In March 2017, before Doug Wardlow had won the Republican primary for a shot at becoming Minnesota’s Attorney General, he sat in on a meeting of the Anoka-Hennepin School Board. When his name was announced, Wardlow rose to the podium and bid the board members “good evening.” He told them he was there as a member of Alliance Defending Freedom, “a nonprofit legal organization that litigates in defense of free speech and religious liberty” in Minnesota and beyond.

He went on to say he was representing parents who were concerned that the district would start letting transgender students use the bathrooms that matched their gender identities. "Boys" should go to the boys’ facilities, he said, and "girls" to the girls’ room. Anyone who “professed” to be transgender could go use a single-stall restroom.

“I urge the District to act in accord with the simple reality that there are boys, and there are girls, and boys and girls are fundamentally different in ways that really do matter,” he said.

This was just one scene from Wardlow’s career litigating for Alliance. The legal group formed in 1994 with a solemn vow to protect “religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family,” according to its website. It’s now one of the most powerful conservative Christian legal organizations in the country.

The former one-term Republican legislator representing the Eagan area started working for the Alliance Defending Freedom in 2014; on LinkedIn, he still lists the Alliance as his employer to this day.

And to this day, it remains, by the definition of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-LGBT hate group, supporting “the recriminalization of homosexuality of the U.S. and criminalization abroad,” defending “state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad” and “claim[ing] that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society.”