In a 2021 federal court deposition, Quentin Van Meter, president of the American College of Pediatricians, described the organization as a “secular scientific medical association” whose “opinions are not religious as such.”
ACPeds have also targeted donors, doctors and other physicians based solely on their political leanings, the documents show. The group maintains a list of more than 5,000 “conservative doctors,” for example, and records reveal they have been routinely targeted by emails designed to pique membership interest.
In 2021, ACPeds solicited a direct mail fundraising agency proposal on how to boost their fundraising efforts and where to spend the windfall. The agency recommended that ACPeds target “30,000 potential conservative donors,” whose gifts, it said, would in turn be spent to “target conservative professionals in the medical community.” In an explanation of the services it offers, the agency said it could obtain donor lists from “other like-minded organizations” and could facilitate “exchanges” and “rentals” from other mailing lists if ACPeds wished.
Information about medical professionals would not be sold or traded, the agency said, if the professionals are “existing members of ACPeds.” A contract between the group and the agency was finalized in August 2021, records show.
Despite their tributes to science, the views of ACPeds and its board are deeply rooted in morality based solely on evangelical religious beliefs. Notes taken at board meetings, which open and close with prayer, show that its directors see consensus science, people holding advanced degrees, and even the law itself as a threat to their agenda. The prayer is prescribed as “armor” against the group’s perceived adversaries, which include other Christians whose devotion they have judged inadequate.
Minutes from a 2017 board meeting stated: “Threats to the university include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the LGBTQ lobbying body, as well as medical , psychology, academia, the media, corporate America, and nominal Christians, churches, and organizations.”
The atmosphere of the ACPeds’ closed-door meetings, dozens of which are meticulously documented, is in stark contrast to the image it claims to project publicly. Conversations about exactly how religious the group can appear publicly have been going on from year to year. During the 2014 and 2015 meetings, members discussed the potential benefits of declaring their “recognition of God versus their position purely as a scientific organization.” One minute taker noted that no “definitive agreement” could be reached on “whether or not to do this.”
Records of its total membership show that only half of ACPeds’ 700 members may be practicing paediatricians, and their numbers are fueled by subscriptions from students, retirees and so-called “friends” of the organization. Records show the group has also explored expanding its ranks to include additional members with no medical background in response to their lackluster returns from expensive recruiting efforts.
Debates about whether to take advantage of their religiosity in a more public way have been attended by a Catholic lawyer, who in 2014 advised them to “express belief in a deity without being evangelical.” After the opening prayer at the meeting the following year, the group’s then-president, Michelle Cretella, followed the lawyer’s advice, reminding members that ACPeds is not a “religious organization,” but rather a “theistic” organization that recognizes the “natural laws” imparted by a Supreme Being.
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