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Traditional Values Coalition (TVC)

Posted Jan 15, 2012 •Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

Traditional Values Coalition (TVC)

The Traditional Values Coalition is a group that has been primarily involved in anti-gay, anti-evolution efforts, but has also become involved in anti-Sharia efforts. They are identified as an anti-gay hate group by the SPLC.

Here is the Right Wing Watch backgrounder on this group

The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) is a small but influential organization that appears to consist mostly of the Rev. Lou Sheldon and his daughter Andrea Sheldon Lafferty. Both are mainstays on the conservative circuit, though their reputation has been damaged by revelations that Lou Sheldon took money from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff to help kill an anti-gambling bill that would have hurt one of Abramoff’s clients.

Traditional Values Coalition
100 S. Anaheim Boulevard - Suite 320
Anaheim, CA 92805

Traditional Values Coalition
139 C Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
Website: www.traditionalvalues.org

Chairman/Founder: Rev. Louis P. Sheldon
Executive Director: Andrea Sheldon Lafferty
Date of founding: 1980
Membership: Claims over 43,000 churches nationwide representing 12 denominations
Publications: Monthly letters are sent to pastors of member churches, along with action alerts and special letters from Founder "Lou" Sheldon. Occasionally publishes reports.
Revenue: Traditional Values Coalition, its 501(c)4 organization - $6,389,448 (2004) [According to tax forms, TVC carried nearly $4 million in debt at the end of the year]; and Traditional Values Education & Legal Institute, its 501(c)3 arm - $716,032 [nearly $80,000 in debt]
Media: Lou Sheldon and Andrea Lafferty have appeared on many mainstream news programs to discuss the TVC perspective on social issues. TVC also runs television ads during political campaigns.
Affiliate organizations: Traditional Values Education & Legal Institute, the foundation arm of TVC, and the Task Force for the Preservation of the Heterosexual Ethic in America (defunct)

Read the latest news on the Traditional Values Coalition on the group’s Right Wing Watch index page

Principal Issues

Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) describes itself as the largest church-lobby in the United States. TVC’s mission is "to restore America’s cultural heritage" by opposing gay and lesbian civil rights, reproductive freedom, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and sex education curricula that does not stress abstinence to the exclusion of information on birth control and disease prevention, and promotes prayer in schools.
TVC is active both as a group that lobbies Congress and as a grassroots organization that gives marching orders to churches to oppose local, state, and federal legislation.
TVC distributes information about gays and lesbians, often referring to gays and lesbians as "sexual predators" and "pedophiles."
TVC has also worked on issues relating to the dangers of pornography, including supporting the use of internet filters at public libraries.
Under their "Judicial Nominee Monitoring Project" the group has lobbied for a conservative judicial system and right wing judicial nominees/appointments.

Activities

TVC’s website includes an interactive guide to the presence or absence of Marriage Protection laws in each of the 50 states.
Rev. Louis Sheldon was outraged by the 2005 decision of the San Francisco Superior Court to rule California’s gay marriage ban as unconstitutional, and along with TVC and other CA state legislators, has proposed two amendments that would protect marriage from being redefined by activist judges.
TVC created a "Judge John Roberts Action Center" on a separate website, "Our Battle Plan," where it provided talking points for proponents of Roberts, and admonished the "anti-God Left [that] has been using America’s courts to impose an anti-religion, anti-family agenda on America…"
Before President Bush nominated Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court, TVC promoted its "$4.5 Million Supreme Court Battle Plan" for a "massive national grassroots mobilization and media campaign to fight the radical left and pressure the Senate to confirm President Bush’s nominee."
Following Roberts’ nomination, TVC activated a "Supreme Court Nominee Action Center" urging its members to pray for Judge Roberts because "character assassins are already out in full force trying to destroy his chances of confirmation." Members were asked to send pre-written "thank-you" letters to President Bush, praising his Supreme Court nominee choice.
TVC actively lobbies against hate crime legislation because according to its executive director, hate crime legislation will be "used by homosexual activists to punish any person who has the courage to speak out against the recruitment of children by homosexuals."
Most of TVC’s work is concerned with homosexuality, which it opposes by working against civil unions, supporting Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) statutes, and accusing gays and lesbians of "recruiting" children into homosexuality.
TVC and many other Religious Right groups oppose the rules that prohibit churches from directly supporting political candidates, either through endorsement or campaign contributions.
TVC was active in state battles over constitutional amendments outlawing civil rights protections for gays and lesbians in Colorado and Oregon. TVC has also helped organized anti-gay initiatives in California, Arizona, Missouri, and Washington.
The group was instrumental in convincing the California State Board of Education to reject a health education curriculum that touched on such subjects as homosexuality and AIDS. TVC has also worked to preserve sodomy laws in California.
TVC occasionally runs ads on televisions in elections in certain congressional districts. TVC offers a weekly e-mail service alerting constituents how their congressional representative voted on TVC issues.
TVC operates an extensive "non-partisan" voter education program. During elections, TVC distributes district specific voter guides which featured side by side profiles of the candidate’s positions and/or their voting records.
Andrea Sheldon Lafferty, founder Louis Sheldon’s daughter, is a former Reagan administration official who works out of the TVC DC office as a Capitol Hill lobbyist.

Quotes from Andrea Sheldon Lafferty

Andrea Sheldon Lafferty says supporters of hate crimes laws that include sexual orientation as a protected category "are trying to take a handful of hideous, horrible crimes and use that to force acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle."

In reference to fetal tissue research, Lafferty says "I think we’re going to have to apologize to the Nazis for this."

Quotes from Rev. Louis P. Sheldon

"As Homosexuals continue to make inroads into public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality. Many of them will die in that world." ("Homosexuals Recruit Public School Children," by Louis Sheldon, special report, Vol. 18, No. 11)

"Americans should understand that their attitudes about homosexuality have been deliberately and deceitfully changed by a masterful propaganda/marketing campaign that rivals that of Adolph Hitler. In fact, many of the strategies used by homosexuals to bring about cultural change in America are taken from Hitler’s writings and propaganda welfare manuals." ("Homosexual Propaganda Campaign Based on Hitler’s ‘Big Lie’ Technique," by Louis Sheldon, special report, Vol. 18, No. 10)

"Give us a few more years under the belt and we will learn how to replace many of the school board members. Give us more time to understand how the system works, and we’ll work the system even better than one could ever imagine." (CNN News, September 9, 1990)

"There is a war waging in America. The battle is over values, beliefs and the cultural basis of western civilization…. the elitist avant-garde arts community uses the NEA to advertise and disseminate their political beliefs. The NEA then uses our scarce tax dollars to fund works which are intended to shock Americans into an acceptance of dysfunctional behavioral lifestyles and to destroy the family." (Hearing on the National Endowment for the Arts, April 1991)

Here is the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State backgrounder on TVC:

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon founded the Traditional Values Coalition in 1981 primarily to work on issues in California. The group was originally named the American Liberties Institute and later the California Coalition for Traditional Values but soon branched out, establishing a Washington beachhead. The D.C. office is run by Sheldon’s daughter, Andrea Lafferty.

Sheldon claims to represent more than 43,000 churches, but critics dispute that figure. In the world of the Religious Right, the Presbyterian minister has a reputation as something of a money-grubbing huckster. He has been criticized for acting as a front for gambling interests on at least two occasions. An aide to disgraced casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff once called Sheldon “Lucky Louie” in an e-mail when the two worked together on a lobbying project on behalf of the legalized gambling industry.

Sheldon’s rhetoric is shrill, even by Religious Right standards, and he makes no efforts to moderate his extreme goals. His daughter is equally florid, once claiming in a 1999 fund-raising letter that she had confronted a “witch” who had sown a “spirit of confusion” over the Senate.

For many years, Sheldon carved out a niche for TVC by engaging in unrelenting gay bashing. (TVC’s Web site includes a section titled “Causes and Cures Of Homosexuality And Gender Identity Disorders.”) In 1995, he even persuaded conservative members of the House of Representatives to hold hearings on the alleged “gay infiltration” of public schools. But in recent years, Sheldon has diversified, ramping up his assaults on church-state separation, public education and the federal judiciary.

TVC is a 501(c)(4) group, which means donations to it are not tax deductible. However, it maintains a fully tax deductible arm called the TVC Education and Legal Institute.

Sheldon Quote: “A dangerous Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition has formed – and we’d better be willing to fight it with everything in our power. These people are playing for keeps. Their hero, Mao Tse Tung, is estimated to have murdered upwards of 60 million people during his reign of terror in China. Do we think we can escape such persecution if we refuse to fight for what is right?” (“The War on Christianity,” column, TVC Web site, Dec. 13, 2005)

Here is the SPLC backgrounder on this group’s anti-Sharia efforts:

The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), long listed as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its demonizing and false propaganda directed at LGBT people, is casting its net of hate even wider.

The organization has created a new grassroots campaign called “The Task Force to Stop Shariah Law in America.” According to one of the latest TVC fundraising letters, the group seeks to “ban Radical Islam’s Shariah Law in every state in America.” Rev. Lou Sheldon, TVC’s founder and chairman, claims in one of the enclosures in the fundraising packet that radical Islam is “subverting our Constitution” and will place “you and your family under Shariah Law.” Also in the packet is a “survey” asking if respondents are aware that the Shariah takeover plot is already in full swing.

All of this, of course, is utter nonsense – the Constitution, which has stood resolutely for 220 years, is in no danger of being supplanted by Shariah or any other type of religious or foreign law. But, the TVC says, you can still prevent the tragic demise of constitutional governance in America if you’ll “make the best donation you can” to help raise over $3 million. The money will be used, the letter claims, to educate and mobilize Americans; launch a website to educate more people and raise more funds; train pastors and activists on how to confront the “Shariah threat”; and provide travel money enabling Andrea Lafferty, Lou Sheldon’s daughter and president of TVC, “go to as many states as possible” to lobby against Shariah Law. Not a dime will be spent to explain to people that absolutely none of this is necessary because no “Shariah threat” exists.

This isn’t the first time TVC has dipped its toe in the anti-Shariah/anti-Islam pool. In 2008, Sheldon reflected on the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an article posted on the TVC website, stating that “Islamists” want to destroy America and western civilization by “conquering nation after nation” and imposing Islamic (Shariah) law upon them. In 2010, Lafferty expressed opposition to the planned Park51 mosque in Lower Manhattan, stating, “We cannot allow the standard for decision-making to become whether or not an action disappoints violent Muslim fanatics. We cannot give the homicide bombers a veto over the lives of free people.”

Like other TVC fundraising letters, the latest one is full of conspiracy theories and patently false claims, including the allegation that “Shariah Law trumps the Law of any land – including our own Constitution.” That’s not true, University of Washington professor of law Clark Lombardi, who is a specialist in Islamic law, told Hatewatch. No government in the United States can impose laws that violate the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he said, Shariah is not a fixed concept, with different variations utilized in Muslim-majority countries. “Highly repressive forms of Shariah that are trotted out [by anti-Shariah activists] as examples … are actually followed by the smallest number of Muslims around the world.” Most Muslims, he said, don’t want to live under those extreme forms, either.

Nevertheless, TVC raises the specter of “judges who support Shariah,” and claims that newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan “believes in Shariah Law and has actively worked to advance it in the United States.” The idea that the Obama administration is promoting Shariah through judges sympathetic to it has been circulating throughout right-wing outlets for months. According to the TVC fundraising letter, Kagan “promoted an initiative called ‘The Islamic Legal Studies Program’” while she was dean at Harvard Law School. The program, the TVC says, was funded with Saudi oil money.

That’s not true, either. There is an Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard, but it was established in 1991, 12 years before Kagan became dean of the law school. Kagan was not even at Harvard in 1991. The “Saudi oil money” TVC is referring to may be the $20 million donation that a former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, accepted in 2005 from American-educated Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal (known for his pro-American stances and investments). The money was to be used for the creation of a university-wide program in Islamic studies, including funding new senior faculty and digitizing Islamic documents in Harvard’s possession to make them available online. Georgetown University also accepted a $20 million donation from the prince that same year, but TVC doesn’t mention that in its letter, possibly because no jurist who is politically unpopular with the extreme right was on Georgetown’s staff at the time.

A third outlandish claim the TVC letter makes is that the “Obama Department of Education” plans to spend “our taxpayer money for mandatory Arab and Islam classes in Texas public schools.” Once again, that’s a highly exaggerated claim. The truth: A single school district, the Mansfield Independent School District located southeast of Fort Worth, received a Foreign Language Assistance Program grant from the Department of Education to implement special Arabic language classes in elementary and middle schools. These language grants were made possible under Title V of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act – legislation passed during the George W. Bush administration – because of the shortage of American speakers of “critical languages” including Arabic, Chinese and Russian. The district is currently working with parents in the implementation of classes, according to a press release available on its website, which also states, in bold face, “There are no ‘mandatory Arabic classes’ as being falsely reported in the media.”

But facts never get in the way of a TVC fundraising letter.