Tag: bigotry

U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers has assembled a campaign team of extremist pastors and activists who have long opposed LGBTQ+ rights and promoted false claims about election fraud, a Metro Times review shows. 

Rogers, a former FBI agent and Republican congressman who narrowly lost the 2024 Senate race to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, launched his 2026 Senate bid in April. As part of his campaign, he created a “Faith Coalition Leadership Team” whose members include hard-right conservatives with well-documented histories of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and attempts to overturn or undermine past election results. The team includes members who openly opposed gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, encouraged the practice of conversion therapy on minors, and shared extreme anti-gay rhetoric that included calling LGBTQ+ rights “demonic, satanic, and wicked.”

The makeup of the council aligns with Rogers’s own record of voting against LGBTQ+ protections during his time in Congress. During his 14 years in the U.S. House, he consistently opposed expanding federal protections for LGBTQ+ people, including voting against efforts to add sexual orientation or gender identity to federal civil rights statutes. More recently, he has criticized Title IX protections for transgender students and has spoken out against transgender athletes participating in school sports.

One of the most prominent members of the coalition is former Michigan Civil Rights Commissioner Linda Lee Tarver, who repeatedly fought efforts to extend basic protections to LGBTQ+ residents while serving on the commission. In 2017, when Equality Michigan asked the commission to interpret the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act as covering sexual orientation and gender identity, Tarver pushed for an outright rejection, saying, “We’re not here to expand law; it is not within our purview.”

Tarver’s public statements went even further. On Facebook in February 2021, when President Joe Biden wanted to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes, she wrote that “God designed the husband to be a MAN and the wife to be a WOMAN” and called federal LGBTQ+ protections a “godless, demonic, satanic and wicked agenda of the devil.”

Another coalition member, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, has preached that LGBTQ+ civil rights undermine Christian teachings. In June, he insisted that extending civil rights to LGBTQ+ residents will “superimpose your sexuality on our culture,” urging congregants to pray against what he described as an “abomination.”

Pastor Brian Ford, another coalition member, leads a church that labelled homosexuality as a “sexual perversion” and opposed gay marriage on the grounds that it was unacceptable “in the eyes of god.” The Living Word Church considers homosexuality “unbiblical” and a “sexual perversion.”

Rogers’s advisory council also includes religious figures and others who tried to overturn or delegitimize past election results.

Tarver was a vocal supporter of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, petitioning the Michigan Supreme Court to seize ballots, ballot boxes, and poll books in Detroit and to block certification of Biden’s victory. The court rejected her claims. She later joined a failed national Republican-backed lawsuit that sought to stop Michigan’s electors from certifying Biden’s win.

Another coalition member, attorney Alexandria Taylor, is an election conspiracy theorist who was sanctioned by a Wayne County judge for filing a baseless 2022 lawsuit claiming widespread wrongdoing in Detroit’s election. The judge found the case “devoid of arguable legal merit” and “rife with speculation.”

Taylor’s lawsuit cited the debunked conspiracy film 2000 Mules as evidence of ballot fraud, despite the movie offering no proof of wrongdoing in Michigan.

Sewell, a key surrogate for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, has also peddled discredited conspiracy theories, claiming during the state House Election Integrity Committee that “systemic voter fraud” occurred during the 2024 Detroit election. He also told the committee that “we don’t have fair elections; we’re like China.”

Meerman, who was also appointed to the coalition, was involved in efforts to undermine the 2020 election and was named an “election denier” by States United Action, a nonpartisan group “with a mission to protect elections.”

State House Rep. Luke Meerman, R-Coopersville, opposed state legislation in June 2023 that banned Michigan health officials from performing conversion therapy, a harmful and widely discredited practice that purports to be able to change minors’ sexual orientation or gender identity. Later that year, Meerman opposed a bill to extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ residents. 

Coalition member John Damoose, a Republican state senator from Harbor Springs, also opposed both bills. 

When Rogers announced his coalition last month, he said the members will “lead grassroots outreach to faith communities, building important relationships, sharing Mike’s America First vision, and mobilizing people of faith across Michigan.”

“This campaign is built on faith, family, and freedom, and I will fight as your next U.S. Senator to defend those values every single day,” Rogers said in a statement at the time. “We look forward to working with this all-star team of faith leaders to protect and defend the religious freedoms that make our state and country the ‘shining city on a hill.’”

In a statement to Metro Times, Rogers’s campaign downplayed the extreme positions of the coalition members, suggesting Rogers couldn’t possibly know the views of all of them.

“Mike has had thousands of volunteers for his campaigns. There’s no way for him to know every view of every volunteer—no candidate does,” the campaign said. “These volunteers get involved not because they agree 100% of the time but because they know Mike is the only candidate who can get Michigan working again and deliver for working families.” 

Responding to Metro Times‘s story, the Michigan Democratic Party denounced Rogers for surrounding himself with divisive figures at a time when residents are already divided.

“Mike Rogers is surrounding himself with election deniers and extremists who want to ban marriage equality and force conversion therapy on minors—all while championing policies that make life more expensive and rip away health care,” Michigan Democratic Party spokesperson Joey Hannum said. “Instead of focusing on how to make Michigan more welcoming and affordable for everyone, Rogers is running a hateful, out-of-touch campaign that pits neighbors against each other and makes everybody worse off.”

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