In late February, Christopher “Chris” Yuan of Escondido used Goodstack’s website to order ChatGPT, seeking a $5-a-month nonprofit discount on the OpenAI product.
Yuan sought to pay $20 per user instead of $25 for an AI account to translate his “holy sexuality” products into languages including Chinese and Spanish.
Twenty days later, his request was denied.
Now his nonprofit, Holy Sexuality, is suing OpenAI in San Diego federal court. OpenAI, recently valued at $300 billion, is accused of “intentional, malicious and outrageous religious discrimination against Holy Sexuality pursuant to OpenAI’s facially discriminatory Religious Discrimination Policy.”
Holy Sexuality, the suit says, is “thus entitled to general and special damages, treble damages, a permanent injunction, declaratory relief and attorney’s fees under the Unruh Act.” No money figure is given, but a jury trial is demanded.
The Holy Sexuality Project is part of the gay conversion movement — employing biblical principles to “help” people shed LGBTQ behavior and identities.
In the latest skirmish of the culture wars, lawyers for the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, aided by Rancho Santa Fe attorney Robert J. Reynolds, are hoping to score a second victory in a month.
In mid-April, ADF settled a similar lawsuit with San Francisco-based Asana Inc. — also citing Yuan as the injured party. Yuan was originally denied a 50% nonprofit discount for Asana’s project management software.
“People of faith aren’t second-class citizens in California, and tech companies in San Francisco cannot provide lesser services to customers simply because they are religious,” said the suit against Asana.
In a statement, ADF’s Mathew Hoffman told Times of San Diego: “Asana agreed to extend the same 50% discount to Holy Sexuality that it offers to other nonprofits, revise its policy to remove the provision that discriminated based on religion, and remove that discriminatory language from its website.”
The latest case comes in a 15-page complaint filed Wednesday — also in downtown federal court. It’s been assigned to Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo, appointed by President Obama. (Magistrate Judge Karen S. Crawford may handle some motions.)
In an ADF news release, Yuan said: “Our nation was founded on the principle of the free exercise of religion — a cornerstone of our democracy. Yet some corporations, emboldened by intersectional ideology and anti-Christian sentiment, choose to unlawfully discriminate based solely on religion. This must stop. California law protects all religions from discrimination. Equal treatment is the bedrock of our society.”
Hoffman, who serves as legal counsel for the Center for Free Speech at ADF, said OpenAI and Goodstack denied Yuan’s group a discount “solely because it is a religious organization.”
“There is a clear pattern of faith-based voices being pushed out of the public square by our largest technology companies,” he said via email. “This issue goes far beyond the loss of a discount — it’s about equal treatment for religious nonprofits. California-based tech companies can’t discriminate against their customers solely because of their religious beliefs.”
Hoffman concluded: “OpenAI still has its discriminatory policy, which sends a clear message: Religious organizations are second-class customers. We must hold tech companies accountable for religious discrimination.”
OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I asked ChatGPT: “Tell me OpenAI’s Religious Discrimination Policy.”
The software began by citing the San Francisco tech giant’s workplace policies, which “explicitly prohibits discrimination based on religion.”
But ChatGPT added: “OpenAI’s usage policies prohibit the use of its services to discriminate based on protected attributes, including religion. Specifically, the policies state that users should not repurpose or distribute output from OpenAI’s services to discriminate based on protected attributes.”
Without mentioning the ADF suits, ChatGPT noted that OpenAI’s nonprofit discount policy has come under legal scrutiny for potentially discriminating against religious organizations.
“The outcome of the lawsuit may provide further clarity on how such policies align with anti-discrimination laws,” ChatGPT said.
In a “Response 2,” ChatGPT added:
“OpenAI’s policy on nonprofit discounts states that academic, medical, religious or governmental institutions are not eligible for its nonprofit program. This policy has been challenged in court, and the outcome of the lawsuit may impact how OpenAI applies its policies to religious organizations in the future.”
ADF has itself been the subject of scrutiny, especially a scathing critique recently on the HBO comedy show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”
But who is Christopher Yuan?
The 54-year-old unpaid executive director of Holy Sexuality came out as gay to his mother while a University of Lousiville dental student hoping to follow his father, Leon, as a dentist.
With his mother, Angela (now 82), Yuan described his journey in the book “Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God. A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope.”
When Angela rejected her gay son (and then mulled suicide), Christopher returned to school. But he was expelled three months before earning his doctorate after becoming a drug dealer — supplying tons of marijuana to a dozen suppliers in 12 states, he says.
“In my world, I had become God,” he told a Liberty University audience.
After his sentence was shortened to three years, Yuan was released in July 2001. He later studied scripture and became a teacher at Moody Bible Institute of Chicago.
Yuan never mentions that he was sued by the feds for not repaying $10,000 in student loans. (Indeed, ChatGPT told me: “There is no public record indicating that Christopher Yuan has been sued by the federal government for unpaid student loans.”)
But court records show that in October 2001, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Illinois brought an action against Yuan to recoup funds lent him in 1993 under the government-insured Health Education Assistance Loan program, or HEAL, when Yuan was at the University of Louisville.
In April 2002, however, the government asked Judge Ronald Guzman to dismiss the case. It’s unclear why.
In 2023, Yuan and his mother (listed as president) launched the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Holy Sexuality, with the mission “to empower Christian adults, teens and children to understand, embrace and celebrate biblical sexuality.”
The only IRS filing I could find — for 2023 — listed revenues of $558,825 (including donations of $302,513) and expenses of only $9,739.
His “ministry services” made $132,736 and his “video and web instruction” brought in $123,576,” according to his Form 990.
Angela Yuan and Holy Sexuality both list their address as 4351 Dallas-Forth Worth Turnpike, suite 200, in Dallas — a Staples store with an iPostal1 “virtual mailbox” service.
A manager there told me Saturday that the service at his Staples has 56 customers.
“Select a private mailbox address at any iPostal1 Virtual Mailbox Locations,” says the service’s website (with the motto “Make our store your mailing address”). Every address is a real street address, not a PO Box, where your mail and packages are securely received from any carrier.”
Yuan also uses a UPS Store post office box as his address for Bearer of Christ Inc. at 1507 E. Valley Parkway in Escondido — a corporation with documents first filed in 2023.
“The purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which a corporation may be organized under the General Corporation Law of California other than the banking business, the trust company business or the practice of a profession permitted to be incorporated by the California Corporations Code,” says its “purpose statement.”
In 2024, he listed the type of business as “Independent Speaker and Author.” A 2025 business filing lists Chris Yuan as “Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Secretary” and Angela Yuan as director.
Yuan didn’t respond to requests for comment made through many channels.
His suit contends that his videos work.
“Thousands of families have been able to use the video series to help parents and teens to understand, embrace and celebrate biblical sexuality,” the suit says. “One pastor went through The Holy Sexuality Project in two weeks. After the first lesson, his 14-year-old son said that it was awkward talking to his parents about sex. After the 12 lessons were finished, the father asked his son whether he still felt awkward. The son said: ‘No, Dad. Not at all.”
Such efforts have been widely condemned by psychological and pediatric experts. One of Yuan’s critics had a lot to say — on Yuan and the lawsuit.
Drew McCoy of Texas, an atheist who goes by “Genetically Modified Skeptic,” told me he wasn’t surprised at the state of the Holy Sexuality Project’s finances.
“As someone with a career in digital media as well as decades of history with fundamentalist Christian ministry, I know how little capital it takes to produce video projects like Yuan’s and how eager certain believers are to throw money at online ministries,” he said Saturday via email.
“Still, the fact that Yuan claimed his video series ‘was a $1.2 million project’ when he actually spent so little floors me.”
McCoy said it was clear that while Yuan has evolved since his days as a “big-time drug dealer — he’s still a salesman to his core.”
“His product today is a narrative which some are desperate to believe: ‘God will change your child’s sexuality if you follow these steps.'”
The OpenAI suit, he said, allows Yuan to “sell another dubious narrative — that anti-Christian discrimination in the U.S. is rampant, and that he stands heroically against it.”
Yuan’s donor list isn’t public. (His Form 990 says their names are “restricted”). I asked McCoy who Yuan’s contributors are.
“I would guess that up to this point, Yuan has mostly received donations from the church congregations and online audiences he regularly addresses,” McCoy said.
“Given the high profile of both OpenAI and ADF on the Religious Right, I expect this lawsuit to put Yuan on the radar of a much wealthier group of potential donors — people who see advancing the narrative of rampant anti-Christian bias as a means to manufacture consent for letting the ‘victims’ of such ‘bias’ play by different rules than everyone else.”
In Febuary, an X user named @sidebeliever challenged Yuan: “For the record @christopheryuan, and before God, can you honestly say you no longer experience any same-sex attraction and you are now exclusively attracted to women?”
Yuan replied: “For the record, I 100% without any equivocation or hesitation do NOT identify as a gay man.”
