Liberty Counsel has a long, documentary history of fighting to oppress LGBTQ individuals.

Liberty Counsel, an extreme Christian legal organization deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is fighting for the right to sue Jacksonville, Florida for its 2017 Human Rights Ordinance (HRO). It wants the ordinance to be cancelled because it affirms that LGBTQ people are humans deserving of human rights.

They filed a brief to the First District Court of Appeal, saying that the previous ruling—that they don’t have the right to sue because they haven’t been harmed by this ordinance enough for legal standing—is wrong. Obviously the Liberty Counsel doesn’t agree. In fact, they insist that “any resident of Jacksonville is already injured by the city’s deception” because they claim “radical LGBT activists” conspired with the City Council to trick people into supporting the HRO.

When they initially sued, Liberty Counsel’s Assistant Vice President of Legal Affairs Roger Gannam told WOKV that it has nothing to do with LGBTQ people getting human rights. It’s just about how they got those rights. He also added, “But the truth is, this is the same bad ordinance that opens women's private facilities to men, coerces Christian business owners to violate their consciences, and does not solve any actual discrimination problem.”

Yeah, this has nothing to go with LGBT hate at all.

Really convincing, Roger.

To make this even more wild, the Liberty Counsel filed this appeal on the behalf of a few plaintiffs—one of which is an ambulance company. In the appeal, it appears clear that this has nothing to do with complaining about a democratic process, but rather trying to weaponize “religious freedom” to legalize discrimination.

The brief claims that the owner of Liberty Ambulance Robert Assaf would be in violating his religious beliefs if he provided health care services to transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. I don’t see how being okay with people getting sicker and/or dying because of their gender identity is not a violation of his Christianity.

The brief claims that the owner of Liberty Ambulance, Robert Assaf, would be in violation of his religious beliefs if he were subject to the HRO.

This isn’t Liberty Ambulance’s first rodeo in the legal world. Back in 2015, the United States sued the company for Medicare fraud. In the complaint by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Florida says that the companies used manuals to train workers on how to falsify records and that most of the $28 million in submitted claims were medically unnecessary. Liberty Ambulance says they’re innocent.

Editor’s note: This post has been edited to clarify the relationship between Assaf's religious beliefs and the human rights ordinance.