Council for National Policy vs. transgender people

Groups Reviewed August 27, 2026 9 min read

Council for National Policy is an Aerican an invitation-only network linking conservative donors, activists, politicians, media figures, and policy organizations. Anti-trans activism has been a consistent part of their work following conservative losses on marriage equality.

Background

The Council for National Policy (CNP) was founded in 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, as a private networking organization bringing together Christian-right activists, conservative political strategists, business leaders, and wealthy donors. Southern Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye was its first president; other early figures included Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell, Howard Phillips, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Phyllis Schlafly.

In 1993, former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese became CNP president, reflecting the organization’s continuing connections to Republican administrations and conservative legal networks.

2015 “Fight to Preserve Marriage” panel

On May 16, 2015, CNP hosted a panel on “the fight to preserve marriage.”

Ryan T. Anderson
Michael Farris
Charles LiMandri
Cathy Ruse
Rick Scarborough
Kelly Shackelford
Bill Walton

Selected speeches

Below are some examples of how invited guests speak about trans topics at CNP events.

Charles LiMandri (February 2018): spoke on the “radical homosexual agenda.”

Michael Farris (May 2018) Spoke on a panel about “religious freedom,” a phrase often utilized to try to justify efforts to undermine the rights of marginalized communities. Farris criticized the proposed Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in a range of settings including employment, housing, and education.

Elizabeth Johnson aka “Activist Mommy” (May 2018) Johnson is known for organizing anti-sex education campaigns and for her anti-LGBT views.

Kelly Shackelford (February 2020) remarks on religious liberty.

Larry Arnn (November 2020) “The colleges have become Thrasymachus now. They explicitly say, as a chief recruiting tool, almost everywhere including most Christian colleges, we will teach you to do whatever you want. That’s relativism, one of the two dominant thoughts of our age. The second is historicism. We will teach you to be in the spirit of this age. Where did all that transgender stuff come from? You know, it just grew one day, nobody ever heard of it. And now it’s everywhere, and it’s a war. There’s an assault like that time after time, and they all start on college campuses. And colleges cater to them.”

William P. Barr (May 2021) “Earlier this year, an Iowa public school district taught trans-genderism and homosexuality to students at all grade levels—including pre-school. As part of a ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action,’ the school district distributed a children’s coloring book page that teaches: ‘Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or someone else, and no one else gets to choose for them.’ Clearly, this is not established “science.” Rather, it is a moral, psychological, and metaphysical dogma of the new progressive orthodoxy. In fact, until very recently, virtually no one in America had even heard of these radical notions, yet they are now so thoroughly institutionalized in many public schools that in some states children are permitted to select a new gender without the consent of their parents. This is not a matter of isolated ideas occasionally popping up that are so discrete and fleeting as to do no great harm. What is taking shape is a full-blown—may I say ‘systemic’—subversion of the religious worldview. While the secularist may view each lesson, such as transsexualism—as dealing with a discrete subject, those lessons embody broader ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the religious viewpoint. Telling school children that they get to choose their gender—not just male or female, but anything else—and that no one else has anything to say about it—does not just contradict particular religious teachings on gender and the authority of parents; it is a broadside attack on the very idea of natural law, which is integral to the moral doctrines of a number of religious denominations.”

Monica Gill (May 2022): “Then we have the current very radical gender ideology, and with the current gender ideology students can on-demand make whatever claim they wish. According to the policy in my county, the way a student identifies must be validated. Teachers are required to call that student by whatever name and pronoun they claim, but this entire notion of gender transition and fluidity is utterly confusing to kids and adults. I had a student one year who was male. He used to dress very feminine and claim that he was a lesbian. His claim was that he was a girl who was attracted to girls trapped in a boy’s body, so he was a lesbian. We laugh, but the truth is that this is a student who needed help. Under the current system, nobody can try to help this kid. Instead, everybody in the school system has to come along and validate this tortured logic. Not even the parents are allowed to question it because they might get referred to child protective services for not validating their child’s gender claims.”

Gary Hamrick (May 2022): “In May of 2020, I was watching the news, and I saw this young man, a PE teacher for Loudoun County public schools. Loudoun County had started to go viral in the news because Tanner Cross was speaking out at a Loudoun County school board meeting where they were inviting public comment on Policy 8040. It allowed students to determine whatever gender they wanted to be, and every teacher and every classmate was forced—think about this, forced speech—to identify those children by their preferred pronouns even if it defied God’s beautiful design of their biological gender. So, there Tanner Cross is, as a Christian, saying that he can’t lie to his students. If this policy passes, he would be lying to God, lying to students, and it would go against his faith as a believer in Jesus Christ. I was watching this, and I was applauding this guy. Later I was told, ‘Oh, by the way, he goes to your church.’ I called him and his wife, Angela, to the church and prayed for them. I got them up on a Sunday morning at all three of our Sunday morning services, and they got standing ovations. We just wanted to come along side of them and pray for them and encourage them. I made a statement that morning. I made a statement that basically said this: ‘When you lie to a child, by not affirming their God-given biology, and allow them to choose whatever gender they want, that’s emotional child abuse.’“

Jay Richards (March 2024) “It is an absolutely depressing subject—gender ideology—and I’ve been talking about it long enough that I know that there is an age gradient in terms of people’s ability to kind of receive this insanity. Here is what I mean. Most of you learned from the time you were five or six years old that there are males and females. You just sort of take this for granted. You didn’t think this was something that would be contested. In fact, no one thought this would be contested. Gender ideology essentially claims that sex, as a real observed given reality out there in nature that is built into the natural order, doesn’t really explain human existence. What explains human existence, rather, is this internal sense of gender called a gender identity. You call it the sort of the psychological self. […] I’d say our primary successes initially in the states have been with gender medicine, because it’s the kind of most grotesque manifestation of this ideology, a direct assault on children’s minds and bodies that leads to sterilization.

Thomas F. Farr (November 2024): “The destructive impact of the autonomy concept is perhaps best revealed in the idea of ‘gender fluidity’ – the false and dangerous proposition that human beings, including children, may acquire a ‘gender identity’ that is somehow incompatible with their sex by using therapeutic counseling, cross-hormone drugs, and surgeries that both mutilate the body, and render it permanently infertile. Of course, there are genuine cases of gender dysphoria and human suffering, and we should address them with compassion and love. But the false idea of ‘gender fluidity’ has been endorsed by the medical profession.”

Lucas Miles (November 2024) [on a Cambridge theologian’s dissertation] “That is a doctoral candidate at one of the leading theological institutions. They said that because Jesus was pierced in his midsection and he himself being born a male, that at that time he had a wound in the middle of his body, that bled, and his male also genitalia and that made him therefore both genders. It’s heretical, it’s disgusting, it’s vile, but it is what has been infiltrating this church, I believe, for well over 100 years.”

Peter Mcilvenna (May 2025) “We could have a word game where I gave you a word, you could tell me the connected words are not allowed to say, that are not Newspeak. So, if I said Islam, you certainly couldn’t say death cult. No, no, no. You’d have to say peace. If I said transgender, you couldn’t say mental illness. You would have to say normality. If I said abortion, you certainly couldn’t say murder. You would have to say healthcare. Or if I said vaccine, you couldn’t say damage. You would have to say safe and effective. We are being told what to say and how to think because we’ve abandoned truth.”

Kelly Shackelford (February 2026) “I just want to give you one example. The president [Trump] showed up one day for the hearing. We got 12 people testifying. He picks one person out of the crowd that’s going to testify. It’s a 12-year-old boy. He’s our client. What happened is all the fifth graders in that class were ordered to read a book called My Shadow is Pink to their kindergarten buddy, forcing them to question their gender. He said he couldn’t do that. They proceeded by not only forcing his parents to file a lawsuit, but they had a Hate Out the Pink Day to bully him. The school did this, okay? Think of a little kid being asked by the president to come up. You can see the podium’s so big, they have to get a stool but look at what this kid did.”

Alex Marlow (February 2026) “We are winning a lot of the culture wars, I think, with a lot of the trans and women’s sports, or as Trump says, transgender for everyone, which I love.“

References

Nelson, Anne (August 26, 2022). A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/167002/council-national-policy-documents-right-wing-conspiracy

Boston, Rob (October 27, 2021). The Council For National Policy Is The Scariest Christian Nationalist Group You’ve Never Heard Of. Americans United https://www.au.org/the-latest/articles/cnp-secret-group/

O’Harrow, Robert Jr. (October 25, 2021). God, Trump and the Closed-Door World of a Major Conservative Group. Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/25/god-trump-closed-door-world-council-national-policy/

Beirich, Heidi; Potok, Mark (May 17, 2016). The Council for National Policy: Behind the Curtain. Southern Poverty Law Center / Hatewatch https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/council-national-policy-behind-curtain/

Ambinder, Marc J. (May 1, 2002). Inside the Council for National Policy. ABC News https://abcnews.com/Politics/story?id=121170