PERSON: Andrea Lafferty

Traditional Values Coalition

Executive Director

Andrea Sheldon Lafferty is a former Reagan Administration official and current Executive Director of Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), an organization founded by her father, Reverend Louis Sheldon, in 1980. Sheldon made a career out anti-LGBT rhetoric. Andrea is the next generation. According to TVC’s website, the organization is “America’s largest non-denominational, grassroots, church lobby, speaking on behalf of 43,000 allied churches and millions of like-minded patriots.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, a monitor of U.S. hate groups, listed the TVC as one of eighteen hate groups for propagandist statements like, “It is evident that homosexuals molest children at a far greater rate than do their heterosexual counterparts.”

Lafferty received media attention for her effort against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill meant to prohibit discrimination against LGBT employees. In the wake of the devastation at Sandy Hook Elementary, she spoke on The Janet Mefford Show, asserting that the presence of LGBTQ teachers in schools is just as threatening as school shooters like Adam Lanza. She believes transgender teachers endanger young children, and often describes the desire to change a person’s gender as a psychological illness. Lafferty has also equated homosexuality to drunk driving. Following U.S. Senator Rob Portman’s (R – Ohio) public statement in support of his gay son, Lafferty issued a mock press release that mirrored Portman’s statement but replaced references to homosexuality with references to drunk driving. “Earlier this week one of my children came to me and told me something which was shocking,” she wrote. “He is a drunk driver and has been driving drunk regularly since college. I have taken several days to reflect on this and I have decided to reverse my earlier opposition to drunk driving.”

Lafferty has appeared on FOX News to bemoan government- and therefore taxpayer-,funded research programs on HIV/AIDS and sexual health—a common complaint by homophobic groups that are appealing to a small government audience. Jeffrey Parsons, a distinguished professor of the Psychology Department at Hunter College, said the “Traditional Values Coalition [has] a vested interest in creating scandal around scientific research related to gay men and sexuality research in general.”

Traditional Values Coalition is actively involved in spreading fear about Islam. Lafferty has frequently spoken against the building of the Park 51 Muslim community center. In her blog she described it as a mosque for the “extreme” religion of Islam on Ground Zero (it is located two blocks from Ground Zero and is not a mosque). In a Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, Lafferty said, “Islam is not just a religion. Islam is a geo-political military system wrapped in a cloak of religious belief that penalizes conversion with death.”

— politicalresearch.org