On Sept. 17, while the United Nations (U.N.) was hosting its annual General Assembly for diplomats and leaders from all over the world, several key figures filled a room across the street at the Millennium Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. Attendees included Trump administration officials, leaders of Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate groups, far-right politicians from Latin America and reporters from far-right media.

These people were meeting for the Global Forum for Life, Family and Freedoms, a two-day summit of right-wing leaders with an ambitious goal to create a new “pro-life and pro-family” Core Group at the U.N.

Since 2008, the U.N. has had an LGBTI Core Group with 42 member states whose mission is to advocate for LGBTQ rights on a global stage. But the organizers of this new group hope to create an opposing organization to push for policies that undermine reproductive and LGBTQ rights around the globe.

Aarón Lara, the Mexico-based conservative activist who came up with the idea for the group, said in an August article that the existing LGBTI Core Group has only been successful because there has not been organized conservative opposition, which a new core group would provide.

“[The LGBTI Core Group] have successfully established victimhood narratives and incorporated observances with global impact. … I always use this example: if it were a soccer match and one team failed to show up, the winner by default would be the team that was present,” Lara said.

Lara and other supporters of the group agreed at the forum to draw up plans for its creation in the coming months. They may be encouraged to move quickly because the group’s leaders have said they want to use the U.S.’ global influence and capitalize off of the current anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion American government to do it. The U.S. recently left the LGBTI Core Group, an early move by Trump in his second term.

Gillian Kane, senior technical manager for policy and advocacy at Ipas, a non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on advocating for reproductive rights, says that the threat is very real.

“I think it is highly likely this will happen,” she told Uncloseted Media in an email. “The desire, the constituency, and the vision are all in place; I imagine at this point it’s simply a matter of going through the UN bureaucracy to make it official.”

What Is a Core Group?

The LGBTI Core Group describes itself as “an informal cross regional group of United Nations Member States.” While it is not an official U.N. body, its work includes ensuring that LGBTQ people are considered and protected across all of the U.N.’s activities, from humanitarian aid to human rights resolutions.

For example, one of the first U.N. resolutions to reference LGBTQ people was one protecting civilians against extrajudicial executions. When some members tried to remove LGBTQ people from those protections, advocates and allies fought to keep them in place. Maria Sjödin, executive director of Outright International, an NGO that focuses on supporting LGBTQ rights worldwide, told Uncloseted Media that work like this could be in jeopardy should the new core group come to fruition.

“We’re talking about the protection of some very basic human rights, and that the opposition to that is trying to organize to make it even more difficult to pass such a thing is really quite horrible,” she says.

Core groups are not official U.N. bodies, so there is no strictly required procedure for their creation. While there have been other core groups established at the U.N., the LGBTI group is unique in that it is designed for continuous operation on multiple issues rather than as a response to a specific conflict or crisis. The “pro-life, pro-family” core group would change that, threatening to shift the balance of power at the U.N.

Ipas shared a briefing paper from August with Uncloseted Media explaining that this core group would allow anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion governments to collaborate on “coordinated voting” to “dilute, block, or impose conditions on language regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The briefing also predicts that the core group would accelerate existing efforts to portray anti-LGBTQ politics as “sovereign resistance” against “globalism” in the public eye.

“This discourse … asserts national sovereignty over agreed upon international human rights, reframing sexual and reproductive rights as an external imposition rather than as already recognized human rights standards,” the briefing reads.

How Did We Get Here?

Lara is the founder and president of the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family (CIVF). Founded in Mexico City in 2017, CIVF describes itself as “a movement for moral, educational, social and legal reform for life and family” (translated from Spanish) and is best known for holding an annual congress for leaders, primarily from Latin America and Spain, to discuss the promotion of socially conservative policies.

In a 2021 article in an evangelical publication, Lara said that his group had applied to become a core group at the U.N.

“We have the conviction that it is our responsibility as believers to be a light in the midst of darkness, this is why [we] are making this big effort,” he said.

While that application never came to fruition, Lara remained interested in starting a U.N. core group, and announced in July that CIVF—who did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment—was launching a new plan to do so.

How Did the US Get Involved?

The following month, Lara shared more details of the plan with The Washington Stand, a news outlet owned by Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group closely affiliated with Focus on the Family. In the article, Lara says the goal is for the U.S. to sponsor the new group because of its powerful position on the world stage.

“The more geopolitical weight a country has, the easier it is, obviously, to form a Core Group,” he said.

Sjödin is concerned about U.S. involvement in a group like this. “[It] already has an outsized influence on the world, so the U.S. potentially taking on a leadership role in a coalition like this also risks the effects being outsized and makes this an initiative that is going to be more difficult to challenge,” she says.

To that end, CIVF enlisted Valerie Huber, an influential American ally based in Washington, D.C., in their fight. Huber, who co-led the Sept. 17 forum alongside Lara, is an American right-wing activist who held multiple leadership roles at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Trump’s first term. She has consistently promoted the exclusion of LGBTQ people in her work—the organization she led before getting her HHS appointment released a guidelinethat said “it would be inappropriate and unethical to assert or affirm” trans kids’ genders.

“Valerie Huber is internationally recognized in the anti-rights space,” Wendy Via, co-founder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Uncloseted Media. “She is bringing some credibility [and] influence to the idea of creating a separate core group, so she’s gonna be able to get people to join with her.”

During her tenure at HHS, Huber helped craft the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family (GCD), an agreement between 46 countries, including the U.S. under both Trump administrations, affirming a commitment to hardline opposition to abortion and promoting the heteronormative nuclear family “as foundational to society.”

Critics have noted that many of the agreement’s signatories are led by notoriously authoritarian governments with harsh restrictions on LGBTQ people. For example, Saudi Arabia’s maximum penalty for gay sex is death, and Russia classifiesthe “international LGBT movement” as an extremist group.

During his first week in office, former president Joe Biden withdrew the U.S. from the GCD just months after its launch, stating, “It is the policy of my Administration to support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States, as well as globally.”

But Huber, now out of her government job and leading the anti-abortion NGO Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), continued to champion the agreement. She’s traveled around the world meeting heads of state, including in Burundi and Argentina, that would quickly go on to join the GCD, while developing more concrete plans to carry out its goals. IWH did not respond to a request for comment.

Within the first week of Trump’s second term, the U.S. rejoined the agreement, and in June, it assumed the leading secretariat position among its signatories. Via says pushing the core group initiative while the U.S. is the secretariat is likely strategic timing.

“The U.N. is seen as the boogeyman for far-right and Christian Nationalist groups, because their definition of human rights is expansive and inclusive, which is not what these organizations want,” Via says. “But they’re gonna work within the system because it looks like they have an opportunity.”

Huber has advocated in favor of the core group since August and has said thatthe GCD is “the substantive basis” for the work ahead.

“What has not yet been built is the intentional, sustained coordination that turns a shared commitment into shared strategy at the international negotiating table,” she told The Washington Stand. “A nation that arrives at a negotiation alone is outmatched. A nation that arrives having strategized with 40 others is not.”

The Who’s Who of the Far Right Are on Board

The Sept. 17 forum was held in the hopes of creating a roadmap to execute the plans for the core group. The event was sponsored by Well Versed, an evangelical NGO whose mission is to bring “biblical principles of governance to government leaders and the people who elect them.”

The organization was founded by American pastor Jim Garlow, who played a leading role in the passage of California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage and has said that marriage equality is “about the desire of Satan to decimate the picture of God’s ultimate design for the Cosmos.” Garlow has a long history of involvement with the U.N.—he’s spoken at events and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. He also has a longstanding relationship with Trump, having been a member of the president’s faith advisory board during his first term and more recently invited to advise him through involvement in the White House Faith Office.