Blind Item #8 - Bigotry - A Reader Blind Item

You might recall a few years ago, as the Supreme Court prepared to make its historic decision on gay marriage, a quartet of ungrateful whiners, who had grown up with gay parents, wrote briefs and were flaunted by anti-marriage equality advocates who did not want gay marriage to be the law of the land. One of the people in the quartet, a bona fide nutjob, founded a sham children's rights group with an important-sounding name. All members of this quartet joined this international institute, and several other members from around the world, basically a laundry list of anti-gay activists, joined the group as members of its various councils. While the group tried to bill itself as non-partisan, educational, and secular, the institute's job was basically to harass and spread lies about gay parents using junk science.

Aforementioned nutjob would eventually be fired from his cushy professor job for trying to force his students to attend the group's first meeting, and is now slowly sinking into irrelevance. Another crackpot from the group, who had several pseudonyms and an anti-trans flair, seems to have disappeared completely. So why did the group mysteriously shut down after about two years? Why did many of the group's most prolific writers and speakers freeze their social media accounts at about the same time the group disappeared? And why do those who were on the group's councils or published articles defending the nutjob when he lost his teaching position want to erase any association with the group or the nutjob, and refuse to talk about it?

 What happened was one of the group's more fame-hungry members (who seems to be the only one still friends with the nutjob) went on several high-profile trips to two island nations that were mulling gay marriage, in an attempt to sway the politics there. American tax-exempt entities are forbidden from trying to influence foreign campaigns and elections, and the penalties can be steep. This bigot would also get banned from one of the countries for illegally taking part in a political rally. While she started her own group that basically does the same thing as the group that disappeared, she, like many other members of the former group, keep their association with the quietly shuttered institution off their bios and refuse to talk about it.