Leak Us Jeff Sessions' Secret Speech to This Anti-LGBTQ Hate Group (UPDATED)
On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended a packed day of being particularly awful by speaking at an event hosted by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
If that name sounds ominously familiar, that’s because the Arizona-based group has been defending Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who claimed that his conservative Christian beliefs prevented him from creating a cake for a same-sex couple. It is, as the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, an anti-LGBTQ extremist group that “specializes in supporting the recriminalization of homosexuality abroad, ending same-sex marriage, and generally making life as difficult as possible for LGBT communities in the U.S. and internationally.”
Given the ADF’s reputation as a bona fide hate group, Sessions’ appearance at what the Department of Justice described as a closed door “Summit on Religious Liberty” would likely be of interest to LGBTQ community specifically, and the general public at large. But, if Sessions and the ADF have their way, the very constituents Sessions ostensibly represents will never actually know what he said. The DOJ has no plans to release the transcript of his remarks to the public, and in a statement to Rewire.news, an ADF spokesperson said simply that it was “a private event attended mostly by people in the legal profession with an interest in religious freedom. Pretty simple.”
While it’s safe to assume Sessions probably didn’t fly out to Arizona just to admonish a group whose president once described Donald Trump’s electoral victory as a “window of opportunity” for pushing their anti-LGBTQ agenda, the degree to which he presumably endorsed the ADF’s hateful agenda is entirely unclear.
“If Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t condone such beliefs, he should immediately make his remarks to the group public and be prepared to defend them,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s deputy legal director David Dinielli said in a statement.
That’s where you come in.
Since Sessions isn’t going to just tell us what he said to this loathsome bunch, it’s up to you to help uncover what Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III said behind closed doors.
Do you know what Sessions told the group? Were you there in the crowd? Did you sneak a recording device in? Help us bring this story to light! Send your leaked info to [email protected], or securely reach out to Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Project Desk on their main phone line (917-999-6143). It is capable of receiving calls and messages on a number of platforms, including iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Line, and Allo.
Update, 7/13/17, 5:10PM: OK, we got the speech! Or, rather, right wing site The Federalist published the full transcript of the speech. You can read some of the key excerpts here.