#2643: Allan Carlson & Paul Mero

Hardcore anti-gay activism is still a thing, and among Catholic activists, Allan Carlson and Paul Mero’s “natural family” manifesto is a somewhat influential rallying point – and Carlson, Mero and their ilk are targeting not only LGBT rights and abortion, but also contraception, sex education (“[w]e will end the corruption of children through state ‘sex education’ programs”) and liberalized divorce laws.

 

Carlson, in addition to being a rabid Taliban-style fundamentalist and a rather influential figure in the rabid Taliban-style fundamentalist movement, is also a former professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan, President Emeritus of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, former director of the Family in America Studies Center, founder of the International Secretary of the World Congress of Families (currently headed by Brian Brown; there is a decent resource on the WFC here), former president of the Rockford Institute and editor of The Natural Family: An International Journal of Research and Policy newsletter. Apart from hatred of LGBT groups, much of Carlson’s work has addressed family values and what he perceives to be the underlying causes of population decline, which, in addition to being non-Catholic, include sex education, contraception and – but of course – LGBT rights. These emergence of these factors can to a large extent be blamed on feminism, whose impact on women’s roles in society is disastrous and which continues to take its toll on the family. Contraception is a particularly sore point for Carlson, and especially the “contraceptive mentality” that have led women away from wishing for “a full quiver of children” (oh yes, Carlson is a major proponent); he did for instance appear in Kevin Peeples’s weird movie Birth Control: How Did We Get Here? starring Kevin Swanson). Carlson, of course, is a defender of complementarianism, as is his organization.

 

Paul Mero, on the other hand, is affiliated with the Western Governors University and is the chairman of the board for Transcend Together; he was previously CEO of Leadership Project for America, president of Sutherland Institute and for a long time in the 90s employed in various roles by various legislators at Capitol Hill, e.g. representing the Christian Action Network, coordinating the WFC and co-forming the Conservative Action Team, which would later evolve into the House Freedom Caucus, where his work was in particular focused on trying to get organized prayer back into public schools, defund the National Endowment for the Arts, blaming sin for AIDS, and combatting “sex studies”. Like his partner Carlson, Mero is fond of using the “freedom” label for his political goals because it has positive connotations and because no one would guess his efforts had anything to do with freedom if he didn’t explicitly label them such (after all, the WFC’s message of freedom should be sharply distinguished from the “diabolical” and “false message of human liberation”, according to Carlson).

 

The WFC, of course, condemns gay marriage and life as well as anything else that could be seen as a threat to traditional families, including abortion and single-parent families, and the organization has ties with colorful characters like Scott Lively, Angela Lanfranchi, Rafael Cruz and Janice Shaw Crouse. The WFC is also famous for promoting falsehoods and pseudoscience related to women’s health, such as the thoroughly refuted idea that abortion causes breast cancer and conspiracy theories about the contraceptive pill. The WFC’s primary role is to bring various fundies together at annual conferences and events around the world (e.g. here), and to issues wingnut petitions. Despite its status as an obvious crank organization, the WFC has obtained consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and its conferences draw a disturbing number of powerful people, including state leaders. Its ties to Russia are worth an investigation; the WFC has also enthusiastically supported Putin’s anti-LGBT laws, and Carlson himself has accused former president Obama of being “hostile to Russia” because Russia is a “pro-family voice” and Obama isn’t because being pro-family means being disgusted by families that aren’t organized the way Carlson wants families to be organized. WCF official Larry Jacobs, meanwhile, has said that the Russian law banning LGBT ‘propaganda’ was a “great idea” and that the “Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”

 

Elsewhere, things aren’t unequivocally going in what the WFC would judge to be the right direction; Carlson, who fancies himself a historian, sees fascism at work: “The parallel I see here is what happened in Italy, Germany, other lands in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism began to impose its fear-driven grip on debate, on conversation, and on policy-making,” which is pretty rich for someone explicitly defending family policies that are more or less copy-pasted from the Nazi regime’s Kinder, Küche, Kirche policy.

 

There is a decent portrait of the WFC here.

 

Diagnosis: Though practically indistinguishable from the Taliban or Iran’s moral police ideologywise (though of course distinct in terms of means available to attaining their goals), Carlson, Mero and their organization are enormously powerful and influential – though their affiliation with and explicit praise of Russia might hopefully provide a bit of a stumbling block for their continued influence in the West, they are seriously dangerous.