Andy Biggs, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, has spent the campaign talking mostly about taxes and elections. A joint investigation by Phoenix New Times and Arizona LOOKOUT, published the day before the election, shows what has sat beside that pitch for 24 years: a close alliance with one of the country's most influential anti-LGBTQ activists.

Her name is Sharon Slater. Her group, Family Watch International, is based in Gilbert. And Biggs was there at the start.

Who Sharon Slater is

The Southern Poverty Law Center designates Family Watch International an anti-LGBTQ hate group. According to New Times, the SPLC cites the group's promotion of claims that being gay is a "mental disorder derived from childhood trauma" and that conversion therapy can "effectively eliminate same-sex attraction."

Much of Slater's work has played out in Africa. New Times reports that her group has been accused of helping Uganda pass its 2023 anti-gay law, which carries a possible death sentence for what it calls "aggravated homosexuality." In a second New Times piece, the paper documents her group helping organize a 2017 conference in Lagos, Nigeria, after which organizers called on lawmakers to reject a bill granting equal rights to women. Nigeria already imprisons people for up to 14 years for entering a same-sex marriage.

Slater's group says it doesn't help write other countries' laws. It did not respond to New Times' questions.

Biggs was there from the beginning

According to the investigation:

• In 2000, Slater incorporated Global Helping to Advance Women and Children as the Arizona chapter of her then-group, United Families International. Biggs was among its first directors. In 2008 that chapter became Family Watch International.
• Before he entered politics, Biggs worked as a policy adviser to United Families International, using his 1993 sweepstakes winnings to travel to international conferences on its behalf.
• When Biggs first ran for the Arizona House in 2002, Slater endorsed him on his campaign website: "I do not believe there is anyone in the state of Arizona more prepared to speak out and defend the family in public policy than Andy Biggs."
• In 2008, when United Families International campaigned for Arizona's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, Biggs' wife, Cindy Biggs, was listed as its secretary and treasurer in the state's voter pamphlet.
• In 2020, Biggs spoke at Family Watch International's policy forum in Phoenix. He posted about it himself: "Last week, I was honored to address the Family Watch International's Family Policy Forum."
• This cycle, Slater and her husband gave $3,000 to his campaign for governor.

What Biggs did with power

New Times lays out Biggs' own record alongside hers.

In the Arizona House, he backed bills that temporarily banned same-sex marriage, ended domestic partner benefits, and made it harder for same-sex couples to adopt. In 2010 he cosponsored a bill favoring married couples in adoptions, at a time same-sex couples couldn't legally marry in Arizona.

As state Senate president from 2013, he controlled which bills got a hearing. Steve Gallardo, a Democrat who served with him, told New Times that Biggs made clear pro-LGBTQ bills would not get hearings. "They were put there to die," Gallardo said.

In 2014, Biggs voted for a bill letting businesses refuse service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds. It went so far that Republican Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it.

In Congress, Biggs voted against the Respect for Marriage Act in July 2022 and again in December 2022. New Times reports he also voted against both versions of the Equality Act.

We've also reported on Biggs running on Prop. 318, the anti-trans ballot measure that would let athletes sue schools over bathrooms and locker rooms.

What he says he'll do as governor

On October 20, Biggs told ABC15 that before he's even sworn in he'll spend 60 days with the Legislature lining up "dozens and dozens, if not hundreds" of bills, and then sign the ones Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed.

New Times and LOOKOUT went through Hobbs' 541 vetoes and identified nearly 100 bills affecting marginalized communities. They include bills limiting transgender students' access to bathrooms, penalizing parents for taking children to drag story hours, requiring doctors to offer detransition services, restricting sex changes on birth certificates, and barring school staff from using a student's preferred pronouns without parental permission. Several match goals Slater has pursued for decades.

One of the lawmakers behind many of those bills, state Rep. Lisa Fink, is president of another Slater group, the Protect Arizona Children Coalition, and campaigned for Biggs at a Gilbert rally before the primary, according to New Times.

Hobbs' veto is the only thing that has stopped those bills. Biggs is promising to remove it.

The bottom line

Andy Biggs was a founding director of the Arizona group that became Sharon Slater's Family Watch International, which the SPLC designates an anti-LGBTQ hate group and which has been accused of helping pass Uganda's law allowing the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality." Slater endorsed his first campaign and has given to his current one, and he spoke at her group's forum in 2020. He voted for a 2014 bill so extreme a Republican governor vetoed it, voted twice against the Respect for Marriage Act, and now says he'll sign the bills Gov. Hobbs vetoed, which New Times counts at nearly 100 affecting marginalized Arizonans.

Source

Before Congress and the governor's race, Andy Biggs had Sharon Slater — Phoenix New Times and Arizona LOOKOUT, November 2026