Media Matters has profiled five legal scholars who are defending religious right to discriminate laws in the U.S.

Media Matters has profiled five legal scholars who are defending religious-based "right to discriminate" laws in the U.S.

While media outlets have relied on these scholars to downplay fears that such laws could result in anti-LGBT discrimination, many of the profiled supposedly neutral experts harbor their own anti-LGBT agendas.

The six scholars profiled are Robin Fretwell Wilson (above), Mary Ann Glendon, Helen M. Alvaré (right), Robert P. George and Michael W. McConnell.

University of Illinois law professor Robin Fretwell Wilson has ties to anti-gay group Family Foundation of Virginia, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), Family Research Council (FRC), Focus on the Family and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
A Harvard Law professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon signed a February 2014 letter defending the Arizona's expanded "religious freedom" law. She has called marriage equality a "radical social experiment", warned that "children will have to be taught about homosexual sex" and fear mongered about the threat posed by "alternative family forms."
George Mason University School of Law professor Helen M. Alvaré actively opposes same-sex marriage and has advocated for "ex-gay" conversion therapy. She signed the Arizona RFRA letter and testified in support of Kansas's 2013 RFRA. She has ties with Focus on the Family, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality and pro-RFRA group Women Speak for Themselves.
A law professor at Princeton, Robert George has pledged to defy "man-made law" to follow "God's law" in the face of marriage equality. George signed pro-RFRA letters in Indiana and North Dakota, is a co-founder of NOM and serves on the board of FRC. He has argued that same-sex relationships have "no intelligible basis in them for the norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence” and has been described as the "reigning brain of the Christian right.”
Stanford University Law professor Michael W. McConnell was a potential Supreme Court nominee under George W. Bush. He signed both the Arizona and Indiana RFRA letters and has a history of portraying LGBT-rights activists as bullies who silence any "dissenters." He has argued that lawyers who oppose a same-sex marriage have been "bullied into silence” because "the level of sheer desire to crush dissent is pretty unprecedented.”