May 19, 2006  |  By: ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG  | COMMENTS     

As gay families rolled Easter Eggs at the White House last month, conservative activists took to the airwaves to denounce the effort as politicizing a children’s event.

One group that took the lead in criticizing the presence of gay and lesbian parents and their children at the event was the Institute on Religion & Democracy, a Washington, D.C. based group “reforming the social and political witness of American churches, while promoting democracy and religious freedom at home and abroad,” according to its website.

Some gay-friendly Christian groups are fighting back at what they see as IRD’s divisive strategies and increasing preoccupation with gay rights issues.

“There is a growing awareness that IRD and groups affiliated with them have been having an increasingly disruptive effect on our churches,” John H. Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, told the Blade. “In some cases, groups that have affinity with IRD provide instruction to churches seeking to leave the United Council of Churches.”

IRD’s critics point to the group’s leadership and funding sources as proof it intends to use gay issues to divide congregations.

Follow the money

IRD’s financial backers include conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Foundation; the Carthage Foundation; the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation; and the Randolph Foundation, according to Media Transparency, a research group that investigates conservative groups.

Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to IRD, according to a report by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington authored by Jim Naughton, communications director for the diocese. Ahmanson has also contributed hundreds of thousands to groups opposing gay marriage and pushing anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, according to the report.

Ahmanson was a disciple of Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony, who supported “basing the American legal system on biblical laws, including stoning adulterers and homosexuals,” the report states.

“It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things,” Ahmanson told the Orange County Register in 2004, according to the Diocese’s report. “But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity.”

IRD’s change of direction

When IRD was formed in 1981, its attention was focused on the Cold War and opposition to the National Council of Church’s protests against U.S. policies in Central America.

In a fundraising letter from the early 1980s, the IRD accused the World and National Council of Churches of using “a significant amount of every dollar” donated to “helping Communist and radical dictatorships in foreign countries.”

This “outrageous, unsubstantiated, smear,” said Frederick Clarkson, president of Talk to Action, a website about evangelical conservatives, was repeated in Reader’s Digest.

Following the end of the Cold War in the mid 1990s, IRD’s literature switched its focus onto the “culture wars” and the place of women in the church.

The IRD criticized a 1995 Platform for Action presentation at the World Conference on Women in China that demanded equality for women in political and economic life.

“Do they really think that more men changing diapers and more women in board rooms will bring world peace? Apparently so,” wrote IRD’s past president Diane Knippers.

In a fundraising letter dated Oct. 7, 1996, Knippers wrote: “Some radical feminists are rejecting traditional Christianity for experimentation with forms of paganism. Lesbian advocacy. Witchcraft. Worship of earth goddesses.”

The IRD also began campaigning against gay rights when it announced its opposition to same-sex marriage rights and gays serving as pastors.