According to its latest “hate map,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has located 39 hate and anti-government groups in Illinois—including six anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.
The anti-LGBTQ+ groups are Liberty Baptist Church, World Congress of Families/International Organization for the Family, Mass Resistance, Partners for Ethical Care, Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (H.O.M.E.) and the Illinois Family Institute.
Liberty Baptist Church is headquartered in Rock Falls. According to its website, the church believes “that any form of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery and pornography are sinful perversions of God’s gift of sex, and that God punishes the abomination of sodomy with the death penalty.”
World Congress is in Rockford and Mass Resistance is in Lake in the Hills, while H.O.M.E. is headquartered in Downers Grove and the Illinois Family Institute is in Tinley Park. Partners for Ethical Care—headquartered in Chicago—states, “No child is born in the wrong body, yet children of all ages are being deceived daily by teachers, doctors, therapists and, sadly, sometimes even their parents.”
According to SPLC, “a central theme of anti-LGBTQ organizing and ideology is the opposition to LGBTQ rights or support of homophobia, heterosexism and/or cisnormativity often expressed through demonizing rhetoric and grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society and often public health.” In total, the group tracked 1,430 hate and anti-government groups across the United States in 2023.