The Center for Garden State Families in New Jersey discovered something wasn't right when the donations suddenly stopped without warning.
Greg Quinlan is founder and president of the center.
He tells AFN his team had changed its credit card processor to Pro-Life Payments because they got along, and their pro-life values matched.
"So I called them to find out what was going on, and he didn't know either. Nobody at Pro-Life Payments knew what was going on."
He made a couple of calls and found out the card processing business has layers. Long story short, PayCosmos, the Oxnard, California-based affiliated credit card division of Avidia Bank, had cut off the Center for Garden State Families.
B-o-t-s, bots, bots, bots
"They debanked us based on bots. B-O-T-S, bots, where they scan the Internet looking for things that could be considered quote, 'hate, harm' and a quote 'reputational risk to the bank.’”
"But they looked back so far. I'm someone who used to be with PFOX, Parents and Friends of X-Gays and Gays. They said I owned the organization that owned the website, which is utterly false. I served on their board. They accused me of hate and harm when it came to the LGBTQ stuff, and they failed to find out or even look that I'm x- gay. I'm 32 years out of the homosexual lifestyle come this Thanksgiving weekend. And they seemed to not know either that according to a judge in Washington DC, we are, X-gays are a protected class in the human rights laws of the District of Columbia. So, they essentially committed a hate crime against me, attacked our organization for doing nothing more than our mission, which is to stand for the natural family."
PayCosmos’ actions are unconstitutional, Quinlan said.
"This is viewpoint discrimination. This is discrimination based on this madness that we're going through on the LGBTQIA - XYZ plus plus plus plus plus … the absurdity of all of this."
Too little, too late
Quinlan said he was able to speak with Jay McShirley, the head of Paycosmos.
"He called me nearly three weeks later to tell me the reason ---he said he was obligated to let me know why they debanked us. I said 'you couldn't have done that before? You couldn’t have given us 14 days to find a new processor?'”
Quinlan said nonprofits, no matter where you are in the country or maybe the western world, you need to know who is really processing your funds because it appears they can debank you at will.
Mass Resistance reports Paycosmos came back later and offered to reopen Quinlan's account, but he had already arranged to move to another company.
