Antigay marriage: two Nebraska groups that killed Lincoln's LGBT fairness ordinance have merged; first order of business: attacking transgendered children

Left to right: Dave Bydalek – Policy Director, Karen Bowling – Outreach and Operations Director, Hallie Ewing – Communication and Office Coordinator, Hannah Buell – Policy Research and Intern Coordinator, Al Riskowski – Executive Director (Via Nebraska Family Alliance Website)

     The Nebraska Family Council has merged with Family First of Nebraska (an affiliate of the Family Research Council) to form the Nebraska Family Alliance.
     In the spring of 2012, after the Lincoln, Nebraska City Council passed a gay rights addition to the city's nondiscrimination ordinance, the Nebraska Family Council and Family First gathered 10,000 signatures to nullify the ordinance.
     The first order of business of the new organization is an attack on transgendered children — an appeal to oppose adoption of a proposed transgender participation policy by the Nebraska School Activities association.
     The Nebraska Family Alliance says it "will be the state affiliate for Focus on the Family and work with Citizen Link, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other national organizations to bring national expertise to our local issues."
     The Nebraska Family Alliance's partner, Alliance Defending Freedom, was known as the Alliance Defense Fund when it ran the following false, gutter-level attack on the ACLU. You can't appreciate the depth of ADF's amoral chicanery until you see what the ACLU was really doing, here.
     Ironically, it was Lisa Biron, a member of the ADF's "Honor Corps Society," who, last spring, was convicted of eight counts related to child pornography.
 
 
     Dave Bydalek, the Executive Director of Family First, who worked as an attorney in the Nebraska's Governor's and Attorney General's offices, will become the new organization's Policy Director and plans to become "even more involved in the legislative process."
    Below, Bydalek testifies against gay-inclusive adoption reform in Nebraska by citing the discredited University of Texas Regnerus Study (just after the 3:00 mark) to a properly skeptical Brad Ashford, Judicial Committee Chairman.
     The scholarly merit of the laughable Regnerus Study has been questioned by 200 PhDs and MDs; it was concocted to influence the gay marriage debate when it reached the Supreme Court and it was called "bullshit" by an editor of the very journal that published it, Darren E. Sherkat, who was assigned to audit the study after the uproar it caused.
     The prestigious American Sociological Association ripped apart the junk science of the Regnerus "research" in a Supreme Court brief opposing the upholding of California's Prop 8 (on pages 15-22, which you may read here.)
 


     In 2012, Hannah Buell, the new Policy Research and Intern Coordinator of the Nebraska Family Alliance, blatently lied to the Lincoln City Council, which was then considering an LGBT fairness ordinance, by falsely claiming that the University of Toledo's Vice President of Human Resources, Crystal Dixon, "was fired for exercising her first amendment rights to write a column to a newspaper and in that column she was writing as a private citizen, but she expressed disagreement with a bill, an ordinance similar to this and expressed her disagreement in that form. She was fired for this."

Hannah Buell giving false testimony to
Lincoln City Council against LGBT antibias
ordinance in 2012

     Contrary to Hannah Buell's untruthful testimony to the Lincoln City Council, Dixon's letter did NOT mention any LGBT ordinances at all — either similar or dissimilar to the one under consideration by Lincoln's City Council. The letter that Buell misrepresented is still on the Toledo Free Press's website.

     Here are the rulings in Dixon's case — she was hardly the martyr Hannah Buell made her out to be:

     When her lawsuit went to court, U.S. District Judge David Katz ruled against her and dismissed the case.
     "The balance of [Dixon’s] interest in making a comment of public concern is clearly outweighed by the University’s interest as her employer in carrying out its own objectives," the judge wrote in an opinion. "Therefore, [Dixon] has failed to establish that her speech was protected. [Dixon] also claims that she was fired for violating an impermissibly vague speech policy. However, the damage she did to her ability to perform her job and to the University provide ample justification for her termination."
     After appealing Katz’s ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled on Monday that Dixon’s column "contradicted the very policies she was charged with creating, promoting, and enforcing," and her defense of being a private citizen does not excuse her from her remarks against LGBT rights. The panel supported Katz’s decision and dismissed the case once again.

The new group is appealing for new donations to cover the $20,000 cost of office remodeling, merging databases, launching a new website and sending out announcements. Presumably not much was spent on the new logo.