#2478: Julaine Appling

The Wisconsin Family Council (WFC) is, as the name suggests, an extremist Taliban satelite group that advocates and lobbies for Christian fundamentalist policy, notably advocating for corporal punishment in religious schools and opposing laws granting rights to children, sex education, gay marriage, and laws designed to punish sexual abuse in churches. The WFC is, formally, a Family Policy Council, i.e. an organization affiliated with Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

 

The WFC was founded by Marvin Munyon in 1986 (who, according to many of his former students, himself has a long history of violence against children, which is relevant to explaining some of WFC’s policy positions), but the current CEO (2021) is Julaine Appling. Appling is, as you’d expect, vehemently anti-gay and opposed to same-sex marriage. Back in 2009, when Wisconsin started allowing domestic partnerships, Appling and the WFC filed a lawsuit to stop them, with Appling calling the law “an assault on the people, the state constitution, the democratic process, and the institution of marriage” and complaining that government officials “are pandering to a marginal group of people and we’re challenging that in court,” because protecting minorities is apparently unconstitutional. The lawsuit received national attention, partly because Scott Walker, who took over as governor of Wisconsin during the trial and was thus named defendant, agreed with the lunatics and tried to stop the case. The courts did not agree with the plaintiffs. Appling also wanted Wisconsin to throw gay people who got married outside of Wisconsin in jail.

 

Part of the problem with gay marriage, as Appling sees it, is that it “ensnares” people in “sexual sin”, which “kind of wraps its cords around you until you become completely identified by it” and makes you “no longer able to distinguish between right and wrong and good and bad.” We recommend taking a few seconds to appreciate the sheer insanity of that piece of reasoning. Appling also claimed that recognizing same-sex marriage will pave the way for “adult–child” marriages, because she is utterly unable to draw distinctions.

 

Appling is also anti-divorce and has lobbied to make it more difficult for (heterosexual) couples to get a divorce: “marriage is indeed under attack and no-fault divorce is one of those attacks,” said Appling. In 2010, WFC even attempted to criminally prosecute teachers for teaching state-mandated comprehensive sex education, and in 2017 WFC notably opposed legislation that would make it easier to prosecute clergy members who molest children and sue religious organizations for failing to deal with abusers in the wake of the abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Milwaukee. Family values, you know.

 

Other (2021) members of the WFC’s board of directors, noted for future reference, include:

 

-       Jack Hoogendyk, Michigan politician

-       Randy Melchert, former President of the Civil Rights Section of the State Bar of Wisconsin

-       Lee Webster, representative on the Wausau School District school board

-       Jo Egelhoff, Appleton politician

 

Diagnosis: Complete mindrot, and the putrid mess that is the ugly mind of Julaine Appling is, unsurprisingly, fuelled by hatred, anger and paranoia. She has certainly lost some important battles in the culture wars, but she remains a non-negligible adversary for anyone who cares about reason, truth, decency and autonomy.