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Thomas Dudley

Thomas Dudley (12 October 1576 – 31 July 1653) was a New England colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dudley was the chief founder of Newtowne, later Cambridge, Massachusetts, and built the town's first home. He provided land and funds to establish the Roxbury Latin School and signed Harvard College's new charter during his 1650 term as governor. Dudley was a devout Puritan who opposed religious views not conforming with his. In this, he was more rigid than other early Massachusetts leaders like John Winthrop, but less confrontational than John Endecott.

The son of a military man who died when he was young, Dudley saw military service himself during the French Wars of Religion, and then acquired some legal training before entering the service of his likely kinsman, the Earl of Lincoln. Along with other Puritans in Lincoln's circle, Dudley helped establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sailing with Winthrop in 1630. Although he served only four one-year terms as governor of the colony, he was regularly in other positions of authority.

Dudley's daughter Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was a prominent early American poet. One of the gates of Harvard Yard, which existed from 1915 to 1947, was named in his honor, and Harvard's Dudley House is named for the family, as is the town of Dudley, Massachusetts.

Early years
Thomas Dudley was born in Yardley Hastings, a village near Northampton, England, on 12 October 1576, to Roger and Susanna (Thorne) Dudley. The family has long asserted connections to the Sutton-Dudleys of Dudley Castle (Duke of Northumberland, Earls of Warwick and Leicester, Viscounts Lisle, and Barons Dudley); there is a similarity in their coats of arms, but association beyond probable common ancestry has not yet been conclusively demonstrated. Roger Dudley, a captain in the English army, was apparently killed in battle. It was for some time believed he was killed in the 1590 Battle of Ivry, but Susanna Dudley is known already to have been widowed by 1588. The 1586 battle of Zutphen has also been suggested as the occasion of Roger Dudley's death.

Like many other young men of good birth Thomas Dudley became a page, in his case in the household of William, Baron Compton at nearby Castle Ashby. Later he raised a company of men following a call to arms by Queen Elizabeth, and served in the English army led by Sir Arthur Savage fighting with King Henry IV of France during the French Wars of Religion. He fought the Spanish at the Siege of Amiens in 1597, which in September surrendered and was the final action of the war.

After he was discharged from his military service, Dudley returned to Northamptonshire. He then entered the service of Sir Augustine Nicolls, a relative of his mother's as a clerk. Nicolls, a lawyer and later a judge, was recognized for his honesty at a time when many judges were susceptible to bribery and other misconduct. He was also sympathetic to the Puritan cause; the exposure to legal affairs and Nicolls' religious views probably had a significant influence on Dudley. After Nicolls' sudden death in 1616, Dudley took a position with Theophilus Clinton, 4th Earl of Lincoln, serving as a steward responsible for managing some of the earl's estates. Although there is a likely blood connection, the reason for the appointment may be that Dudley's soldier grandfather Henry had served under Edward Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln. The earl's estate in Lincolnshire was a center of Nonconformist thought, and Dudley was already recognized for his Puritan virtues by the time he entered the earl's service. According to Cotton Mather's biography of Dudley, he successfully disentangled a legacy of financial difficulties bequeathed to the earl, and the earl consequently came to depend on Dudley for financial advice. Dudley's services were not entirely pecuniary in nature: he is also said to have had an important role in securing the engagement of Clinton to Lord Saye's daughter. In 1622, Dudley acquired the assistance of Simon Bradstreet who was eventually drawn to Dudley's daughter Anne. The two were married six years later when she was 16.

Dudley was briefly out of Lincoln's service between about 1624 and 1628. During this time, he lived with his growing family in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he likely was a parishioner at St Botolph's Church, where John Cotton preached. The Dudleys were known to be back on Lincoln's estate in 1628 when his daughter Anne came down with smallpox and was treated there.

Massachusetts Bay Colony
In 1628 Dudley and other Puritans decided to form the Massachusetts Bay Company, with a view toward establishing a Puritan colony in North America. Dudley's name does not appear on the land grant issued to the company that year. Still, he was almost certainly involved in the company's formative stages, whose investors and supporters included many individuals in the Earl of Lincoln's circle. The company sent a small group of colonists led by John Endecott to begin building a settlement, called Salem, on the shores of Massachusetts Bay; a second group was sent in 1629. The company acquired a royal charter in April 1629 and later that year made the critical decision to transport the charter and the company's corporate governance to the colony. The Cambridge Agreement, which enabled the emigrating shareholders to buy out those that remained behind, may have been written by Dudley. In October 1629 John Winthrop was elected governor, and John Humphrey was chosen as his deputy. However, as the fleet was preparing to sail in March 1630, Humphrey decided he would not leave England immediately, and Dudley was chosen as deputy governor in his place.

Dudley and his family sailed for the New World on the Arbella, the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet, on 8 April 1630 and arrived in Salem Harbour on 12 June. Finding conditions at Salem inadequate for establishing a larger colony, Winthrop and Dudley led forays into the Charles River watershed, but were unable to immediately agree on a site for the capital. With limited time to establish themselves and concerns over rumors of potential hostile French action, the leaders decided to distribute the colonists in several places to avoid presenting a single target for hostilities. The Dudleys probably spent the winter of 1630–31 in Boston, which was where the leadership chose to stay after its first choice, Charlestown, was found to have inadequate water. A letter Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln in March 1631 narrated the first year's experience of the colonists that arrived in Winthrop's fleet in an intimate tone befitting a son or suitor as much as a servant. It appeared in print for the first time in a 1696 compilation of early colonial documents by Joshua Scottow.

Founding of Cambridge
In the spring of 1631, the leadership agreed to establish the colony's capital at Newtowne (near present-day Harvard Square in Cambridge), and the town was surveyed and laid out. Dudley, Simon Bradstreet, and others built their houses there, but to Dudley's anger, Winthrop decided to build in Boston. This decision caused a rift between Dudley and Winthrop; it was severe enough that in 1632 Dudley resigned his posts and considered returning to England. After the mediation of others, the two reconciled, and Dudley retracted his resignation. Winthrop reported that "[e]ver after they kept peace and good correspondency in love and friendship." During the dispute, Dudley also harshly questioned Winthrop's authority as governor for several actions without consulting his council of assistants. Dudley's differences with Winthrop came to the fore again in January 1636, when other magistrates orchestrated a series of accusations that Winthrop had been overly lenient in his judicial decisions.

In 1632 Dudley, at his own expense, erected a palisade around Newtowne (which was renamed Cambridge in 1636) that enclosed 1,000 acre of land, principally as a defense against wild animals and Native American raids. The colony agreed to reimburse him by imposing taxes on all area communities. The meetings occasioned by this need are among the first instances of a truly representative government in North America, when each town chose two representatives to advise the governor on the subject. This principle was extended to govern the colony as a whole in 1634, the year Dudley was first elected governor. During this term, the colony established a committee to oversee military affairs and to manage the colony's munitions.

The colony came under legal threat in 1632, when Sir Ferdinando Gorges, attempting to revive an earlier claim to the territory, raised issues of the colony's charter and governance with the Privy Council of King Charles I. When the colony's governing magistrates drafted a response to the charges raised by Gorges, Dudley was alone in opposing language, referring to the king as his "sacred majesty", and to bishops of the Church of England as "Reverend Bishops". Although a quo warranto writ was issued in 1635 calling for the charter to be returned to England, the king's financial straits prevented it from being served, and the issue eventually died out.

Anne Hutchinson affair

In 1635, and for the four following years, Dudley was elected either as deputy governor or as a member of the council of assistants. The governor in 1636 was Henry Vane, and the colony was split over the actions of Anne Hutchinson. She had come to the colony in 1634 and began preaching a "covenant of grace" following her mentor, John Cotton, while most of the colony's leadership, including Dudley, Winthrop, and most of the ministers, espoused a more Legalist view ("covenant of works"). This split divided the colony since Vane and Cotton supported her. At the end of this colonial strife, called the Antinomian Controversy, Hutchinson was banished from the colony, and a number of her followers left the colony as a consequence. She settled in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams, also persona non-grata in Massachusetts over theological differences, offered her shelter. Dudley's role in the affair is unclear, but historians supportive of Hutchinson's cause argue that he was a significant force in her banishment, and that he was unhappy that the colony did not adopt a more rigid stance or ban more of her followers.

Vane was turned out of office in 1637 over the Hutchinson affair and his insistence on flying the English flag over the colony's fort; many Puritans felt that the Cross of St George on the flag was a symbol of popery and was thus anathema to them. Vane was replaced by Winthrop, who served three terms. According to Winthrop, concerns over the length of his service led to Dudley's election as governor in 1640.

Although Dudley and Winthrop clashed with each other on several issues, they agreed on banning Hutchinson, and their relationship had some significant positive elements. In 1638 Dudley and Winthrop were each granted a tract of land "about six miles from Concord, northward". Reportedly, Winthrop and Dudley went to the area together to survey the land and select their parcels. Winthrop, then governor, graciously deferred to Dudley, then deputy governor, to make the first choice of land. Dudley's land became Billerica, and Winthrop's Bedford. The place where the two properties met was marked by two large stones, each carved with the owner's name; Winthrop described the spot as the "'Two Brothers', in remembrance that they were brothers by their children's marriage".

Other political activities
During Dudley's term of office in 1640, many new laws were passed. This led to the introduction the following year of the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, a document that contains guarantees that were later placed in the United States Bill of Rights. During this term, he joined moderates, including John Winthrop, in opposing attempts by the local clergy to take a more prominent and explicit role in the colony's governance. When he was again governor in 1645, the colony threatened war against the expansionist Narragansetts, who had been making war against the English-allied Mohegans. This prompted the Narragansett leader Miantonomi to sign a peace agreement with the New England colonies which lasted until King Philip's War broke out 30 years later. Dudley also presided over the acquittal of John Winthrop in a trial held that year; Winthrop had been charged with abuses of his power as a magistrate by residents of Hingham the previous year.

In 1649 Dudley was appointed once again to serve as a commissioner and president of the New England Confederation, an umbrella organization established by most of the New England colonies to address issues of common interest; however, he was ill (and aging, at 73), and consequently unable to discharge his duties in that office. Dudley was elected governor for the fourth and last time in 1650 despite the illness. The most notable acts during this term were the issuance of a new charter for Harvard College, and the judicial decision to burn The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a book by Springfield resident William Pynchon that expounded on religious views heretical to the ruling Puritans. Pynchon was called upon to retract his views but returned to England instead of facing the magistrates.

During most of his years in Massachusetts, when not governor, Dudley served as either deputy governor or as one of the colony's commissioners to the New England Confederation. He also served as a magistrate in the colonial courts, and sat on committees that drafted the laws of the colony. His views were conservative, but he was not as strident in them as John Endecott. Endecott notoriously defaced the English flag in 1632, an act for which he was censured and deprived of office for one year. Dudley sided with the moderate faction on the issue, which believed the flag's depiction of the Cross of St George had by then been reduced to a symbol of nationalism.

Nathaniel Morton, an early chronicler of the Plymouth Colony, wrote of Dudley, "His zeal to order appeared in contriving good laws, and faithfully executing them upon criminal offenders, heretics, and underminers of true religion. He had a piercing judgment to discover the wolf, though clothed with a sheepskin." Early Massachusetts historian James Savage wrote of Dudley that "[a] hardness in public, and rigidity in private life, are too observable in his character". In a more modern historical view, Francis Bremer observes that Dudley was "more precise and rigid than the moderate Winthrop in his approach to the issues facing the colonists".

Founding of Harvard and Roxbury Latin
In 1637, the colony established a committee "to take order for a new college at Newtown". The committee consisted of most of the colony's elders, including Dudley. In 1638, John Harvard, a childless colonist, bequeathed to the colony his library and half of his estate as a contribution to the college, which was consequently named in his honor. The college charter was first issued in 1642, and a second charter was issued in 1650, signed by then-Governor Thomas Dudley, who also served for many years as one of the college's overseers. Harvard University's Dudley House, now only an administrative unit located in Lehman Hall after the actual house was torn down, is named in honor of the Dudley family. Harvard Yard once had a Dudley Gate bearing words written by his daughter Anne; it was torn down in the 1940s to make way for construction of Lamont Library. A fragment remains in Dudley Garden, behind Lamont Library, including a lengthy inscription in stone.

In 1643, Reverend John Eliot established a school at Roxbury. Dudley, who was then living in Roxbury, gave significant donations of both land and money to the school, which survives to this day as the Roxbury Latin School.

Family and legacy
Dudley married Dorothy Yorke in 1603 and had five or six children. Samuel, the first, also came to the New World and married Winthrop's daughter Mary in 1633, the first of several alliances of the Dudley-Winthrop family. He later served as the pastor in Exeter, New Hampshire. Daughter Anne married Simon Bradstreet, and became the first poet published in North America. Patience, Dudley's third child, married a colonial militia officer Daniel Denison. The fourth child, Sarah, married Benjamin Keayne, a militia officer. This union was unhappy, resulting in the first reported instance of divorce in the colony; Keayne returned to England and repudiated the marriage. Although no formal divorce proceedings are known, Sarah eventually married again, to Job Judkins, by whom she bore five children. Mercy, the last of his children with Dorothy, married minister John Woodbridge.

Dudley may have had another son, though most historians think the evidence is too slim. A “Thomas Dudley” was awarded degrees from Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in 1626 and 1630, and some historians have argued this is a son of Dudley. Also, Dudley was referred to as “Thomas Dudley Senior” on a lone occasion in 1637.

Dorothy Yorke died on 27 December 1643 at 61 years of age, and was remembered by her daughter Anne in a poem:

"Here lies, A worthy matron of unspotted life, A loving mother and obedient wife, A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor, Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store;"

Dudley married his second wife, the widow Katherine (Deighton) Hackburne, a descendant of the noble Berkeley, Lygon, and Beauchamp families, in 1644. She is also a direct descendant of eleven of the twenty-five barons who acted as sureties for John Lackland on the Magna Carta. They had three children, Deborah, Joseph, and Paul. Joseph served as governor of the Dominion of New England and of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Paul (not to be confused with Joseph's son Paul, who served as provincial attorney general) was for a time the colony's register of probate.

In 1636, Dudley moved from Cambridge to Ipswich, and in 1639, moved to Roxbury. He died in Roxbury on 31 July 1653, and was buried in the Eliot Burying Ground there. Dudley, Massachusetts is named for his grandsons Paul and William, its first proprietors.

The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation owns a parcel of land in Billerica called Governor Thomas Dudley Park. The "Two Brothers" rocks are located in the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Bedford, in an area that has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District.

Dudley Square
Dudley Square in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood was named after Dudley. Proponents of an effort to rename the square noted that Dudley was "a leading politician in 1641", when the colony became the first to sanction slavery legally. Conversely, Byron Rushing, former president of the Museum of African American History in Boston, stated, “I’ve really searched, and I’ve found no evidence that Dudley ever owned slaves."

A non-binding advisory question was added to the 5 November 2019 municipal ballot for all Boston residents asking, "Do you support the renaming/changing of the name of Dudley Square to Nubian Square?" Election night results show that the question was defeated.

Mayor of Boston Marty Walsh subsequently announced that the question had "passed in the surrounding areas" near the square, and could be considered further by the city's Public Improvement Commission. On 19 December 2019, the Public Improvement Commission unanimously approved changing the name of Dudley Square to Nubian Square. Dudley station was renamed Nubian station in June 2020.

title: Thomas Dudley


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Green Mountains

The Green Mountains are a mountain range in the U.S. state of Vermont and are a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains. The range runs primarily south to north and extends approximately 250 mi from the border with Massachusetts to the border with Quebec, Canada. The part of the same range that is in Massachusetts and Connecticut is known as The Berkshires or the Berkshire Hills (with the Connecticut portion, mostly in Litchfield County, locally called the Northwest Hills or Litchfield Hills) and the Quebec portion is called the Sutton Mountains, or Monts Sutton in French.

All mountains in Vermont are often referred to as the "Green Mountains". However, other ranges within Vermont, including the Taconic Mountains in southwestern Vermont and the Northeastern Highlands, are not geologically part of the Green Mountains.

Peaks
The best-known mountains—for reasons such as high elevation, ease of public access by road or trail (especially the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail), or with ski resorts or towns nearby—in the range include:

 * 1) Mount Mansfield, 4395 ft, the highest point in Vermont
 * 2) Killington Peak, 4241 ft
 * 3) Camel's Hump, 4084 ft
 * 4) Mount Ellen, 4083 ft
 * 5) Mount Abraham, 4017 ft
 * 6) Pico Peak, 3957 ft
 * 7) Stratton Mountain, 3940 ft
 * 8) Jay Peak, 3862 ft, receives the most snowfall on average in the eastern United States.
 * 9) Bread Loaf Mountain, 3835 ft
 * 10) Mount Wilson, 3780 ft
 * 11) Glastenbury Mountain, 3748 ft
 * 12) Burke Mountain, 3280 ft

The Green Mountains are part of the Appalachian Mountains, a range that stretches from Quebec in the north to Alabama in the south. The Green Mountains are part of the New England/Acadian forests ecoregion.

Three peaks—Mount Mansfield, Camel's Hump, and Mount Abraham—support alpine vegetation.

Tourism
Some of the mountains are developed for skiing and other snow-related activities. Others have hiking trails for use in summer. Mansfield, Killington, Pico, and Ellen have downhill ski resorts on their slopes. All of the major peaks are traversed by the Long Trail, a wilderness hiking trail that runs from the southern to northern borders of the state and is overlapped by the Appalachian Trail for roughly $1/undefined$ of its length.

History
The Vermont Republic, also known as the Green Mountain Republic, existed from 1777 to 1791, at which time Vermont became the 14th state.

Vermont not only takes its state nickname ("The Green Mountain State") from the mountains, it is named after them. The French Monts Verts or Verts Monts is literally translated as "Green Mountains". This name was suggested in 1777 by Dr. Thomas Young, an American revolutionary and Boston Tea Party participant. The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College is referred to as UVM, after the Latin Universitas Viridis Montis (University of the Green Mountains).

Geology and physiography
The Green Mountains are a physiographic section of the larger New England province, which in turn is part of the larger Appalachian physiographic division.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Green Mountains


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Richthofen family

The Richthofen family is a prominent German Noble family. The most famous member is the air ace Manfred von Richthofen (1892–1918), also known as the "Red Baron", but a number of other members of his family are also notable for various reasons.

Walter von Richthofen
Baron Walter von Richthofen, an uncle of Manfred von Richthofen, immigrated to the United States in 1877 from Silesia. He founded the Denver Chamber of Commerce and was co-founder of Montclair, Denver, at that time a village east of Denver but now incorporated into the city. His Richthofen Castle was one of the most sumptuous mansions in the American West. Begun in 1883 and completed in 1887, it was modeled on the original Richthofen Castle in Germany. Located immediately around the castle are the baron's mistress's house and his sanitarium/dairy.

WWI flying aces
Manfred von Richthofen was the most successful fighter pilot of World War I, with 80 official victories before he was killed in action.

His younger brother, Lothar von Richthofen (1894–1922), was also a flying ace, with 40 victories. He served alongside his brother in Jasta 11. Lothar died in an air crash in 1922.

The two aviators were fourth cousins of the German World War II field marshal Wolfram von Richthofen (1895–1945). Wolfram was a cavalry man and later a World War I flying ace who flew with Manfred and Lothar in Jagdgeschwader 1 during the last year of the war.

Frieda and Else von Richthofen
Frieda von Richthofen (1879–1956), who married the English novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) in July 1914, was a distant cousin. Though their last common ancestor was born in 1661, the Red Baron's fame nonetheless attached to Frieda's reputation in war time England.

Frieda's sister Else von Richthofen was one of the earliest female social scientists in Germany.

Suzane Louise von Richthofen
Suzane Louise von Richthofen (born 3 November 1983) is a German-Brazilian woman who was convicted of murdering her parents on 31 October 2002 with the help of her boyfriend and his brother. She was put on trial in São Paulo in July 2006 and was sentenced to 39 years and 6 months in prison. In 2023 she was released from prison on parole.

Ambassadors

 * Herbert von Richthofen was an ambassador to Bulgaria between 1938 and 1941.
 * Dr. Hermann von Richthofen (grand-nephew of Frieda and Else), was German Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1989–1993, where his name made him a media favorite.

Other
Other well-known family members include:
 * Bolko von Richthofen (1899–1983), German archaeologist (not to be confused with Manfred's younger brother)
 * Emil von Richthofen (1810-1895), Prussian diplomat and father of Oswald von Richthofen
 * Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905), German traveller, geographer and scientist, for whom Colorado's Mount Richthofen was named
 * Manfred von Richthofen (general) (1855–1939), German General of the Cavalry during World War I
 * Manfred von Richthofen (sports official) (1934–2014), German hockey player and coach
 * Oswald von Richthofen (1847-1906), German diplomat and politician

title: Richthofen family


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Registered retirement savings plan

A registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) (régime enregistré d'épargne-retraite, REER), or retirement savings plan (RSP), is a type of financial account in Canada for holding savings and investment assets. RRSPs have various tax advantages compared to investing outside of tax-preferred accounts. They were introduced in 1957 to promote savings for retirement by employees and self-employed people.

They must comply with a variety of restrictions stipulated in the Income Tax Act. Qualified investments include savings accounts, guaranteed investment certificates (GICs), bonds, mortgage loans, mutual funds, income trusts, common and preferred shares listed on a designated stock exchange, exchange-traded funds, call and put options listed on a designated stock exchange, foreign currency, and labour-sponsored funds. Short call contracts covered by long stock ("covered calls") are eligible, however, cash secured puts (short put contracts covered by cash) are not eligible. Rules determine the maximum contributions, the timing of contributions, the assets allowed, and the eventual conversion to a registered retirement income fund (RRIF), or an annuity, or the withdrawal of all funds within the RRSP, at age 71.

Taxation
Contributions to RRSPs are deductible from income, reducing income tax payable for the year in which the contributions are claimed. The holder of the RRSP (the "annuitant") can defer the deduction due to the contribution to a later year.

Income earned on sale of qualified investments is not taxed within the RRSP. If the RRSP earns business income, the business income is subject to taxation on the basis of the business income less the amount of business income arising from the sale of qualified investments. The effect of this rule, set out in section 146(4)(b)(i) and (ii) of the Income Tax Act, is that business income on qualified investments, earned within an RRSP, is subject to zero tax. This means that business income, for example, due to day trading within the RRSP, is not taxed, so long as the business income is due entirely to the sale of qualified investments. This is an important tax carve-out unique among registered accounts to the RRSP and the Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF), as, for example, in the case of the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA), business income is taxable as personal income earned by the TFSA holder.

All withdrawals except for withdrawals due to participation in the Home Buyers' Plan and the Lifelong Learning Plan are taxed as income when they are withdrawn. This is the same tax treatment provided to Registered Pension Plans established by employers.

RRSP accounts can be set up with either one or two associated individuals:

 * Individual RRSP: an individual RRSP is associated with only a single person, called an account holder. With Individual RRSPs, the account holder is also called a contributor, as only they contribute money to their RRSP.
 * Spousal RRSP: a spousal RRSP allows a higher earner, called a spousal contributor, to contribute to an RRSP in their spouse's name. In this case, it is the spouse who is the account holder. The spouse can withdraw the funds, subject to tax, after a holding period. A spousal RRSP is a means of splitting income in retirement: By dividing investment properties between both spouses each spouse will receive half the income, and thus the marginal tax rate will be lower than if one spouse earned all of the income.
 * Group RRSP: in a group RRSP, an employer arranges for employees to make contributions, as they wish, through a schedule of regular payroll deductions. The employee can decide the size of contribution per year and the employer will deduct an amount accordingly and submit it to the investment manager selected to administer the group account. The contribution is then deposited into the employee’s individual account and invested as specified. The primary benefit with a group plan is that the employee-contributor realizes the tax savings immediately, because the income taxes his or her employer must deduct on every paycheque can be reduced. By contrast, if a taxpayer making a private contribution is not expecting to owe more than $3,000 ($1,800 in Quebec) at the end of the year, then he or she will have to wait until the end of the tax year (or even not until after that in the case of taxpayers expecting a refund) before realizing the benefit.
 * Pooled RRSP: legislation was introduced during the 41st Canadian parliament in 2011 to create pooled retirement pension plans (PRPP). PRPPs would be aimed at employees and employers in small businesses, and at self-employed people.

Benefits from tax savings
There are a few benefit factors that add to a total. The only benefit that everyone always gets is from permanently tax-free profits on after tax savings. This is the same and equal benefit as from a TFSA. The conceptual understanding is that the contribution's tax reduction is the government investing its money alongside the saver's, for him to invest as he likes. They become co-owners of the account. The government's share of the account (funding plus the tax-free profits earned by it) at withdrawal fully funds the account's withdrawal tax calculated at the contribution's tax rate. So the contribution's tax reduction is never a benefit, and profits are never taxed. The withdrawal tax is conceptually an allocation of principal between owners, not a 'tax', and there is no benefit 'from deferral'.

There is a possible bonus (or penalty) from withdrawal tax rates lower (or higher) than at contribution. Both are possibilities. It equals the dollars withdrawn multiplied by the difference in tax rates. Hopefully the rate will be lower in retirement for a benefit. The tax rates used for this calculation are the effective rates that include the impact of the RRSP contributions / withdrawals on the qualification for benefits from other income-tested programs.

There is a growing cost from any delay in claiming the contribution's tax refund. Additional benefits may result from drawing funds using the Home Buyers' Plan or the Lifelong Learning Plan.

Contributing
Any resident of Canada who filed a tax return for the year prior to the year of the contribution, can contribute to an RRSP, up until December 31 of the year in which the RRSP annuitant (holder) turns 71. Contributions and deductions are two different things. Contributions are usually deducted from taxable income in the same tax year but may be deferred by the annuitant to future years. Because Canada has a progressive tax system, taxes are reduced at the individual's highest marginal rate. For individuals who always claim the same deduction amount as their yearly contribution, their maximum contribution is the 'deduction limit' calculated by the Canada Revenue Agency.

The 'deduction limit' is a running total calculated for the next year and printed on every notice of assessment or reassessment, provided the taxpayer is aged 71 years or younger. It is reduced by tax deductions claimed and increased by the year's contribution limit, minus any pension adjustment (PA) and past service pension adjustment (PSPA), plus pension adjustment reversals (PAR).

Since 1991, contribution limits are calculated at 18% of the prior year's reported earned income (from employment or self-employment), up to a maximum. The maximum has been rising as shown in the table below. Since 2010 it is indexed to the annual increase in the average wage.

While it is possible to contribute more than the contributor's deduction limit, it is generally not advised as any amount $2,000 over the deduction limit is subject to a significant penalty tax removing all benefits (1% per month on the overage amount).

RRSP contributions can be made up until and including the 60th day following December 31 of the tax year of the contribution. For example, contributions for the 2023 tax year can be made up until and including February 29, 2024. Unused contributions carry forward until December 31 in the year the annuitant reaches 71 years of age, at which point the unused contributions are cancelled.

Prior to 1991, contribution limits were calculated at 20% of the prior year's reported earned income, up to a maximum of $7,500 for taxfilers without an employer-sponsored registered pension plan, or $3,500 for taxfilers who had an employer-sponsored registered pension plan. Furthermore, any unused portion of the contribution limit could not be held for future use, and was therefore lost forever if not contributed before the 60 first days of the year.

Withdrawals
An account holder is able to withdraw dollars or assets from an RRSP at any age. Withholding tax is deducted by the institution managing the account. Amounts withdrawn must be included in the taxable income of that year. The tax withheld reduces the taxes owing at year end. There are two exceptions to this process: the Home Buyers' Plan and the Lifelong Learning Plan.

Before the end of the year the account holder turns 71, the RRSP must either be cashed out or transferred to a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF) or an annuity. Until 2007, account holders were required to make this decision at age 69 rather than 71.

Investments held in a RRIF continue to grow tax-free, though an obligatory minimum RRIF withdrawal amount is cashed out and sent to the account holder each year.

On death the assets remaining in the account are withdrawn and distributed directly to the named beneficiary. They do not flow through the estate. The account is closed. Like other withdrawals, the value of the assets is included in the taxable income of the account's owner. This large lump sum may result in much of its value being taxed at the top tax bracket. The liability to pay the tax lies with the estate, no matter who received the account's assets.

There are exceptions. When a spouse is the named beneficiary, the account continues, without triggering taxes, in the name of the spouse. There are also provisions for the tax-free transfer of assets to minor children, grandchildren and dependents.

Home buyers' plan
While the original purpose of RRSPs was to help Canadians save for retirement, it is possible to use RRSP funds to help purchase one's first home under what is known as the Home Buyers' Plan (HBP). An RRSP holder can borrow, tax-free, up to $35,000 from their RRSP (and another $35,000 from a spousal RRSP) towards buying their residence. This loan has to be repaid within 15 years after two years of grace. Contrary to popular belief, this plan can be used more than once per lifetime, as long as the borrower did not own a residence in the previous five years, and has fully repaid any previous loans under this plan. Originally introduced in the 1992 federal budget, the initial amount that could be borrowed was $15,000. Seventeen years later the amount was raised to $25,000 in the 2009 budget. The 2019 budget raised that amount again to $35,000.

Lifelong learning plan
Similarly to the home buyers' plan, the Life-Long Learning Plan (LLP) allows for temporary diversions of tax-free funds from an RRSP. This program allows individuals to borrow from an RRSP to go or return to post-secondary school. The user may withdraw up to $10,000 per year to a maximum of $20,000. The first repayment under the LLP will be due at the earliest of the following two dates.

 * 1) 60 days after the fifth year following the first withdrawal
 * 2) the second year after the last year the student was enrolled in full-time studies

Account structure
Both individual and spousal RRSPs can be held in one of three account structures. One or more of the account types below may not be an option depending on what type of investment instrument (example stocks, mutual funds, bonds) is being held inside the RRSP.

Client-held accounts
Client-held, or client-name accounts, exist when an account holder uses their RRSP contributions to purchase an investment with a particular investment company. Each time that an individual uses RRSP contribution money to purchase an investment at a different fund company, it results in a separate client-held account being opened. For example, if an individual buys investment #1 with one company and investment #2 with another, the individual would have separate RRSP accounts held with two different companies.

The main benefits of client-name accounts is that they do not generally incur annual fees or "exit fees", the investment is registered with the trustee in the client's name instead of the "dealer's" name and therefore, client-name investments are not subject to bankruptcy issues if the dealer goes bankrupt. Another benefit is that a Dealer Statement generated quarterly by the Mutual Fund Dealer; and Exempt Market Dealer contain all investment activity (buy, sell, switch) through that dealer for ease of tracking investments. The Dealer Statement contains all types of plans for registered investments (RRSP, RRIF, Tax-Free Savings Account, Locked-in Retirement Account, Life Income Fund) and non-registered investments thereby making it easy to track investments in one place.

Generally, client-held accounts are for mutual funds and exempt products only; therefore, if an investor holds stocks and bonds along with mutual funds or exempt products, a Nominee or Intermediary account is most beneficial for ease of tracking all types of investments in one place.

Nominee accounts
Nominee accounts are so named because individuals with this type of account nominate a nominee, usually one of Canada's five major banks or a major investment dealer, to hold a number of different investments in a single account. For example, if an individual buys investment #1 with one company and investment #2 with another, both investments are held in a single RRSP account with the nominee, a chartered bank.

The main benefit of a nominee account is the ability to keep track of all RRSP investments within a single account. The main detriment is that nominee accounts often incur annual fees.

A "self-directed" RRSP (SDRSP) is a special kind of nominee account. It is essentially a trading account at a brokerage that has tax-sheltered status. The holder of a self-directed RRSP instructs the brokerage to buy and sell securities on their behalf as with any brokerage account. The reason that it is described as "self-directed" is that the holder of this kind of RRSP directs all the investment decisions themselves, and does not normally have the service of an investment advisor.

Intermediary accounts
Intermediary accounts are essentially identical in function to nominee accounts. The reason investors would have an intermediary account instead of a nominee account has to do with the investment advisor they deal with, as advisors not aligned with a major bank or investment dealer may not have the logistical ability to offer nominee accounts to their clients.

As a result, the advisor will approach an intermediary company which is able to offer the investor identical benefits as those offered by a nominee account. The two main Canadian financial institutions that offer intermediary services are B2B Bank and Canadian Western Trust.

The main benefits and detriments of intermediary accounts are identical as those offered by nominee accounts.

RRSP rollover
It is possible to have an RRSP roll over to an adult dependent survivor, child or grandchild, as it would to a spouse. This was made possible in 2003 and there are various Income Tax Act (ITA) requirements to allow this to take place. The new registered asset could result in provincial benefits being cut off. In many cases a court application to have someone appointed guardian of the child’s property and person would be necessary to provide a legally authorized party to manage the asset if the child is deemed incompetent to do so. This possibility affects the overall estate plan and often the distribution of the estate.

Acquiring this asset may also affect the adult dependent child's eligibility for provincial assistance programs. A Henson trust may be useful for enabling the adult dependent child to receive RRSP rollovers and still be eligible for provincial social assistance programs such as Ontario disability support program (ODSP). A lifetime benefit trust (LBT) is a new option that may be valuable for leaving a personal trust in a will for a special needs, financially dependent child, grandchild or spouse. It has the added benefit that RRSP assets dedicated to the LBT could be protected from creditors.

Foreign content
Originally, RRSPs were limited to mostly domestic content, that is, Canadian based investments such as GICs, bonds and shares of Canadian corporations, and mutual funds holding such assets. Non-Canadian content was limited to 10% of the plan's assets, originally measured by market value, and in 1971 changed to 10% of book value.

In 1994, the foreign content limit was raised to 20%. However, by then, mutual fund managers found a way to get around this limitation and offer unitholders exposure to foreign markets without using up any of the foreign content quota. They typically did this by holding all fund assets in Canadian treasury bills or similar cash equivalent assets, and using foreign equity index futures or forward contracts with a similar notional value to obtain equivalent market exposure. Since derivatives are generally considered off-balance-sheet items for accounting purposes, these synthetic foreign funds qualified as 100% Canadian content.

In 2001, the foreign content limit was raised yet again, this time to 30%, but the prevalence of synthetic foreign funds was such as to make the limit a matter of form only.

In 2005, the law was changed to remove foreign content limit altogether.

Similar accounts in other countries

 * Individual retirement account (IRA) and 401(k) (United States)
 * Self-invested personal pension (SIPP) and individual savings account (ISA) (United Kingdom)
 * Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) (Ireland)
 * Superannuation (Australia)
 * KiwiSaver (New Zealand)
 * Nippon individual savings account (NISA) (Japan)
 * Mandatory Provident Fund (Hong Kong)
 * Vanuatu National Provident Fund (Vanuatu) – a compulsory savings scheme for Employees who receive a salary of Vt3, 000 or more a month, to help them financially at retirement.
 * Central Provident Fund (Singapore)
 * Employees Provident Fund (Malaysia)
 * Pensions in Chile

title: Registered retirement savings plan


text:
Elijah Woods

Elijah Woods may refer to:

 * Elijah Woods (politician) (1778–1820), Ohio politician
 * Elijah Woods, half of Canadian electropop duo Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine

title: Elijah Woods


text:
Napoleon Chagnon

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 – 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.

Admirers described him as a pioneer of scientific anthropology. Chagnon was called the "most controversial anthropologist" in the United States in a New York Times Magazine profile preceding the publication of Chagnon's most recent book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, a memoir.

Early life and education
Chagnon was born in Port Austin, Michigan, and was the second of twelve children. After enrolling at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1957, he transferred to the University of Michigan after his first year and there received a bachelor's degree in 1961, an M.A. in 1963, and a Ph.D. in 1966 under the tutelage of Leslie White. Based on seventeen months of fieldwork begun in 1964, Chagnon's thesis examined the relationship between kinship and the social organization of Yanomamö villages.

Career
Chagnon was best known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, indigenous Amazonians who live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil. Working primarily in the headwaters of the upper Siapa and upper Mavaca Rivers in Venezuela, he conducted fieldwork from the mid-1960s until the latter half of the 1990s. According to Chagnon, when he arrived he realised that the theories he had been taught during his training had shortcomings, because contrary to what they predicted, raiding and fighting, often over women, was endemic. His habit of constantly asking them questions earned Chagnon the Yanomamö nickname "pesky bee." A major focus of his research was the collection of genealogies of the residents of the villages he visited, and from these he would analyze patterns of relatedness, marriage patterns, cooperation, and settlement pattern histories. The degree of kinship was seen by Chagnon as important for the forming of alliances in social interactions, including conflict.

Chagnon's methods of analysis are widely seen as having been influenced by sociobiology. As Chagnon described it, Yanomamö society produced fierceness, because that behavior furthered male reproductive success. The genealogies showed that men who killed had more wives and children than men who did not kill. At the level of the villages, the war-like populations expanded at the expense of their neighbors. Chagnon's positing of a link between reproductive success and violence cast doubt on the sociocultural perspective that cultures are constructed from human experience. An enduring controversy over Chagnon's work has been described as a microcosm of the conflict between biological and sociocultural anthropology.

Chagnon's ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, was published in 1968 and ran to several editions, selling nearly a million copies,. It is commonly used as a text in university-level introductory anthropology classes, making it one of the bestselling anthropological texts of all time. Chagnon was also a pioneer in the field of visual anthropology. He collaborated with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch and produced a series of more than twenty ethnographic films documenting Yanomamö life. The ethnographic film The Ax Fight, showing a fight among two Yanomami groups and analyzing it as it relates to kinship networks, is considered a classic in ethnographic film making.

In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Marshall Sahlins, who was a major critic of Chagnon, resigned from the academy, citing Chagnon's induction as one of the reasons he quit.

On 21 September 2019, Chagnon died at the age of 81.

Darkness in El Dorado
In 2000, Patrick Tierney, in his book Darkness in El Dorado, accused Chagnon and his colleague James V. Neel of unethical behavior, such as, among other things, manipulating data, and exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people.

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000. For example, the interviews upon which the book was based all came from members of the Salesians of Don Bosco, a congregation of the Catholic Church, which Chagnon had criticized and angered.

The American Anthropological Association convened a task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book. Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied. However, the Task Force stated that there was no support for the claim that Chagnon and Neel began a measles epidemic. In June 2005, however, the AAA voted two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report.

Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky.

Anthropological critiques of his work
Chagnon's work with the Yanomamö was widely criticized by other anthropologists. Anthropologists critiqued both aspects of his research methods as well as the theoretical approach, and the interpretations and conclusions he drew from his data. Most controversial was his claim that Yanomamö society is particularly violent, and his claim that this feature of their culture is grounded in biological differences that are the result of natural selection.

The anthropologist Brian Ferguson argued that Yanomamö culture is not particularly violent, and that the violence that does exist is largely a result of socio-political reconfigurations of their society under the influence of colonization. Bruce Albert rejected the statistical basis for his claims that more violent Yanomamö men have more children. Others questioned the ethics inherent in painting an ethnic group as violent savages, pointing out that Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomamö as such breaks with anthropology's traditional ethics of trying to describe foreign societies sympathetically, and argued that his depictions resulted in increased hostility and racism against the Yanomamö by settlers and colonists in the area. Emily Eakin countered that Albert "cannot demonstrate a direct connection between Chagnon's writings and the government's Indian policy" and that the idea that scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects is troubling and supports the idea that nonviolence is a prerequisite for protecting the Yanomamö.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's graduate teachers, criticized Chagnon's methods, pointing out that Chagnon acknowledged engaging in behavior that was disagreeable to his informants by not participating in food-sharing obligations. Sahlins claimed that Chagnon's trade of steel weaponry for blood samples and genealogical information amounted to "participant-instigation" which encouraged economic competition and violence. Lastly, Sahlins argued that Chagnon's publications, which contend that violent Yanomamö men are conferred with reproductive advantages, made false assumptions in designating killers and omit other variables that explain reproductive success. In 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, in part in protest of Chagnon's election to the body. Other researchers of the Yanomamö such as Brian Ferguson argued that Chagnon himself contributed to escalating violence among the Yanomamö by offering machetes, axes, and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation. Chagnon said that it was instead local Salesian priests who were supplying guns to the Yanomamö, who then used them to kill each other.

In his autobiography, Chagnon stated that most criticisms of his work were based on a postmodern and antiscientific ideology that arose within anthropology, in which careful study of isolated tribes was replaced in many cases by explicit political advocacy that denied less pleasant aspects of the Yanomamö culture, such as warfare, domestic violence, and infanticide. Chagnon stated that much of his work has undermined the idea of the 'Noble savage' – a romanticized stereotype of indigenous people living in synchrony with nature and uncorrupted by modern civilization. Chagnon also stated that his beliefs about sociobiology and kin selection were misinterpreted and misunderstood, similarly because of a rejection of scientific and biological explanations for culture within anthropology.

As a result of the controversy and the alleged unethical practices with the Yanomami, Chagnon was officially barred from studying the Yanomami and from reentering their country in Venezuela.

Film
Chagnon worked with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch to produce at least forty films on Yanomamo culture, including The Feast (1969), Magical Death (1973) and The Ax Fight (1975). These films, especially The Ax Fight, are widely used in anthropological and visual culture curriculum and are considered to be among the most important ethnographic films ever produced.

title: Napoleon Chagnon


text:
Cocos Plate

The Cocos Plate is a young oceanic tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Central America, named for Cocos Island, which rides upon it. The Cocos Plate was created approximately 23 million years ago when the Farallon Plate broke into two pieces, which also created the Nazca Plate. The Cocos Plate also broke into two pieces, creating the small Rivera Plate. The Cocos Plate is bounded by several different plates. To the northeast it is bounded by the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate. To the west it is bounded by the Pacific Plate and to the south by the Nazca Plate.

The only land above water on the Cocos Plate is Cocos Island, which is administered by Costa Rica and lies approximately 550 km (342 mi; 297 nmi) southwest of the Costa Rican mainland.

Geology
The Cocos Plate was created by sea floor spreading along the East Pacific Rise and the Cocos Ridge, specifically in a complicated area geologists call the Cocos-Nazca spreading system. From the rise the plate is pushed eastward and pushed or dragged (perhaps both) under the less dense Caribbean Plate, in the process called subduction. The subducted leading edge heats up and adds its water to the mantle above it. In the mantle layer called the asthenosphere, mantle rock melts to make magma, trapping superheated water under great pressure. As a result, to the northeast of the subducting edge lies the continuous arc of volcanos —also known as the Central America Volcanic Arc— stretching from Costa Rica to Guatemala, and a belt of earthquakes that extends farther north, into Mexico.

The northern boundary of the Cocos Plate is the Middle America Trench. The eastern boundary is a transform fault, the Panama Fracture Zone. The southern boundary is a mid-oceanic ridge, the Galapagos Rise. The western boundary is another mid-ocean ridge, the East Pacific Rise.

A hotspot under the Galapagos Islands lies along the Galapagos Rise. (see Galapagos hotspot and Galapagos Microplate)

The Rivera Plate north of the Cocos Plate is thought to have separated from the Cocos Plate 5–10 million years ago. The boundary between the two plates appears to lack a definite transform fault, yet they are regarded as distinct. After its separation from the Cocos Plate, the Rivera Plate started acting as an independent microplate.

The devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the 2017 Chiapas earthquake were results of the subduction of the Cocos Plate beneath the North American Plate. The devastating El Salvador earthquakes in January 2001 and February 2001 were generated by the subduction of this plate beneath the Caribbean Plate.

title: Cocos Plate


text:
Hippolyte Bayard

Hippolyte Bayard (20 January 1801 – 14 May 1887) was a French photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. He claimed to have invented photography earlier than Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England, the men traditionally credited with its invention.

Bayard experimented with the new medium taking photos of plant specimens, statuary (including posing with them for self-portraits), street scenes, urban landscapes, architectural photos, and portraits. He photographed prominent figures and an ordinary worker. He also advocated combination printing and was one of the founders of a photo society.

Early life and career
While working as a civil servant, Bayard experimented with photography. He developed his own method of producing photos called the direct positive process. It involved exposing silver chloride paper to light, which turned the paper completely black. It was then soaked in potassium iodide before being exposed in a camera. After the exposure, it was washed in a bath of sodium hyposulfate and dried.

The resulting image was a unique photograph that could not be reproduced. Because of the paper's poor light sensitivity, an exposure of about twelve minutes was required, so that still-lives were favoured and human sitters were told to close their eyes to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced by blinking and moving the eyes during a long exposure.

In the summer of 1851, along with photographers Édouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, and O. Mestral, Bayard travelled throughout France to photograph architectural monuments at the request of the Commission des Monuments Historiques.

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man
Bayard was persuaded to postpone announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences by François Arago, a friend of Louis Daguerre, who invented the rival daguerreotype process. Arago's conflict of interest cost Bayard his recognition as one of the principal inventors of photography. He eventually gave details of the process to the French Academy of Sciences on 24 February 1840, in return for money to buy better equipment.

In reaction to the injustice that he felt he had been subjected to, Bayard made, possibly in October 1840, the first staged photograph, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, in which he pretends to have committed suicide, sitting and leaning to the right. Bayard wrote on the back of his most notable photograph:

Late career
Despite his initial hardships in photography, Bayard continued to be a productive member of the photographic society. He was a founding member of the French Society of Photography. Bayard was also one of the first photographers to be commissioned to document and preserve architecture and historical sites in France for the Missions Héliographiques in 1851 by the Historic Monument Commission. He used a paper photographic process similar to the one he developed to take pictures for the Commission. Additionally, he suggested combining two negatives to properly expose the sky and then the landscape or building, an idea known as combination printing which began being used in the 1850s.

Famous photographs

 * Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840.
 * Specimens, 1842.
 * Construction Worker, Paris, 1845–1847.
 * Self Portrait in the Garden, 1847.

title: Hippolyte Bayard


text:
American Family Association

The American Family Association (AFA) is a conservative and Christian fundamentalist 501(c)(3) organization based in the United States. It opposes LGBT rights and expression, pornography, and abortion. It also takes a position on a variety of other public policy goals. It was founded in 1977 by Donald Wildmon as the National Federation for Decency and is headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Part of the religious right, the AFA defined itself as "a Christian organization promoting the biblical ethic of decency in American society with primary emphasis on television and other media," later switching their stated emphasis to "moral issues that impact the family." It engages in activism efforts, including boycotts, buycotts, action alert emails, publications on the AFA's web sites or in the AFA Journal, broadcasts on American Family Radio, and lobbying. The organization is accredited by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) and posted a 2011 budget of over $16 million. AFA owns 200 American Family Radio stations in 33 states, seven affiliate stations in seven states, and one affiliate TV station (KAZQ) in New Mexico.

AFA has been listed as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) since November 2010 for the "propagation of known falsehoods" and the use of "demonizing propaganda" against LGBT people.

Operations
Reverend Donald Wildmon served as chairman of AFA until he announced his retirement on March 3, 2010. His son, Tim, is president of AFA. AFA is governed by an independent board of directors. AFA Journal is a monthly publication with a circulation of 180,000 containing news, features, columns, and interviews. In addition to the publication, AFA Journal articles are made available online. The journal reviews the content of prime-time television shows, categorizing them based on profanity, sex, violence, homosexuality, substance abuse, "anti-Christian" content, or "political correctness". The categorization is accompanied by short descriptions of the content of the episode under review. The review also lists the advertisers of each show and invites readers to contact the advertisers or television networks to express concern over program content.

American Family Radio (AFR) is a network of approximately 200 AFA-owned radio stations broadcasting Christian-oriented programming.

OneNewsNow.com (formerly AgapePress), the AFA news division, provides online audio newscasts and a daily digest of news articles, Associated Press stories, and opinion columns.

Center for Law and Policy, the legal and political arm of the AFA, was shut down in 2007. It specialized in First Amendment cases. The Center for Law and Policy lobbied legislative bodies, drafted legislation, and filed religious-discrimination lawsuits on behalf of individuals. Chief among its efforts were to promote the recognition of Christmas in seasonal print advertisements; the criminalization of homosexuality, and censorship of television programming;  and to oppose same-sex marriage, as well as equal-rights and hate-crime legislation that would include sexual orientation and gender identity among the protected categories. and advocating

Campaigns and issues
The AFA has a history of activism by organizing its members in boycotts and letter-writing campaigns aimed at promoting socially conservative values in the United States. The AFA has promoted boycotts of television shows, movies, and businesses that the group considers to have promoted indecency, obscenity, or homosexuality. In addition to promoting activism via mail to AFA members, 3.4 million subscribers receive AFA "Action Alerts" via email.

Boycotts
The AFA has boycotted companies for various reasons, most often relating to Christmas controversies, pornography, support of pro-choice activism, support of violent or sexual content in entertainment, and support of LGBT rights,  including same-sex partner employee benefits. These organizations include: 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl's Jr., Chobani, Clorox, Comcast, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Hardee's, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Movie Gallery, Microsoft, MTV, Paramount Pictures, Time Warner, Universal Studios, DreamWorks, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Procter & Gamble, Target, Walt Disney Company, and PepsiCo.

In 1986, 7-Eleven stopped selling Playboy and Penthouse magazines after a two-year boycott by the AFA. In 1989 the AFA boycotted WaldenBooks in an attempt to persuade the company to stop selling those same magazines. WaldenBooks responded with an advertisement campaign against censorship, asserting First Amendment rights. WaldenBooks, American Booksellers Association, the Council for Periodical Distributors Association, the International Periodical Distributors Association, and Duval Bibb Services launched a lawsuit against the AFA in October 1989, under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and the Florida State RICO Acts, which protect an organization's right to conduct business without harassment or threats. The case was settled by the parties without a court ruling.

AFA boycotted PepsiCo in 1989 for supporting Madonna, whose video for "Like a Prayer" Wildmon felt was sacrilegious.

During the summer of 1993 the AFA purchased full-page ads in The New York Times, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times denouncing the sexual and violent content of the upcoming ABC police drama NYPD Blue. It also urged ABC affiliates not to broadcast the program and citizens to boycott sponsors of Blue. About a quarter of the 225 existing ABC stations followed suit, but such affiliates were mostly in rural areas of the US. The AFA campaign increased hype for the show in larger American media markets, and Blue became one of the most popular shows of the 1993–1994 television season. In 1996, the AFA launched a boycott against Walt Disney Company when the company began giving benefits to same-sex employees in domestic partnerships. The AFA has claimed that Michael Eisner, the CEO of The Disney Company, "was involved in a media group that actively promoted the homosexual agenda" and was pushing the "gay agenda". The AFA ended the boycott in the spring of 2005 after Eisner left the company. Tim Wildmon stated "We feel after nine years of boycotting Disney we have made our point."

In January 2002, the restaurant chain Taco Bell held a month-long promotion in which four Cardcaptor Sakura toys were available in their kids' meals, expecting to distribute up to 7 million of the toys during the month. The AFA complained about the promotion, saying the Clow Cards being offered were similar to tarot cards and the series they were derived from was akin to Eastern mythology. However, the organization's complaints began on the day before the promotion's scheduled end date.

In 2003, the AFA, with the American Decency Association, Focus on the Family, and Citizens for Community Values, lobbied and boycotted Abercrombie & Fitch, calling on "A&F to stop using blatant pornography in its quarterly catalog". In December 2003, the company "recalled the holiday catalog from all its stores, saying it needed the space on the counter for a new perfume" and stated it would stop printing catalogs and start a new campaign.

In 2005 the AFA boycotted the company American Girl, seller of dolls and accessories, over their support of the charity Girls, Inc., which the AFA called "a pro-abortion, pro-lesbian advocacy group".

In Spring 2005 the AFA launched a boycott of Ford for advertising in gay magazines, donating to gay rights organizations, and sponsoring gay pride celebrations. After meeting with representatives of the group, Ford announced it was curtailing ads in a number of major gay-themed publications, due not to cultural but to "cost-cutting" factors. That statement was contradicted by the AFA, which claimed it had a "good faith agreement" that Ford would cease such ads. Soon afterwards, as a result of a strong outcry from the gay community, Ford backtracked and announced it would continue ads in gay publications, in response to which the AFA denounced Ford for "violating" the agreement, and renewed threats of a boycott. The boycott ended in March 2008.

On Independence Day 2008, the AFA announced a boycott of McDonald's, which had a director on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. In October 2008, AFA announced the end of its boycott following the declaration to be "neutral on same-sex marriage or any 'homosexual agenda' as defined by the American Family Association" by McDonald's in a memo to franchisees.

In December 2008, the AFA issued an "Action Alert" which called for members to protest the Campbell Soup Company, which had purchased two two-page advertisements in the December 2008 and January 2009 issues of the LGBT magazine The Advocate. Donald Wildmon said that the ads, which showed a lesbian couple with their son, "sent a message that homosexual parents constitute a family and are worthy of support".

In November 2009, the AFA called for a boycott against clothing retailer The Gap, Inc., claiming the retailer's holiday television advertising campaign failed to mention Christmas. "Christmas has historically been very good for commerce. But now Gap wants the commerce but no Christmas" wrote an AFA spokesperson. The Gap soon released an advertisement in response to the boycott, specifically referring to Christmas, albeit with a number of other holidays that take place at the same time of year and added the word "Christmas" to in-store decor.

In 2012 the AFA led a boycott against Archie Comics when they published a comic book featuring a same-sex marriage.

In July 2012, they considered boycotting Google due to Google's "Legalize Love" campaign which supports LGBT rights.

In April 2016, AFA launched a boycott against Target Corporation due to Target announcing they "welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity."

Published media
On April 16, 2007, following the Virginia Tech Massacre, the AFA released a video titled The Day They Kicked God out of the Schools, in which God tells a student that students were killed in schools because God is not allowed in schools anymore. The video claims that the shootings at Virginia Tech and Columbine, among others, are in part the result of: decreased discipline in schools; no prayer in schools; sex out of wedlock; rampant violence in TV, movies, and music; or abortions.

Speechless: Silencing the Christians is a 2008 documentary series hosted by Janet Parshall. The series explains the AFA's position against the drive towards political correctness, and how various factors, such as hate crime laws and other discriminatory actions, are threatening the Christians' existence. In 2009, a one-hour special version of the program was produced and aired on commercial television stations, where AFA had purchased the air time.

Sexual morality
The AFA has repeatedly lobbied Congress to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Speaking in defense of Mike Huckabee's statements that people with AIDS should be quarantined, the head of the AFA of Pennsylvania said Huckabee's recommendation was appropriate.

View on media
Wildmon has been accused of saying that he believes Hollywood and the theater world are heavily influenced by Jewish people, and that television network executives and advertisers have a genuine hostility towards Christians.

Opposition to other religions
On November 28, 2006, following the election of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, the AFA released an "Action Alert." The Action Alert, entitled "A first for America...The Koran replaces the Bible at swearing-in oath: What book will America base its values on, the Bible or the Koran?", requested subscribers to write to their Congressional representatives and urge them to create a "law making the Bible the book used in the swearing-in ceremony of representatives and senators."

On July 13, 2007, a Hindu prayer was conducted in the U.S. Senate. Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple, read the prayer at the invitation of Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who defended his invitation based on the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. AFA sent out an "Action Alert" to its members to email, write letters, or call their senators to oppose the Hindu prayer, stating it is "seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god." The "alert" stated that "since Hindus worship multiple gods, the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto One Nation Under God." The convocation by Zed was disrupted by three protesters from a different Fundamentalist Christian activist group, Operation Save America, in the gallery; they reportedly shouted "this is an abomination", and called themselves "Christians and patriots".

On August 10, 2010, Bryan Fischer, AFA's director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, posted on his blog on the AFA website that "Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government." Fischer continued: "Because of this subversive ideology, Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment."

Homosexuality
The AFA expresses public concern over what it refers to as the "homosexual agenda". They state that the Bible "declares that homosexuality is unnatural and sinful" and that they have "sponsored several events reaching out to homosexuals and letting them know there is love and healing at the Cross of Christ."

The AFA actively lobbies against the social acceptance of homosexual behavior ("We oppose the homosexual movement's efforts to convince our society that their behavior is normal"). The AFA also actively promotes the idea that homosexuality is a choice and that sexual orientation can be changed through ex-gay ministries.

In 1996, responding to a complaint from an AFA member who was participating in an AFA campaign targeting gay journalists, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram transferred a gay editor out of a job that occasionally required him to work with schoolchildren. The AFA targeted the editor due to cartoon strips he created, which were published in gay magazines. The paper apparently acted on the AFA's unsubstantiated statement that the editor was "preoccupied with the subjects of pedophilia and incest."

In 2000, vice president Tim Wildmon spoke out against gay-straight alliance clubs in schools, stating, "We view these kinds of clubs as an advancement of the homosexual cause." In 2003, the AFA filed an amicus curiae brief in Lawrence vs Texas, arguing against repeal of Texas sodomy laws. In 2004, the AFA raised concerns about the movie Shark Tale because the group believed the movie was designed to promote the acceptance of gay rights by children. On the October 11, 2005, AFA broadcast, Tim Wildmon agreed with a caller that cable networks like Animal Planet and HGTV featured "evidence of homosexuality and lesbian people" and added that "you have to watch out for children's programs today as well because they'll slip it in there as well." In 2007, the AFA spoke out against IKEA for featuring gay families in their television ads. In June 2008, the AFA protested a Heinz television advertisement, shown in the United Kingdom, which showed two men kissing, which Heinz then withdrew. On January 28, 2015, the AFA wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center that the AFA now rejected the policy that homosexual conduct should be illegal.

The AFA's founder, Don Wildmon, was "instrumental" in initially setting up the Arlington Group, a networking vehicle for social conservatives focusing on gay marriage.

One Million Moms/One Million Dads project
AFA created "One Million Moms" and "One Million Dads", two websites with the stated goal of mobilizing parents to "stop the exploitation of children" by the media. It uses these websites to organize boycotts and urge activists to send emails to mainstream companies employing advertising, selling products, or advertising on television shows they find offensive. In 2012, the group started and then backed off from a failed campaign against the hiring of talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson for department store chain J. C. Penney. They opposed her employment on the grounds that DeGeneres is "an open homosexual". At a taping of her show, DeGeneres informed her audience of the fizzled effort: "They wanted to get me fired and I am proud and happy to say J. C. Penney stuck by their decision to make me their spokesperson."

The One Million Moms campaign opposed Marvel and DC Comics issues which featured gay characters, describing the storylines as a "brainwashing and desensitizing experience" for children, written to "influence them in thinking that a gay lifestyle choice is normal and desirable."

The organization criticized GEICO for a 2013 commercial showing Maxwell the Pig in a car with a human girl, saying it suggests bestiality.

In 2015, the organization criticized a Campbell's ad that depicted two dads taking care of their child by feeding him Campbell's Star Wars soup. The organization claimed the ad "normaliz[ed] sin."

In 2019, the organization complained about ads airing on The Hallmark Channel for wedding planning site Zola, which featured two brides kissing at the altar. In response, Hallmark's parent company Crown Media pulled the ads. After protests from the public, including celebrities Ellen DeGeneres and William Shatner, Crown Media reversed their decision and stated they would reinstate the ads. In 2020, Burger King was their target for using the word "damn" in a television commercial.

The actual number involved in One Million Moms has been questioned. After a complaint about Burger King ads using the word "damn", a CNN article stated that "Despite its name, it is not clear that the group has a million members. According to its website, more than 8,000 people have taken action on the Burger King issue, and its Facebook group has just shy of 100,000 likes."

In God We Trust
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, many public schools across the United States posted "In God We Trust" framed posters in their "libraries, cafeterias and classrooms". The American Family Association supplied several 11-by-14-inch posters to school systems and vowed to defend any legal challenges to the displaying of the posters.

Criticism and controversy
In 2015, the organisation officially repudiated views of former director of issues analysis Bryan Fischer, including the claim that black people "rut like rabbits"; that the First Amendment applies only to Christians; that Hispanics are "socialists by nature" and come to the U.S. to "plunder" the country; that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, and that "Homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews."

Religious exercise
Sandy Rios, the Family Association's director of governmental affairs, has criticised "powerful Jewish forces behind the ACLU" and stated that secular Jews often "turn out to be the worst enemies of the country" while the AFA's president Tim Wildmon stated "Most of the Jews in this country, unfortunately, are far-left."

Bryan Fischer, former director of issues analysis, has described Muslims as "Parasites Who Must Convert or Die" and stated that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects only the religious practice of Christianity, writing in a blog post "The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects... So the purpose of the First Amendment was most decidedly NOT to "approve, support, (or) accept" any "religion" other than Christianity." Fischer has suggested Jews and Muslims are not included in religious freedom protections in the US, saying: "I have contended for years that the First Amendment, as given by the Founders, provides religious liberty protections for Christianity only." He later wrote: "We are a Christian nation and not a Jewish or Muslim one."

In a 2015 press release denouncing Fischer's views, the AFA stated "AFA rejects the idea expressed by Bryan Fischer that 'Free exercise of religion' only applies to Christians. Consequently, AFA rejects Bryan's assertions that Muslims should not be granted permits to build mosques in the United States."

Stance on homosexuality
The AFA has been criticized by a number of organizations for their stance against gay rights.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, through its Teaching Tolerance program, has encouraged schools across the U.S. to hold a "Mix It Up at Lunch" day in order to encourage students to break up cliques and prevent bullying. In late 2012, the AFA called the project – begun 11 years earlier and held in more than 2,500 schools – "a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools", urging parents to keep their children home from school on October 30, 2012, and to call the schools to protest the event. "I was surprised that they completely lied about what Mix It Up Day is", Maureen Costello, the director of the center's Teaching Tolerance project, which organizes the program, told The New York Times. "It was a cynical, fear-mongering tactic." In October, Bryan Fischer was taken off air during a CNN interview with Carol Costello for repeating his belief that "Hitler recruited homosexuals around him to make up his Stormtroopers."

In 2012, as jury selection was to begin in a trial on charges of kidnapping of a lesbian couple's daughter, Fischer wrote on Twitter in support of kidnapping of children from same-sex households and smuggling them to what he calls "normal" homes. Fischer also reiterated his views on his radio show, and on video. In January 2013, he compared consensual sex between people of the same gender to pedophilia, incest and bestiality. In January 2013, Fischer compared the Boy Scouts of America's change in views on gay scouts and scoutmasters to Jerry Sandusky, saying allowing gay scoutmasters was inviting pedophiles into the tents of children. In March 2013, Fischer compared homosexuality to bank robbery when Senator Portman announced his views on same-sex marriage had changed due to having a gay son. Fischer also stated that homosexuality should be banned like trans fats for being "a hazard to human health"  and likened homosexuals to thieves, murderers and child molesters.

On January 28, 2015, Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, demoted Fischer from being a spokesperson. Fischer went on to state that he will still be hosting the AFA's American Family Talk radio. In order to avoid being categorised as a hate group by Israel, the AFA issued a press release denouncing some of Fischer's views, rejecting his claim that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, and stating: "AFA rejects the statement by Bryan Fischer that, 'Homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.' AFA rejects the policy advocated by Bryan Fischer that homosexual conduct should be illegal. AFA rejects the notion advocated by Bryan Fischer that, 'We need an underground railroad to protect innocent children from same-sex households.'"

Homosexuality and Nazism
Former AFA California leader Scott Lively is a co-author of The Pink Swastika (1995), in which he claims that all of the major leaders in the Nazi regime were homosexual, a claim which is widely rejected by most historians. He has since co-founded Watchmen on the Walls. In 2007, Bryan Fischer, former Director of Issues Analysis for the AFA, hosted Scott Lively at an event promoting the message that "homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism".

In May 2010, Fischer wrote a blog post on the AFA website and RenewAmerica detailing purported allegations that Adolf Hitler was a homosexual, that "the Nazi Party began in a gay bar in Munich,"  and concluded by claiming that the Holocaust (which included gay victims of Nazi persecution) was caused by homosexuals in the Nazi German military: "Nazi Germany became the horror that it was because it rejected both Christianity and its clear teaching about human sexuality." On American Family Talk radio, Fischer repeated the claim that Hitler was a homosexual, and stated that Hitler recruited homosexuals to be stormtroopers, because "homosexual soldiers basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict."

In 2013, Fischer claimed that "Homofascists" will treat Christians like Jews in the Holocaust and later that year he repeated on American Family Talk that Hitler started the Nazi party "in a gay bar in Munich" and that "[Adolf Hitler] couldn't get straights to be vicious enough in being his enforcers."

Criticism of homosexuality
In 1998, the Internet filtering software CyberPatrol blocked the AFA's web site, classifying it under the category "intolerance", defined as "pictures or text advocating prejudice or discrimination against any race, color, national origin, religion, disability or handicap, gender or sexual orientation..." AFA spokesman Steve Ensley told reporters, "Basically we're being blocked for free speech." CyberPatrol cited quotes from the AFA for meeting its intolerance criteria, which included: "Indifference or neutrality toward the homosexual rights movement will result in society's destruction by allowing civil order to be redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children, and grandchildren into an age of godlessness"; "A national 'Coming Out of Homosexuality' provides us a means whereby to dispel the lies of the homosexual rights crowd who say they are born that way and cannot change"; and "We want to outlaw public homosexuality...We believe homosexuality is immoral and leads ultimately to personal and social decay."

On October 19, 1998, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, led by Leslie Katz, wrote a letter to the AFA in response to an advertisement placed in the San Francisco Chronicle by the AFA regarding homosexuality and Christianity. The letter stated:

"Supervisor Leslie Katz denounces your rhetoric against gays, lesbians and transgendered people. What happened to Matthew Shepard is in part due to the message being espoused by your groups that gays and lesbians are not worthy of the most basic equal rights and treatment. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is a direct correlation between these acts of discrimination, such as when gays and lesbians are called sinful and when major religious organizations say they can change if they tried, and the horrible crimes committed against gays and lesbians."

During the same time, the City and County of San Francisco passed two resolutions. Resolution No. 234-99 "calls for the Religious Right to take accountability for the impact of their long-standing rhetoric denouncing gays and lesbians, which leads to a climate of mistrust and discrimination that can open the door to horrible crimes such as those committed against Mr. Gaither" and Resolution No. 873-98 was specifically directed at "anti-gay" television advertisements. AFA unsuccessfully challenged these actions as violating the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment in American Family Association v. City and County of San Francisco.

In 1998, multiple organizations voiced criticism of a series of AFA-sponsored full-page newspaper advertisements that promoted religious ministries involved in the ex-gay movement. In response to the advertisements, the Religious Leadership Roundtable said the ads employed "language of violence and hatred to denounce other people". IntegrityUSA criticized the ads, calling them "evil" disregarding Christian teachings about the "dignity of every human being". DignityUSA also criticized the advertisements, which they said were "misleading and destructive".

In July 2000, the AFA sent out emails and letters calling for openly gay Arizona Republican United States House of Representatives member Jim Kolbe to be barred from speaking at the Republican National Convention. The AFA also said that Kolbe should be arrested when he returned to his home state, as because Kolbe is gay, he was violating an Arizona law that banned sodomy. Equality Mississippi, a statewide LGBT civil rights organization which has voiced opposition and criticism towards the AFA's activism regarding homosexuality, felt that AFA's action was constituting and encouraging violence towards the gay community.

In 2005, Equality Mississippi publicly spoke out against the AFA for the use of copyrighted images on the AFA web site in its boycott against Kraft Foods for being a sponsor of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago. The photographs, which were used without permission, were owned by and retrieved from ChrisGeary.com. Equality Mississippi encouraged ChrisGeary.com to file suit against the AFA and offered to support the suit. , the images were still on AFA's web site.

In June 2008, AFA's news website, OneNewsNow – which had begun replacing all instances of "gay" with "homosexual" in re-posted Associated Press articles – changed an AP profile of Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay, rendering his name as "Tyson Homosexual". OneNewsNow similarly altered the name of basketball player Rudy Gay, naming him "Rudy Homosexual". The gay rights website GoodAsYou.org, which "has long chronicled the AFA's practice of changing AP copy to suit its conservative agenda", spotted the errors. Tyson Gay was upset with the mistake.

In 2019, Fischer wrote on AFA's website that homosexuality is inescapably linked to pedophilia.

Intellectual freedom
Individuals in the media industry have criticized Donald Wildmon, the founder of AFA. Gene Mater, senior vice president of CBS Television, has stated, "We look upon Wildmon's efforts as the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced" and Brandon Tartikoff, then NBC Entertainment President, stated that Wildmon's boycott campaign was "the first step toward a police state."

Marilyn Manson
Paul Cambria, lawyer for rock band Marilyn Manson, sent a cease and desist letter to AFA on April 25, 1997, in response to allegations published in the AFA Journal that Manson encouraged audience members to engage in sexual and violent acts in its concerts. AFA Journal relied on testimony by two anonymous claimed teenage concertgoers. The allegations were independently proven to be false. Wildmon responded that his organization as a whole was not responsible, but rather the AFA's Gulf Coast chapter in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Hate group listing
The Southern Poverty Law Center, in a 2005 report, stated that the AFA, along with other groups, engaged in hate speech to "help drive the religious right's anti-gay crusade." Mark Potok of the SPLC determined that the turning point was 2003's Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court struck down Texas's anti-sodomy laws. After that, the Christian right spent millions on advertisements, and on pastor briefings organized by activists such as "born-again" Christian David Lane. Lane helped AFA put constitutional opposite-sex marriage amendments on the ballots of 13 states.

In November 2010, the SPLC changed their listing of AFA from a group that used hate speech to the more serious one of being designated a hate group. *
 * Potok said that the AFA's "propagation of known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda" was the basis for the change.
 * Potok said that the AFA's "propagation of known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda" was the basis for the change.
 * Potok said that the AFA's "propagation of known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda" was the basis for the change.
 * Potok said that the AFA's "propagation of known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda" was the basis for the change.
 * Potok said that the AFA's "propagation of known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda" was the basis for the change.

The AFA was greatly displeased with the designation as a hate group, calling the list "slanderous". In response to the SPLC's announcement, some members of the Christian right "called on Congress to cut off their funding." J. Matt Barber of The Washington Times said that the SPLC was "marginalizing" themselves by giving the AFA the same hate group designation shared by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. Tony Perkins, the president of Family Research Council (FRC) – an organization also named a hate group – asked the SPLC to strike the new designation, but they held their position. Ken Williams commented that in reaction, the FRC and the AFA joined with other "pro-family" organizations targeted by the SPLC to establish a new website, an online petition called "Start Debating/Stop Hating" to counter the SPLC, and they took out full page ads in two Washington D.C. newspapers, defending their work "to protect and promote natural marriage and the family." The advertisement stated the "undersigned stand in solidarity" with the organizations designated as hate groups, and that they "support the vigorous but responsible exercise of the First Amendment rights of free speech and religious liberty that are the birthright of all Americans." House Speaker–Designate John Boehner and the governors of Louisiana, Minnesota and Virginia were among those signing the statement. The SPLC addressed the new website statement; Potok was quoted by David Weigel of Slate magazine as saying, "the SPLC's listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods – claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities – and repeated, groundless name-calling." The American Independent News Network (AINN) noted that the AFA had recently denounced Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan as a lesbian unfit for office – AINN stated that "she's not" a lesbian – and that Fischer said Hitler's savage and brutal methods were only possible because he and most of his stormtroopers were gay. Jillian Rayfield of Talking Points Memo noted the irony in the website calling the SPLC a "radical Left" group "spreading hateful rhetoric" yet elsewhere declaring that the debates of the Christian right "can and must remain civil – but they must never be suppressed through personal assaults that aim only to malign an opponent's character."

title: American Family Association


text:
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