In Massachusetts a major player in the well-financed assault on secular institutions, public health, diversity, and science is the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), a Christian Dominionist organization that, together with its daughter project Massachusetts Informed Parents (MIP), is involved in various skirmishes in the Culture War.
In a 2022 interview on Red Pill Politics, MFI’s Director of Community Alliances Michael King, described MFI as a local affiliate of Focus on the Family (FOF), a fundamentalist Christian organization created by James Dobson. FOF has affiliates like MFI in 32 states and in 2018 declared itself a church. MFI is a member of the Family Policy Alliance, Focus on the Family’s national network of conservative Christian-right state groups.
MFI’s astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents was originally a Facebook group but now functions as a separate entity with its own Substack blog. MIP offers Christian conservatives a checklist for attacking schools and libraries and maintains a book banning list. MIP/MFI is categorically opposed to sex education in schools and advocates not education but counsels abstinence. When MFI is not counseling parents to homeschool their children, they are laser-focused on turning public schools into mirrors of the private Christian academies they send their children to.
MFI, working closely with the right-wing legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has won some well-fought victories by intimidating municipal government officials. However, when it throws its considerable weight behind ballot initiatives it has not always had the same success in convincing Massachusetts voters that they need more religion in their schools, bedrooms or legal system.
This disparity in success may explain the far-right’s, and in particular the GOP’s, focus on municipal elections. It’s much easier to make political gains when town governments, who are barely able to pay the bills thanks to tax limits like Proposition 2 ½, often have to make the tough call that fighting religious bigotry is just too expensive.
Organizational Structure
MFI, Inc. was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 04-3113783 in 1990 as the Pilgrim Family Institute, changing its name to the Massachusetts Family Institute in 1994. A related organization, MFI Action Inc., was incorporated in 2008 as a 501(c)(4) non-profit with EIN 00-0974938 and was dissolved in 2014. MFI’s 2019 Form 990 filing, the most recent on the IRS website, shows donations of $623,050. ProPublica’s nonprofit search tool shows donations in 2021 of $904,875. Despite MFI’s support of anti-vaxxers and it defense of the Christian “right” to let unvaccinated children infect others, MFI applied for and received $59,514 in COVID Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the federal government.
Leadership and Staff
MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith serves as an attorney with the “Christian liberties” law group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). MFI staff members include: Michael King, Director of Community Alliances, who who has a degree in “Christian Leadership” from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, believes democracy must be based on the Bible, and developed MFI’s program to inspire Christians to engage with their local government leaders and inspire Biblical decisions to be made”; Sam Whiting, who also works for the ADF: Mary Ellen Siegler, who runs the MFI-directed astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents, and together with her husband Bill runs Chosen People Ministries, a Messianic sect that tries to convert Jews to Christianity – despite MFI’s stated mission of “affirming Judeo-Christian values”; Mariah Newell, Communications and Social Media Specialist and former intern with the Family Research Council; Marci Anthony, Education Research Assistant and Christian home-schooler; and several others who are co-pastors churches with their husbands.
Related Organizations
While MFI’s pro-life and far-right connections are extremely broad, MFI’s National Allies page lists only its links to Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the First Liberty Institute. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designates the first three of these as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.
MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), whose vice chair is Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation. Beckwith is also associated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, a 501(c)(4) corporation that targets legislators, as well as the anti-abortion Legal Defense Fund. Other MFI board members include Ray Ruddy, who is affiliated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, both in Fredericksburg, VA, and whose fellow board members include Scott Walker and Leonard Leo. During the Obama administration Ruddy funded a series of hoax videos attacking Planned Parenthood and accusing Obama of “infanticide.”
Besides Beckwith, MFI’s staff attorney Sam Whiting also works for ADF. Whiting attended George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, later becoming an Alliance Defending Freedom Blackstone Fellow, a program created by ADF to put Christian lawyers into “positions of influence, thereby impacting the legal culture and keeping the door open for the Gospel.” Other Fellows include Josh Hawley and Amy Coney Barrett.
ADF was incorporated in 1993 by Christian Dominionist Bill Bright, who also founded Campus Crusade for Christ; Larry Burkett, an evangelical financial advisor; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; Marlin Maddoux, a Christian radio personality; and Alan Sears, former director of the Meese Commission.
ADF attorneys have argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, including cases about religion in public schools, the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, business owners’ right to not provide services for same-sex marriages, and prayers before town meetings. ADF lawyers wrote the model for Mississippi’s anti-abortion legislation involved in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overruled the fifty-year-old precedent case Roe v. Wade establishing the right to abortion. ADF was also responsible for the recent 303 Creative v. Elenis case, which legalized religious bigotry against LGBTQ+ citizens. ADF was also involved in a scheme with the discredited American College of Pediatricians to use anti-LGBTQ+ “junk science” to “substantiate” many of ADF’s anti-LGBTQ+ talking points and provide “medical” justification for interpreting Title IX to exclude gender-identity protections for trans students in several states.
Besides ADF, MFI frequently works with First Liberty Institute, a group that works to insert Christianity into government. The First Liberty Institute argued the Kennedy v Bremerton case before a friendly Supreme Court, a case in which a football coach coerced his teenage players to pray with him at the 50 yard line. MFI also works with the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a group which opposes student debt forgiveness, the existence of the CFPB, protections for renters, and regulation of bump-stocks. MFI supports the interests of and is supported by deep pocket right-wing foundations like the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Bradley Foundation, and dozens more. MFI has also partnered with Child and Parent Rights, another legal attack group that “defends parents’ right to secure their children against the social contagion and harms caused by gender identity ideology, providing legal representation before administrative agencies and state and federal courts.”
Opposing abortion
Though the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which once made abortion legal throughout the U.S., the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution still provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Following the Dobbs ruling states rushed to pass laws to protect abortion, and Massachusetts has a bunch of them. In 2020 when a budget amendment with an abortion amendment in it came up for a vote, MFI labelled it the “Infanticide Act.”
And though the Christian right has had to accept the laws of the Commonwealth, it has still found creative ways to subvert them. Besides calling for bans of books that mention abortion, curriculum mentioning it, creating fake abortion clinics that prevent women from receiving actual medical care, or cheering the ban on the interstate shipment of mifepristone, the MFI is also trying to reframe their own opposition to abortion as “feminism.”
In 2022 MFI’s Andrew Beckwith joined with others from the Christian right to “modernize” the “pro-life” movement. CNN’s Elle Reeve visited MFI and spoke with MFI supporters trying pass off anti-abortion as “feminism.” According to this narrative, “consequence-free sex” places the burden of pregnancy on women and “we’ve really let men off the hook.” Therefore, regardless of what the pregnant woman herself wants, the man involved in the pregnancy must be forced to accept its consequences by banning abortion. Even as MFI supports a MAGA Republican agenda committed to slashing the social safety net, its faux feminists argue for a system where women give up individual liberties in exchange for expanding the social safety net, for example by bolstering programs and laws like parental leave.
Men are the real victims here, characterized by Beckwith as devalued by society. But MFI believes there is nothing more ennobling to men than marriage. Unmarried yet sexually active men ought to be forced into marriage by abortion bans, Beckwith says, “We believe men should be responsible and be fathers and not use abortion as a kind of after-the-fact contraception or get-out-of-jail-free card.” He says that banning abortion will make men more responsible as fathers and will “restore the culture to where fatherhood is valued and [will] give them something better than just video games and Netflix.” Reeve then asks Beckwith to clarify his ideological goulash: “I just don’t see why I have to give something up so that men can be better people. […] What if you made policy to address the man problem that [actually] addressed the man problem directly?” To this Beckwith had no answer, so it was up to the Christian ladies interviewed to try to explain.
Defending Fake Abortion Clinics
Fake Abortion Clinics, sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), operate in more than 30 locations in the Commonwealth. They mislead patients about abortion and are not held to patient confidentiality standards because they are not actually medical clinics. One in New Bedford is literally on Catholic church property. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 71% of crisis pregnancy centers “use deceptive means such as spreading thoroughly debunked misinformation” and 38% fail to disclose on their websites that they do not provide abortion care.
In 2021 Connecticut passed a law regulating CPCs. The state was then sued by lawyers from the ADF, MFI’s sister organization. In January ADF and the state attorney general agreed to Connecticut’s stipulation it would not enforce the law, thus dismissing the suit. MFI is now attempting the same in Massachusetts.
In July 2022 Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey warned patients to be careful when seeking reproductive health care. “While crisis pregnancy centers claim to offer reproductive healthcare services, their goal is to prevent people from accessing abortion and contraception,” Healey wrote. “In Massachusetts, you have the right to a safe and legal abortion. We want to ensure that patients can protect themselves from deceptive and coercive tactics when seeking the care they need.” Healey had also warned Abundant Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Attleboro that the center could be held accountable for violating people’s civil rights by “interfering, or attempting to interfere, with the exercise of the constitutionally protected right to access abortion care in Massachusetts.” The fake clinics were incensed.
MFI’s Beckwith, partnering with the First Liberty Institute, a hardball Christian legal outfit, wrote to Healey, warning her that “Your office’s hostility against our clients’ religious beliefs raises serious concerns that you intend to take legal action against our clients in violation of their constitutional rights…”
In 2023 the legislature held hearings on “An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.” This legislation protects patient privacy and prevents unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. It also allocates $1 million to informing the public about the risks of fake clinics. Predictably, MFI has ratcheted up its rhetoric on the legislation, calling legislators’ efforts to protect women from medical misinformation and proselytizing a “gag order.”
On July 5th in Easthampton, the City Council approved an addition to town ordinances that would have explicitly prohibited city employees from assisting another municipality in the prosecution of a person seeking an abortion in Easthampton. The ordinance would also have protected women from being preyed upon by fake clinics.
As recognized in M.G.L. c. 12 § 11I ½ access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming health care services is a right secured by the constitution and laws of the commonwealth. Interference with this right, whether or not under the color of law, is against the public policy of the commonwealth and of the City. [¶] This ordinance is promulgated pursuant to the City’s power to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the citizens and is intended to provide more stringent protections than those afforded by the Laws of the Commonwealth or the United States of America.
But, for the first time since being elected in 2017, Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle vetoed the ordinance, clearly intimidated by organizations like MFI and the ADF: “Even with our City Solicitor assuring the ordinance’s legal merit, we know it will face legal challenges by well-funded organizations intent on limiting the rights of women and the LGBTQIA+ community.” An override attempt failed when one City Councillor changed his vote, another abstained from voting, and a third was absent. MFI took a victory lap. The mayor had caved to extremists who didn’t even need to lift a finger to get her to do it.
Opposing same-sex marriage
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Public Law 104-199, was a federal law that explicitly denied same-sex couples the right to marry by creating an arbitrary definition of marriage. The law was signed by President Bill Clinton and remained in force from 1996 to 2013. As it became obvious that DOMA was highly discriminatory and increasingly likely to be ruled unconstitutional, the Christian right began furiously cranking out amicus briefs in support of DOMA. In Massachusetts, same-sex marriage has been legal since May 17, 2004 because of the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in Goodridge v Department of Public Health that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates equal protection of the laws and due process, thereby violating the Massachusetts Constitution.
In 2005, fundamentalist preacher Roberto S. Mirando, then- MFI President Kris Mine, and Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation and vice-chair of MFI, attempted to create their own Massachusetts version of DOMA legislation. They filed papers with the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) to create a ballot initiative, votonmarriage.org, to promote a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. MFI as an organization also contributed over $82,000 to the campaign.
VoteOnMarriage was accused of forgery and bait-and-switch tactics to obtain fraudulent signatures. There were numerous complaints of improper actions by paid signature gatherers. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, “Angela McElroy of Florida, who until recently was a paid signature gatherer, is expected to testify on what she encountered during her 2-1/2 weeks working in Massachusetts. She said in an interview with the Telegram & Gazette that she saw one co-worker forge signatures from the petition to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stories to the petition that would put the same-sex marriage issue on the ballot. She said she also observed some gatherers induce voters to sign one petition and then slipped the second petition underneath and asked them to sign that paper without telling them what they were signing.” Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly launched a criminal investigation of the forgeries. VoteOnMarriage pushed back, describing the allegations as the work of “homosexual activists” who simply didn’t want to see the petition succeed.
In 2011, writing that “MFI is concerned with the untold consequences same-sex ‘marriages’ will have on American society, moral principles, and the family,” MFI filed an amicus brief, arguing that the Supreme Court failed to consider Minnesota’s Baker v Nelson case, which ruled that there is no fundamental right to same-sex marriage under the Ninth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Christian Right continued losing state after state on same-sex marriage. With Obergefell v Hodges in 2015 a very different Supreme Court from ours today ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
Promoting Gay Conversion
Gay Conversion “Therapy” is – in the words of the American Psychological Association – NOT therapy. It is a harmful and ultimately ineffective attempt to apply ideological and religious pressure on a person to change their sexual or gender orientation and expression. Experts with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration say it is “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”
Conversion “therapy” is opposed by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Association of School Administrators, American College of Physicians, American Counseling Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Psychological Association, American School Counselor Association, American School Health Association, Interfaith Alliance Foundation, National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Social Workers, National Education Association, Pan American Health Organization, and School Social Work Association of America.
But what do they know?
In 2019 Massachusetts became the 16th state to ban Conversion “therapy.” House bill H.140, An Act relative to abusive practices to change sexual orientation and gender identity in minors, passed both houses of the legislature and was signed into law by the then-Republican governor, but not before MFI mobilized the Christian Right to testify against it. MFI President and General Counsel Andrew Beckwith told the press with a straight face, “Some legislators don’t understand that the focus is on eliminating any counseling options that don’t affirm a LGBT-centric view of human sexuality.”
Defending discrimination of school children
In Middleboro, Massachusetts middle schooler Liam Morrison came to school one day with a t-shirt that read “there are only two genders.” While it might have been slightly more accurate to say “there are only two sexes,” even that is not quite true, as there are intersex people, those with chromosomal differences, people whose external sex characteristics don’t match their genetics, and so on. But where “gender” is concerned, Christian fundamentalists absolutely reject modern definitions of gender as vehemently as they reject the Theory of Evolution.
But here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say about gender:
“Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex. But in nonmedical and nontechnical contexts, there is no clear delineation, and the status of the words remains complicated.”
So when Liam Morrison marched into school with his obnoxious t-shirt, he was presenting his “sincere religious belief” that gender only means sex. Morrison’s case is currently being appealed by MFI and ADF, and it is likely he will eventually prevail because he most certainly has a First Amendment right to his parents’ and pastor’s opinion.
To his school’s credit, it recognized that Morrison’s t-shirt was, besides being a limited interpretation of gender, mainly intended to offend, marginalize, and harm fellow non-binary students who do not rigidly identify with their biological sex. A study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that in the United States alone there are 1.2 million non-binary people, the majority of whom are under 29 years of age. According to the UCLA study, life for teens who identify as non-binary is not easy. Thus the care Morrison’s school took to ban the t-shirt was intended to reduce injury to other students:
“Tables A.4 – A.10 provide information about stress experiences of nonbinary LGBTQ people. These data show that a majority of nonbinary people were hit, beaten, physically attacked, or sexually assaulted (55%) at some points since they were 18 years old (Figure 5). Also, most felt that they were less respected (54%) than other people over the year prior to being interviewed. Many suffered chronic stressors, including not having enough money to make ends meet (68%), feeling mentally and physically tired because of their job (68%), being alone too much (56%), and having strained or conflicted relationships with their parents (60%). Nonbinary LGBTQ adults also experienced stress in childhood (before age 18, Figure 6), including emotional (82%), physical (40%), and sexual (41%) abuse. More than one in ten nonbinary people (11%) had gone through conversion therapy to change their sexual orientation (cis LGBQ respondents) or gender identity (transgender respondents).”
One can only hope that, following Morrison’s likely First Amendment victory, other students in his school will be permitted to wear t-shirts bearing their First Amendment-protected opinion of Morrison, just as he did of them.
Sponsoring Anti-Trans Legislation
In 2016 the Renew MA Coalition, a right-wing lobbying group, created an anti-trans “Bathroom bill” campaign, Keep Massachusetts Safe, whose goals were “protecting the privacy rights and right to safety of all Massachusetts citizens, particularly women and children by preserving lawfully sex-segregated facilities based on biological and anatomical sex.” The ballot initiative was intended to repeal Chapter 134 of the Acts of 2016, which protects transgender rights. Over three years MFI donated over $104,000 to Renew MA’s unsuccessful “Bathroom bill” and was neck-deep in both ballot and legal efforts to deny civil rights to trans people.
In 2018 Question 3 asked Massachusetts voters to reject a law signed by Governor Charlie Baker in 2016 that expanded the state’s existing nondiscrimination protections for transgender people to include public accommodations such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Existing law already protected transgender residents from discrimination in housing and the workplace. Christian groups came out in force to oppose Question 3, but despite MFI’s misinformation and scare tactics, Question 3 affirmed trans rights in Massachusetts by a 67% majority. Not one county in the Commonwealth wanted to turn back the clock and strike a civil right. Once again, when put to the voters, MFI’s bigotry was rejected.
In 2022 MFI partnered with Child and Parental Rights, a legal attack group, to sue the Ludlow School Committee and Superintendent, as well as the Principal, guidance counselor, and librarian of the Baird Middle School for failing to disclose to two sets of parents of 11 year-old middle schoolers that their non-binary children were using both pronouns and sex-segregated bathrooms not matching the sex on their birth certificates. The school attempted to follow DESE guidance on non-discrimination on the basis of gender. One of the students was quite clear with their friends and teachers about their identity:
“Hello everyone, If you are reading this you are either my teacher or guidance counselor. I have an announcement to make and I trust you guys with this information. I am genderqueer. Basically, it means I use any pronouns (other than it/its). This also means I have a name change. My new name will be R. Please call me by that name. If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am not comfortable with I will politely tell you. I am telling you this because I feel like I can trust you. A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. I have added a link so you can look at how to say them. Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them. Thank you. R.”
DESE guidance suggests that transgender and gender-nonconforming students may not be open about their gender identities at home because of safety concerns or lack of acceptance. For those reasons, teachers in the state should speak with the students prior to discussing their gender identity with their parents. But state law (603 CMR 23) referenced in the lawsuit also gives parents of children under 14 complete control over school records and communications with guidance counselors and teachers. The legal distinctions here are that, while information was not explicitly denied to the parents, it was withheld out of concern for the safety of the children. Only when one teacher sent an email to parents – actually a legal violation in itself – did the parents discover their children’s non-binary identities.
Both sets of parents regard their children’s identities as a mental illness and their complaint is framed as the school’s neglect in informing them of a mental problem. The MFI suit references this in the complaint that the defendants “In reckless disregard of Plaintiffs Foote’s and Silvestri’s parental rights to make mental health decisions for their children […] Said Baird Middle School staff did not notify Plaintiffs Foote and Silvestri of these conversations, but instead followed the Protocol to conceal this information from B.F.’s parents” MFI’s Beckwith told The Boston Globe, “By deliberately circumventing the authority of parents over the mental health and religious beliefs of their children, activists at the Ludlow schools are violating time-honored rights guaranteed under the US Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution.”
And how was all this framed in the right-wing media’s headlines? “Parents Allege a Massachusetts Middle School Carried Out Secret Gender Transitions on Children.”
But as one summary of the complaint shows, the lawsuit’s prime objective was to completely hobble any support for non-binary and LGBTQ+ children in the schools:
“The complaint seeks a declaration that teachers and staff may not facilitate a child’s social transition to a different gender identity without parental notification. A declaration is also sought that the related school protocol and associated policies and procedures are to be publicly rescinded. [..] The complaint seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction that stops school officials from using the protocol and related rules as guidance for Ludlow Public Schools. The proposed injunctions would stop any training of staff to exclude parents in discussions related to their children’s gender identify, and require notification of parents should that topic arise in the school setting. The proposed injunctions would stop school officials from ignoring parental instructions about gender identify, and stop any meeting with children to discuss gender identify unless parents are notified.”
Opposing Sex Education
Although there are over 20 million LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. alone, and though a 2020 Pew Research poll shows that 72% of Americans believe that “homosexual relationships should be accepted by society,” the Massachusetts Family Institute believes otherwise and its bigotry is reflected as well in its views on sex education.
To MFI any sort of secular sex education amounts to “indoctrination and sexualization,” particularly if it concerns non-heterosexual relationships, gender, or sexuality. MFI supports abstinence education or “sexual risk avoidance,” an ineffective form of indoctrination the Guttmacher Institute recommends that the Federal government stop funding.
As part of Focus on the Family, MFI recommends a “biblically holistic approach” to sex ed, which insists on heterosexuality, rigid sex roles, and instead of science relies on scripture. If MFI is appalled by secular sex ed, secular parents will be left scratching their heads by this: “We want our children to understand that the Bible begins in Genesis with the marriage of a man and a woman and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church (Revelations 19:7).” How does such “curriculum” deal with teenage sexual feelings? It teaches about “David who looked lustfully at Bathsheba and sinned, and Joseph who ran from Potiphar’s wife when tempted.”
In 2019 MFI’s Director of Community Alliances, Michael King, joined with predominantly Hispanic church leaders in Worcester to oppose a local implementation of state educational frameworks with Planned Parenthood materials, the Proud Choices curriculum. Members of King’s church alliance outnumbered secular supporters and wanted their children to be taught abstinence and marriage, objecting particularly to the Proud Choices curriculum, which is intended for older students likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and includes references to contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. A 2022 study of the Proud Choices curriculum funded by the U.S. Department of Health found a couple of things MFI might actually appreciate: students who used the curriculum were more confident refusing sex and overall they had less sex. However, students had been given facts rather than bible stories.
MFI’s biblical orientation holds no sympathy for teens discovering they are gay, trans or non-binary, or for the needs of their parents. In 2013 MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith authored a piece in Public Discourse, a journal of the Witherspoon Institute which funded a discredited study on LGBTQ+ parenting which pronounced gay parents unfit. Beckwith sputtered that in 2011 Massachusetts prohibited discrimination in public schools on the basis of gender identity. He went on to attack non-discrimination by appealing neither to logic nor to law – rather to personal bigotry: “As lawyers, we perceive the logic of this latest regulatory innovation. But as fathers, we think that those who are dismayed by MDOE’s regulations are the only Massachusetts residents who can plausibly claim to be in their right minds.”
In 2023 newly-elected (and quite “out”) Governor Maura Healey observed that the state’s sex ed standards had not been updated since 1999, did not even require the subject to be taught, and were deficient in a number of areas. Healey proposed a series of updates that were realized in both legislation and a new Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Health and Physical Education Framework. The legislation has broad support in both the House and Senate as well as from the Healthy Youth Coalition, and the DESE draft is a vast improvement over the quarter-century old non-standard. Among the DESE framework components guaranteed to upset MFI are sexuality, gender, consent, and contraception. Even though the accompanying legislation gives parents an opt-out and communities freedom to tailor the curriculum, MFI has launched a vicious attack on the standards.
Adoption of the legislation will not be easy. It has been filed repeatedly for over a decade and has died several times in the legislature, usually because of pressure from MFI and its sister organizations.
Defending questionable educational and counseling standards
In 2021 Vida Real Church in Somerville applied to open a private school, the Real Life Learning Center (RLLC), submitting an application to Somerville’s Subcommittee for Educational Programs. According to the director, Pastor Luis Morales, “The mission of Real Life Learning Center is to lead the student into a deep, personal, and growing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything else is secondary.”
With “everything else secondary” the Somerville subcommittee had good reason to inquire more deeply into what, besides Lord Jesus, students would be learning. After sending a list of 35 questions to the school, the school forwarded them to Andrew Beckwith at the MFI instead of replying to the Board. Initially, then, the school’s approval was denied.
One subcommittee member, Sara Dion, had specific unanswered concerns: the school’s policy of admitting only Christian students; teaching creationism instead of science; the school’s position on homosexuality and its implications for health education; the school’s approach to student services and counseling based on a belief that mental illness is caused by sin and demons; and its methods of discipline being “Biblically” based (Rods? Stoning?)
Dion was apparently the only subcommittee member asking about the implications of such mis-education and her questions were perceived as hostile by MFI and the First Liberty Institute, who served notice on the Somerville Public School Committee. In the end all but Dion voted to approve the school’s application. A combination of cowardice combined with state laws that give priority to religion over sound educational principles had doomed Somerville’s ability to say no to a school that believes “everything else is secondary” to religious indoctrination.
Opposing COVID restrictions
During the height of the COVID pandemic, the Commonwealth issued a number of emergency public health directives. Different classes of organizations and enterprises were required to adhere to different restrictions, As the pandemic waned in severity, newer directives began relaxing those restrictions, though not always in the order or at a pace the public liked. Order 66 rescinded Order 45 but did not phase out limitations altogether, a decision based on the typical number of people, and density, in a given enterprise. This irked New Bedford’s New Life Church, which also objected to the way the New Bedford Health Department calculated occupant density. In 2021, at the request of New Life’s pastor Marco DeBarros, MFI and the First Liberty Institute sued both Governor Charlie Baker and New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell, claiming that “where less onerous COVID-19-related regulations suffice for comparable secular activities, those same regulations [ought to] suffice for religious activities. Massachusetts’ regulations fail this standard. The regulations make it easier to meet at Applebee’s or an AMC theater than at New Life. This cannot stand.” Ultimately MFI prevailed.
Opposing common-sense infectious disease measures
And of course MFI opposes COVID vaccinations. For years Massachusetts has irresponsibly granted religious exemptions to vaccination against diseases like diptheria, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and chickenpox, The religious right has never believed your child’s health was just as important as their “sincere religious beliefs.” Now a bill in the legislature, An Act promoting community immunity (S.1458), will strengthen and modernize tracking of both immunizations for infectious disease and exemptions to the vaccinations. Contrary to MFI’s misinformation, parents can still pursue exemptions; however they will be processed by the Department of Public Health and not a school nurse. And more importantly the legislation drops religious exemptions for these potentially fatal diseases – some of which have returned with a vengeance. Parents will now have to show a valid medical reason for not immunizing their children if they want to place them in a congregational public setting (like a classroom) with other children. MFI is suing.
Spreading conspiracy theories about COVID tracking
In 2022 the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing legal advocacy group, filed a class action lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Health, claiming that it had conspired with Google to covertly install a COVID tracking app on one million Android phones. During the pandemic there were many downloadable apps that used bluetooth to gather proximity data from other devices with similar software. The idea was, if you developed COVID you could alert a health authority and those who had come into contact with you would be alerted to a potential risk. The concept relied on widespread user downloads and installation.
The Massachusetts Department of Health, together with Apple and Google, offered such an app called MassNotify, which was used by 3.2 million users, of whom 1.8 million were notified of potential exposure to COVID. New Civil Liberties Alliance charged that the Massachusetts DOH was pushing the app onto Android devices, as opposed to via user-initiated downloads. An article in the online tech journal Ars Technica showed that the state had no role in the rollout but that Google had indeed used push installs to add a tracking code stub (not a full-featured app) to Android’s alert mechanism. Users of Google Android had discovered one more problem with their insecure mobile operating system. Ignoring facts and nuance, MFI’s Andrew Beckwith huffed that this was “yet another example of government bureaucrats using the COVID hysteria to run roughshod over clear Constitution rights.”
Defending Crime, Autocracy, and Insurrection
In 2019 Christianity Today published an editorial entitled “Trump Should be Removed from Office.” The centrist magazine argued that Trump’s temporal actions were illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral; that his Twitter feed was a “near perfect example” of a human being “morally lost and confused.” The editorial acknowledged the political opportunism behind evangelical support of Trump, but the “impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”
Greater Boston interviewed Evangelicals to get their view on the influential magazine’s charges. MFI’s Andrew Beckwith didn’t mind if Trump was an immoral criminal. His take was that Evangelicals had no choice but to choose an immoral criminal who was likely to destroy American democracy – as long as Trump delivered to the 200 Evangelicals he cited. Beckwith then reduced it all to abortion, saying evangelicals had to weigh Trump’s three ex-wives against 60 million “murdered children” since the beginning of Roe v Wade. Beckwith ended his Trump apologetics by fully embracing authoritarianism when he replied that MFI was above partisan politics, even democracy, smiling and pointing out that Jesus was a monarchist who was the “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” Which is just what a Christian Dominionist would say.
And now you know who MFI is.
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