A Twocare.org analysis shows that out of the 101-odd American speakers featured at major World Congress of Families congresses from WCF I, held in Prague in 1997, to WCF VI, held in Madrid in 2012, 48 of those speakers, almost half, were attached to organizations that have been funded by the National Christian Foundation, the biggest foundation at the yearly event known as The Gathering (featured in the April 2014 Twocare.org special report The Gathering: The Religious Right's Cash Cow) - an event at which leaders of top Christian right anti-LGBT groups such as the Family Research Council, Focus on The Family, and the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) frequently mingle with billionaire financiers of the religious right, representatives from the right-wing DeVos, Coors, Friess, Ahmanson, Prince, DeMoss, and MacLellan families and the rapidly growing National Christian Foundation - now America's 12th biggest charity according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and which funds multiple "ex-gay" ministries.

By its own description, the event known as The Gathering - whose attending nonprofit foundations give out, according to a Twocare.org analysis, over $1 billion dollars a year in grants - was launched in 1985 from a meeting at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of The Fellowship, which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Featured speakers have included Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Alan Sears (The Gathering 2013), Focus on The Family President Jim Daly (The Gathering 2011) and Family Research Council head Tony Perkins (The Gathering 2006), and the board membership of these three nonprofits interlocks (see footnote 2) with board membership of The Gathering, the National Christian Foundation, and the $1/2 billion dollar a year ministry Campus Crusade For Christ - whose founder Bill Bright advocated the use of stealth and deception to fight LGBT rights (see footnote 4), forming a strategic coalition with global reach and networks that can distribute eliminationist anti-gay propaganda across entire continents.

Speakers scheduled this year for The Gathering 2014 include NYT columnist David Brooks, a frequent National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered and The Diane Rehm Show. Among those Joining Brooks at The Gathering 2014 will be Terry Parker, co-founder and board member of the National Christian Foundation, which since 2005 has given over $1.5 million dollars to the His Servants ministry of Don Schmierer, producer and vendor of a Fieldstead & Company-commissioned line of "ex-gay" books and curricula translated into dozens of languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Schmierer co-starred, along with Scott Lively, in a March 2009 Kampala, Uganda anti-gay conference widely credited with dramatically ratcheting up anti-LGBT hatred in that nation.

[image, right: Scott Lively (second from left), March 2009 in Kampala, Uganda, with Don Schmierer (fourth from left), a longtime program manager for billionaire anti-LGBT rights funder Howard F. Ahmanson's Fieldstead and Company. Both Schmierer and Ahmanson - one of the most dedicated and strategic anti-LGBT rights funders in America [see: 1, 2, 3, 4] and one of The Gathering's earliest participants - have been featured speakers at The Gathering. (click on image for full-size version)]

In 1997 at The Gathering [link to audio, link to transcript], Don Schmierer was part of a special team - assembled by Fieldstead & Company of Howard Ahmanson, Jr. (Ahmanson has been described at The Gathering as one of its original members, and his Fieldstead & Co. was the second biggest funder backing the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8) - that solicited funding from The Gathering's deep pocketed investors to finance a Fieldstead-commissioned master plan to combat "organized homosexuality". Masterminding the plan was former CIA analyst and author Herbert Schlossberg, husband of current Alliance Defending Freedom board member Terry Schlossberg.

In 2006 Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told The Gathering that the "second greatest threat:" to America, besides "radical Islamists" was "radical homosexuals". In 2013 The Gathering advertised a special briefing from Alan Sears on the ADF's ongoing legal work, which has included providing legal support for Proposition 8 in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a major role in the cases that led up to the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, and also advocacy for the "religious freedom" bills that flooded into state legislatures in early 2014.

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