‘WE’RE NOT CANCELING’: Ohio Venue Stands for Christian Leader’s Free Speech Amid LGBTQ Activist Pressure

The City Club of Cleveland is defying LGBTQ activist pressure to cancel or substantially alter an event featuring a conservative Christian leader next month, and Ohio’s attorney general is standing with the venue.

“We’re not canceling, and we have never had any intention of canceling this,” Dan Moulthrop, the City Club’s CEO, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “We’re gonna continue to do what we always do, and have done for 113 years, which is convene conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive and do that with the leadership of relevant organizations who are shaping our communities.”

Moulthrop confirmed that he has no intention of changing the Jan. 16 forum in which he will interview Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue.

The center says it “seeks the good of our neighbors by advocating for public policy that reflects the truth of the Gospel.” It advocates for religious freedom, free speech, educational freedom, and pro-life and pro-family policy.

The Letter

Yet more than 100 LGBTQ leaders and organizations across Ohio signed an open letter denouncing the City Club for hosting Baer and urging the venue to “cancel or modify this forum in a way that does not platform an organization that has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQIA2S+ hate group.”

The letter makes four demands: cancel the event or include an LGBTQ activist; replace Moulthrop with a likely pro-LGBTQ “external moderator;” “disavow platforming hate speech;” or “structure the event so that diverse and impacted perspectives are not only present but also meaningfully centered.”

More than 20 organizations—including HRC Cleveland, the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland, Equality Ohio, GLAAD, and Plexus LGBT & Allied Chamber of Commerce—signed the letter, which aims to “prevent extremism from going unchallenged” and suggests a distinction between “facilitating dialogue and platforming organized hate.”

“Free speech is a cornerstone of our democracy,” Dwayne Steward, CEO and executive director of Equality Ohio, told The Daily Signal. Yet he argued that Baer’s message is “rooted in oppression and erasure.”

“CCV is fueling the equality crisis in Ohio and across the nation,” Steward argued. He cited the LGBTQ activist Trevor Project in claiming that “anti-transgender legislation” of the kind CCV supports was “directly related to a 72% increase in suicide rates among Ohio’s transgender and gender non-conforming youth.”

“I hope any public forum featuring Baer that seeks inclusive community dialogue illuminates the harmful impact of his actions and the actions of his organization,” Steward added.

Steward referred The Daily Signal to Plexus, which did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Bringing Down the Temperature

“This petition is the same broken playbook the Left has deployed for the last decade,” Baer told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “They’ve lost the public debate, and all these LGBT groups have left is to try to pressure the City Club to cancel us.”

“But the City Club and Dan Moulthrop deserve credit for inviting a different perspective to their stage and holding fast to this point,” Baer added. “After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it’s going to take events like this to bring the temperature down in our country.”

Kirk’s assassination came after the SPLC put his organization, Turning Point USA, on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. While there is no direct evidence the SPLC inspired that assassination, a terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council—which the SPLC brands an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” alongside the Center for Christian Virtue—in 2012. The SPLC condemned both attacks but kept both groups on the map.

The SPLC advocates for LGBTQ issues, and puts those who oppose that agenda on the “hate map.”

The SPLC has used the “anti-LGBTQ hate group” label against Alliance Defending Freedom (which even left-leaning attorneys like former ACLU President Nadine Strossen have contested), and Gays Against Groomers, even though it consists of LGB people.

The SPLC has even suggested that agreement with the Catechism of the Catholic Church qualifies one as a “hate group.”

Ohio’s AG Weighs In

Attorney General Dave Yost, R-Ohio, urged Moulthrop to stand by Baer in a letter Wednesday.

“To land on the SPLC’s list, a group need only offend progressive orthodoxy,” Yost wrote.

“The Center for Christian Virtue apparently falls afoul the SPLC in its adherence to an orthodox Christian worldview against a variety of postmodernist views about human nature, including sexuality,” he added.

“The City Club has long prided itself as a citadel of free speech, and rightly so,” Yost wrote. Yet he warned that “the reason for your very existence as a forum will evaporate if you give in to the demands to cancel Mr. Baer’s talk” (emphasis original).

“I believe you and your board are made of sterner stuff,” Yost concluded.

“Dave Yost has always been a champion for free speech—he’s demonstrating how Christians can use their voice to engage in courageous discussion today,” Baer said in response to Yost’s letter.

The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

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