (18).

A governor’s pen still decides many of them. Another 15 bills cleared a legislature this year and were vetoed, so the same bill can become law in one state and die on a desk in the next.

The anti-LGBTQ bills cluster in a few areas. In the tracker’s 2026 count, healthcare bills (203) and education bills (202) make up about half, followed by sports (103) and bathroom bills (45). In practice that means bans on gender-affirming care, sports restrictions built on Title IX, bathroom bills, and classroom censorship.

The federal blueprint is explicit. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 called for ending federal support for gender-affirming care and rolling back protections, and Executive Order 14168 put much of that into federal policy in January 2025. Our explainers on state bans on gender-affirming care and the Supreme Court’s conversion therapy ruling track where this is live.

Where Each Fight Stands in 2026

The movement has won most of its recent cases on transgender rights and lost its bid to reopen same-sex marriage. Each item below is a separate fight with its own legal status.

Skrmetti and the sports cases let states ban; they do not require any state to. That leaves the fight in statehouses and in Congress, where a letter from a constituent still counts.

The Harm Is Measurable

The campaign is not symbolic. It tracks with rising reported hate crimes and a youth mental-health crisis. FBI hate-crime data depends on voluntary reporting by police agencies, so these numbers are reported incidents, not the full universe of harm. The reported trend still shows a sharp increase.

The first figure is the FBI’s 2025 count, released August 14, 2026: of victims in single-bias incidents, 14.5% were targeted for sexual orientation and 4.6% for gender identity (DOJ). The second compares FBI counts from 2015 and 2024 (USAFacts).

Anti-LGBTQ protests and attacks have their own record. GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked 1,042 anti-LGBTQ incidents in 2025 in 47 states and D.C., including 128 acts of vandalism, 76 violent assaults, 22 threats of mass violence, and 15 arson attempts. Just over half, 532, targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and 268 came in June, during Pride. Drag events were an early focus: GLAAD documented more than 160 protests and significant threats against drag events from early 2022 into 2023, with Proud Boys members and other extremist groups repeatedly present. In June 2023 the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans, the first in its four-decade history.

The suicide gap is the starkest measure. The Trevor Project’s 2025 survey put the finding plainly: LGBTQ+ young people “are not inherently prone to higher suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Rather, they are placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized.”

The politics themselves are part of the injury. In the Trevor Project’s 2025 survey, 9 in 10 LGBTQ+ young people said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws, policies, and debates caused them stress or anxiety.

The statistics measure scale. What they look like in a person’s life is more specific.

Why the Movement Targets Trans People

The pivot to transgender people was strategic. After marriage equality won broad acceptance, opposing it stopped working as a wedge. Transgender people are a small share of the population, public opinion is less settled, and the issues are easy to make confusing. That made transgender rights the new front.

Analysts who study the movement point to several forces behind it, and most are not personal stakes.

• Fundraising. Fear drives donations. ADF alone took in $101.8 million in 2023, and a sense of threat keeps contributions flowing.
• Voter mobilization. Right-wing politicians use culture war fights as a turnout tool. A divisive issue brings out a base.
• The post-Obergefell pivot. Marriage was lost as an issue, so the movement moved to ground where opinion is split.
• Worldview. Many participants hold a sincere belief in a traditional model of gender and family, and “religious freedom” framing carries that belief into policy.

Social psychologists add a layer. Research on intergroup threat finds that people resist when they perceive a threat to their values and identity, not only to their material interests. That predicts backlash against rising LGBTQ visibility, and it explains why a Pride flag or an inclusive classroom can be read as a threat by people it does not harm.

The campaign has moved some opinion. PRRI’s 2025 survey found support for nondiscrimination protections among Republicans ages 18 to 29 fell from 74% in 2015 to 50%, while support among Americans 65 and over rose from 61% to 74%. The national number held at 72%.

This is also the answer to “why do we even need Pride.” The question treats visibility as the problem. The history and the data show the opposite. Visibility and recognition protect a group with a documented record of being criminalized, fired, and denied care.

What Protects People

The evidence on what reduces harm is consistent. Acceptance, recognition, and access to care are linked to lower suicide risk. The fight over LGBTQ rights is a fight over lives.

Gender-affirming care, family acceptance, and legal recognition are each tied to sharply lower suicide risk.

Legal recognition matters too. A study in JAMA Pediatrics compared states before and after they allowed same-sex marriage and found a 7% relative drop in high school suicide attempts, concentrated among students who were sexual minorities. The law’s message reached kids who would not marry for years. The same pattern holds for everyday acceptance.

The medical consensus is settled. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society all support age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and the same bodies reject conversion therapy as harmful and ineffective. The bans override that consensus.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline). LGBTQ young people can reach the Trevor Project any time at 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678. Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860) is staffed by trans people, weekdays 1 to 9 p.m. Eastern.

Not Every Critic Is Part of the Movement

The goal is to name an organized campaign, not to indict ordinary people. Several distinctions keep that honest.

• Faith is not the movement. Many people of faith support LGBTQ equality, and many denominations marry same-sex couples. Religious freedom protects both the believer and the couple. The movement uses religious language, but it does not speak for all believers.
• A concerned parent is not an activist. Worrying about your kid is normal, while funding model legislation and running school-board takeover campaigns is a political operation.
• Designations are attributed, not our verdict. When this page says a group is a designated hate group, that is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification, which the groups dispute. We report the designation; we do not assign it.
• Disagreement is not the harm. A person’s private view is theirs. The harm documented here comes from that view being funded and written into law, where it reaches every LGBTQ person in the jurisdiction.
• The movement does not always win. The Supreme Court refused to revisit same-sex marriage in 2025, California voters rejected the Briggs Initiative in 1978, and North Carolina retreated on HB2 within a year. Losses are part of the record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is it called when someone hates LGBTQ people?

Prejudice against lesbian, gay, and bisexual people is homophobia. Prejudice against transgender people is transphobia. “Anti-LGBTQ” covers both, and the anti-LGBTQ movement is the organized effort to write that prejudice into law. The explainer on anti-trans prejudice goes deeper.

Is opposing LGBTQ rights the same as homophobia or transphobia?

Not always. A person can hold a private religious view without running a political campaign. The anti-LGBTQ movement is the organized, funded effort to write that view into law, which is a specific and documented thing.

How often do anti-LGBTQ protests and attacks happen?

GLAAD tracked 1,042 anti-LGBTQ incidents in 2025, up from 984 in 2024, including 76 violent assaults. The FBI’s 2025 data shows about 1 in 5 hate-crime victims were targeted for sexual orientation or gender identity. Both are undercounts, because they rely on reports.

Are these groups really hate groups?

Several are designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism. The groups dispute the label. Resist Now reports the designation as the SPLC’s, attributed, rather than as its own conclusion.

Could the Supreme Court overturn same-sex marriage?

In November 2025 the Court turned down Kim Davis’s petition, which asked it to overturn Obergefell. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2022 that the Court should reconsider the ruling, but the Court declined the most direct request to do so.

Isn’t this just a debate about kids and medicine?

The medical question is not open among major medical bodies. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, and the Endocrine Society support age-appropriate gender-affirming care, and research ties it to lower suicide risk. The legislative campaign overrides that consensus.

What You Can Do

1. Fight the anti-LGBTQ bills in your own state. Most of the damage happens in statehouses, not Washington. The ACLU’s tracker and the Trans Legislation Tracker show which bills are moving where. Call your state legislators about the specific bill, by number, before it gets a vote. State equality groups and the Human Rights Campaign post alerts when a bill is moving.

2. Report what you see. If you witness or experience an anti-LGBTQ incident, report it to local police if you are in danger, and to GLAAD’s ALERT Desk so it is counted. The national numbers only exist because people report.

3. Be the accepting adult. One accepting adult is tied to 40% lower odds of a suicide attempt for an LGBTQ young person. Make sure the young people in your life know the Trevor Project’s number: 1-866-488-7386.

4. Tell your members of Congress to co-sponsor the Equality Act. H.R. 15 and S. 1503 would write protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity into federal law, so they stop rising and falling with each statehouse. Use the letter and call script below, and ask for a yes or no.