A nonprofit dedicated to chronicling the history of the LGBTQ movement in the Deep South said it was “appalling” that two Republican state lawmakers criticized the group’s presentation Thursday hosted by the Alabama Department of Archives and History as promoting the “liberal political LGBTQ agenda.”

“I don’t think they know what ‘politicize’ means,” said Maigen Sullivan, cofounder of the Birmingham-based Invisible Histories Project, who gave the ADAH-hosted lecture titled “Invisible No More: Alabama’s LGBTQ+ History” on Thursday in Montgomery.

1819 News, a website that was once owned by the Alabama Policy Institute, posted a preview of the event on Wednesday.

The preview was followed by a story quoting Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, and state Rep. Jamie Kiehl, R-Russellville.

“The fact that state money, buildings and resources are being used to promote a liberal political LGBTQ agenda flies in the face of our state’s values. If this is what they are doing with the taxpayer money that is sent to them, perhaps we should re-reevaluate [the ADAH’s] allocation in the next budget,” Statdthagen said, according to 1819 News.

Kiehl said the event was an example of the “woke liberal agenda … evading our culture.”

“I do not support spending Alabamians’ tax dollars for something the vast majority of the State does not support,” he said, according to 1819 News. “This also brings to light the need to expose state spending on other DEI programs that may exist. It’s sad that state resources are being used to politicize the left’s out-of-touch views.”

An ADAH spokeswoman could not immediately be reached to comment on the lawmakers’ response.

But Sullivan said the presentation, which touched on the first Pride march in Alabama, the struggles of student LGBTQ organizations at Auburn University and the University of Alabama and the first LGBTQ center in the state, was not political.

“I really just went over things that are quite black and white,” she said. “It’s just a record of history, and so I find it mind-boggling that anyone would interpret facts as a political agenda.”

Sullivan said she finds it “appalling as an individual taxpayer that our legislature is trying to deny the full and honest looking at our own histories, to eradicate history in that way it just seems counterintuitive to what we say we are as a country.”

Stadthagen’s and Kiehl’s remarks, Sullivan said, sound “like rhetoric they’re making up to politicize their own agenda.

“I believe this is the dying breath of bigotry because they wanted a culture war and they’re losing,” she said.

The event was also not paid for with state money, Sullivan said.

“This wasn’t tax-funded, this came from a grant program from the Alabama Humanities Alliance,” she said, referring to ADAH’s Food for Thought series of lectures and presentations.

Sullivan pointed out that in the early 1990s, when there were attempts to shutter the Auburn Gay Lesbian Alliance, the university’s president at the time said the constitutional right to assemble was granted to all organizations and not just those that the majority agreed with.

“As Americans, we have rights to assemble, we have rights to free speech,” she said. “And to come attack this [event] …is a violation of free speech and people’s ability to gather and learn about things.”

“Quite frankly, it’s an eradication of open knowledge and conversation, and those things lead to fascism,” she continued.

She said the organization appreciated ADAH for being open to their conversation.

“It’s important right now for these institutions to be defenders of honest and accurate truth telling,” Sullivan said.