#1985: Matthew McReynolds

The University of California, Berkeley, hosts (or used to host) an informative website, Understanding Evolution, that in 2013 provoked the ire of several groups of people who definitely didn’t understand evolution and would benefit most from actually studying the contents of that website. It ended with a lawsuit, filed by Jeanne E. Caldwell, who decided to believe that the information about evolution on the site used taxpayer funds and constitutes religious proselytizing because science is a religion and she rejects that religion, and who asked for damages because the Web pages offended her and made her feel like an outsider. In the suit, which was promptly dismissed, she was primarily represented by her husband Larry, but she brought aboard two other lawyers, too: Kevin T. Snider and Matthew McReynolds.

So, McReynolds is presumably a creationist. He is, however, primarily known as staff attorney for the Pacific Justice Institute, a California-based anti-LGBT group led by Brad Dacus. The PJI is famous for instance for inventing (and ultimately admitting that it invented) a story about a transgender student harassing classmates so that McReynolds could try to put legal pressure on the school in question. McReynolds defended the fabrication by saying that “the core issue is that this school is giving this transgender youth full access to both boys’ and girls’ facilities”; that is, that allowing transgender students to use locker rooms is inherently harassment of … well, mostly of the PJI, since they disagree with such things.

Diagnosis: Wingnut fundie whose dislike of science matches his dislike of LGBT people. McReynolds is apparently also that kind of person who thinks, because he chooses to disagree with science, that science is an offensive, alternative religion, and, because he doesn’t like them, that LGBT people are harassing him. Moron.