Over the past year, one of the largest charities in the Northwest has donated $375,000 to a nonprofit in Arizona that supports laws that have been criticized as anti-transgender, including a law in North Carolina preventing transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity, Willamette Week reports.
The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, based in Vancouver, Washington, was founded by a powerful figure in Oregon’s technology industry. It has assets of more than $1 billion, and gives away $50 million annually. The $375,000 it gave to a conservative Christian group in Arizona called the Alliance Defending Freedom was earmarked for “teaching schools how to follow the law when creating nondiscrimination and free speech policies,” Steve Moore, the trust’s executive director, told Willamette Week. In the last nine years, the trust has given almost $1 million to the ADF, Willamette Week reports.
The ADF created model legislation in February 2015 that served as a basis for a law in North Carolina requiring transgender people to use bathrooms matching the gender on their birth certificates, rather than their current gender identity.
Noting that according to its website, the Trust’s mission is to “enrich the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest,” The Stranger's Dan Savage wrote today: “It's hard to see how financing rightwing hate groups in Arizona and their attacks on trans people in North Carolina (and other states) enriches the quality of life around here.”
