Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on President Biden’s Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein:
Personnel is policy. The people a president appoints to any job reveal his priorities. Even ambassadors, who are usually just major campaign donors, can tell a lot about what a president wants to accomplish. From President Biden’s appointment of Scott Miller to serve as the United States Ambassador to the Swiss Confederation and the Principality of Liechtenstein, we can see once again that Biden has clearly prioritized LGBT issues over Christians.
Scott Miller comes into his ambassadorship after serving as the co-chairman of the Gill Foundation, one of the largest militant and anti-Christian LGBT organizations in the country. The Foundation has long worked to trample the rights of anyone who morally objects to same-sex marriage. Miller, along with his “husband” Tim Gill, the founder and co-chair of the foundation, have not sought to find a compromise in which homosexuals and people of faith can coexist; rather, they have treated the relationship as a zero-sum game.
According to John Lomperis, the United Methodist Director at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Gill Foundation “has shown an extremist hostility to basic freedom-of-conscience protections for those who do not morally approve of same-sex unions.”
When open hostility will not suffice, the Gill Foundation works to subvert religious organizations from within. Frequently, the foundation partners with Jon Stryker and his Arcus Foundation. Together, they have backed efforts within Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim groups that reject their religions’ teachings on homosexual acts and relationships.
In 2012, the Gill Foundation made a $100,000 general support grant to the Catholics United Education Fund. Catholics United used this money to promote same-sex marriage while attacking groups that promoted traditional values. In 2012, the group sent letters to pastors in Florida putting them on notice that they were watching for illegal political activity from the pulpit in an attempt to silence priests from speaking out against issues that directly concerned the Church in that election cycle. In 2013, Catholics United sparred with the Knights of Columbus claiming that the Knights were promoting a “far-right political agenda” hostile to “marriage equality.”
In short, Miller is a radical. The organization he co-chairs actively works to undermine religious liberty and subvert the Catholic Church and other faiths. Now, he will play an important part in shaping America’s foreign policy, and based on his history, we can say with the highest degree of confidence that he will not champion the cause of religious liberty. Indeed, he will likely undermine it.
Contact White House press secretary Jen Psaki: jennifer.r.psaki@who.eop.gov
