WebOps platform Pantheon defends hosting “hate groups” as developers quit

Enlarge (credit: Erika Goldring / Contributor | Getty Images North America)

Over the past week, backlash erupted on LinkedIn in a thread where passionate open source developers began criticizing Pantheon. The developers and other Pantheon supporters commenting had just discovered that the website operations platform—which hosts more than 700,000 websites—is currently hosting websites for hugely influential anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigration organizations that have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The controversy sparked after a digital strategist, Greg Dunlap, posted a link to SPLC’s page designating a Christian conservative legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), as a hate group for its views on the LGBTQ community and efforts to influence laws restricting LGBTQ rights. On the page, SPLC described ADF as supporting “recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the US and criminalization abroad,” defending “state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad,” and claiming that a “homosexual agenda” will “destroy Christianity and society.”

In his LinkedIn post, Dunlap tagged Pantheon co-founders Josh Koenig and Zack Rosen, and asked them why Pantheon is hosting a website for the alleged hate group. ADF also has ties to high-ranking Republicans and has influenced Supreme Court opinions (including the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade).