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Alliance Defense ADF

aka alliance defending freedom, see other node SEARS

change name? diff orgs?  all xian?

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rww

11/12/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Liberty Counsel’s petition to overturn the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling in Obergefell. Mat Staver, who heads the anti-LGBTQ group, insisted the next day that “it’s not if, but when, Obergefell will be overturned.”

While large majorities of Americans support marriage equality, religious-right groups are determined to destroy it. Staver has called the marriage equality ruling a “cancer” on the Constitution.

Liberty Counsel has spent the past decade representing Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court overturned state marriage bans.

The case that Liberty Counsel asked the Supreme Court to hear was about the specific question of whether Davis could be held personally liable for damages for denying a gay couple the license to which they were entitled. A federal judge ruled against Davis, awarding the couple damages and attorney fees, and an appeals court upheld that ruling.

Liberty Counsel appealed and asked the Supreme Court to go well beyond the legal question at hand and take the opportunity to overturn marriage equality altogether. The Court declined.

It’s good news that the Court rejected Liberty Counsel’s appeal. But Liberty Counsel and other religious-right groups are certainly not going to drop their efforts to overturn marriage equality.

“I have no doubt that Davis’ resolve will serve as a catalyst to raise up many more challenges to the wrongly decided Obergefellopinion,” Staver wrote. He vowed that his group “will continue working with state legislators and individuals to overturn Obergefell and to return the issue of marriage to the states.”

Liberty Counsel has powerful allies who want to see marriage equality eliminated.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-equality legal giant that led the legal effort to overturnRoe v. Wade,views reversing marriage equality as another of its “generational wins” goals. ADF drafted the state law that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe, and it's nearly certain that ADF is working on a similar strategy to undo Obergefell. ADF was not involved in Kim Davis’s case, but it is active at the Supreme Court this term.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is headed by Ryan Anderson, who published a road map for overturning marriage equality when he was still at the Heritage Foundation. EPPC fellow Nathanael Blake wrote earlier this year that same-sex couples' ability to get legally married reflects liberalism’s “hatred for human nature.” Another EPPC fellow, Andrew Walker, wrote that same-sex marriage reflects “moral lawlessness.” He mocked gay parents and their families, writing, “If you’re anything like me, the sight of gay and lesbian couples and small children cosplaying in idyllic family settings is proving to be too much.”

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john oliver 525

softball trans dtr, not trans

mike johnson say christmas.com

acb blackstone

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incubator

jon berry cbg fedsoc liar mofo2025 pjt trmp

blackstone

promo vid MLK change culture i shit younot

b lackstone Legal Fellowship is not a culmination . . . it is a beginning

Blackstone Legal Fellowship is a leadership training program that brings together exceptional Christian law students and prepares them for careers marked by integrity, excellence, and leadership. Since 2000, Alliance Defending Freedom has trained more than 2,600 law students from more than 230 law schools in 30 different countries.

The Fellowship begins with a summer-long leadership training program, which includes three weeks of seminars on topics such as legal philosophy, constitutional law, practicing with integrity and excellence within the legal profession, and career development and cultural engagement. Interns also spend the summer engaged in legal internships across the world, working with nonprofits, governmental entities, and boutique law firms, among others.

The summer program represents a beginning, not a culmination, as Interns emerge with a professional network, enduring friendships, and a foundation of knowledge that will serve them throughout their careers. Those selected to become “Fellows” at the end of the summer also receive ongoing training, resources, and support through an international community.

Alliance Defense Fund To Launch Law School Aimed At Creating "Liberal Chaser" Attorneys

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wed, 09/28/2011 - 12:56pm

Religious Right leaders are coming together to form yet another law school to train future lawyers of the conservative movement.The right-wing Alliance Defense Fund is helping Louisiana College, a Southern Baptist institution,start the Paul Pressler School of Law, which will join Liberty University, Regent University and others in providing politicized training to the next generation of Religious Right lawyers.

Pressler’s ties to the Alliance Defense Fund will be similar to the Liberty University School of Law’s partnership with Liberty Counsel and the Regent University School of Law’s (originally Oral Roberts University’s Coburn School of Law) alliance with the American Center for Law and Justice. As Sarah Posner notes, such law schools intend to“teach the ‘biblical’ foundations of the law” and create “lawyers unafraid to inject their particular Christian beliefs, not only into the public square, but quite deliberately into legislation, policy, and jurisprudence.”

According to the National Law Journal, the new law school “is named for Paul Pressler III, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge who helped lead the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1970s.”

The founding dean of the Pressler law school, J. Michael Johnson, was previously senior counsel of the ADF and, according to his Townhall.com bio, has “provided legal representation to organizations such as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, Toward Tradition, the American Family Association, and Coral Ridge Ministries, and numerous family policy councils and crisis pregnancy centers.” In 2005, Johnson won the “Faith, Family and Freedom” award from Family Research Council president Tony Perkinsfor his work defending the Louisiana Marriage Protection Amendment, which placed a ban on same-sex marriage in the state’s constitution.

Yesterday on **:{Today’s Issues:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:**, Perkins, who is a member of Pressler’s **:{board of reference:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:**, spoke to Johnson about the new law school. Johnson said the law school would be “not unlike what our colleagues are doing at the Liberty University School of Law and the Regent University School of Law.” Perkins said, “This law school’s not going to be pumping out ambulance chasers, this is going to be pumping out liberal chasers, I mean we’re gonna track them down, wherever they are and we’re gonna defeat them, and if we can’t defeat them in the policy realm we’re gonna defeat them in the courts.” He added, “This law school is gonna be pumping out God-fearing, American-loving, family-defending attorneys”:

The choice of Louisiana College is no surprise. The school claims it “seeks to view all areas of knowledge from a distinctively Christian perspective and integrate Biblical truth thoroughly with each academic discipline” and believes “academic freedom of a Christian professor is limited by the preeminence of Jesus Christ, the authoritative nature of the Holy Scriptures, and the mission of the institution.”

In 2008 the school barred members of the Christian LGBT group Soul Force from appearing on campus. In his decision to bar the group, the college’s president cited a fake James Madison quote propagated by David Barton, which states that the U.S. government was based on “the Ten Commandments.”

Now David Barton is serving on the board of the law school.

Along with Perkins and Barton, Religious Right leaders on the board include Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association,Alveda King of Priests for Life, Religious Right luminary Tim LaHaye and his wife Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America, Kelly Shackleford of the Liberty Institute and Reagan’s Attorney GeneralEdwin Meese. Republican politicians including Reps. Rodney Alexander and John Fleming, former congressman Bob McEwen, and senatorial candidate and Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz are also on the board.

PFAW

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training lawyers blackstone, rutherford

an ah 4 22

since its formation 29 years ago in 1993, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has consistently fought against gay rights — often equating anti-gay discrimination with religious freedom. When Kristen Waggoner, legal counsel for ADF, spoke at Yale University on March 10, about 120 students protested her appearance. And in Utah, two well-known Republicans — Sen. Mike Lee and State Attorney General Sean Reyes — have added their names to a letter demanding punishment for Yale students who**protested**the March 10 event.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Bryan Schott explains, “More than half of the school’s students signed an open letter critical of the decision by the Federalist Society to invite Waggoner to speak and condemned the presence of armed police at the protest. Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said the protest was ‘unacceptable’ behavior from the students, but they had not violated the school’s free speech policy.”

Co-founded by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the ADF (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) represents a far-right form of White evangelical Christian fundamentalism and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

“In addition to Lee and Reyes,” Schott reports, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, several U.S. House of Representatives members, five governors, and more than two dozen other state attorneys general also signed on. The letter was drafted by the same group responsible for the Philadelphia Statement, a document that decries the persistence of ‘cancel culture’ in American society. More than 1400 people signed the letter to Yale.”

The letter reads, “Instead of engaging with the panelists, a shocking number of Yale Law students hurled constant insults and obscenities at them.” But according to Schott, “The letter’s depiction of the event is primarily based on an initial report from the conservative Washington Free Beacon. That reporting has been credibly debunked by other publications, multiple videos and the school’s official account of the incident.”

Some of the debunking came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. On March 18, Stern reported, “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began. Their exercise in free speech, however rowdy or distasteful, did not prevent the panelists from expressing their views. And their demonstration did not — contrary to the Free Beacon’s reporting — require administrators to summon the police.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/global-christian-right/

an 12 21

an investigation by the media outletopenDemocracy revealed Friday that the dark money groups masterminding the far-right assault on reproductive freedoms in the U.S. have also spent at least $28 million in recent years on efforts to roll back the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people worldwide.

The new analysis shows that prominent anti-abortion groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Federalist Society, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family and Heartbeat International have "been involved in recent efforts to limit reproductive rights in Europe and Latin America."

The organizations form what openDemocracydescribes as "the 'dark money' global empire of the U.S. Christian right," which is exporting its legal strategy, army of lawyers, and resources overseas to forestall and reverse international progress on abortion access.

ADF, a far-right Christian legal advocacy group with ties to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has spent years laying the groundwork for the draconian Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a Supreme Court case that could imperil reproductive freedoms across the U.S.

But ADF's influence extends well beyond its home country. According to openDemocracy, the organization—whose global arm is called ADF International—spent $15.3 million between 2016 and 2019 on efforts to gut abortion rights overseas.

"The European offices of ACLJ and ADF have intervened in dozens of European court cases against sexual and reproductive rights," the outlet notes. "Last year, Poland's constitutional court voted to ban abortion in cases of fetal defects. [ACLJ] submitted arguments in favor of the new restrictions, condemned by the Council of Europe as a grave 'human rights violation.'"

"The European branch of ACLJ also intervened for the first time at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," openDemocracy observes. "The government of El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, was sued for the imprisonment and death of a woman who had experienced a miscarriage."

As for the Federalist Society—of which all six current right-wing Supreme Court justices are either current or former members—"Europe was the main destination of foreign spending," openDemocracyfinds.

"Europeans are too naive in thinking that achievements in women's rights and sexual and reproductive health are irreversible," said Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told the outlet. "The anti-choice movement does not only have a lot of money, they also have a plan and the determination. Europe should wake up, and it should wake up fast."

While under U.S. tax law the far-right groups have largely succeeded in keeping their funding sources hidden from the public, openDemocracy examined "financial information disclosed by grantmakers" showing that the National Christian Foundation (NCF) and Fidelity Charitable donated $93 million to the organizations between 2016 and 2020.

Feminist researcher Sonia Corrêa of Sexuality Policy Watch said openDemocracy's report "exposes once again the long-running organic connections between anti-abortion forces in the U.S. and Latin America."

Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, similarly argued that the findings "further demonstrate the growing trend of religious extremists forging cross-border alliances to advance... pseudo-legal arguments and engaging in formal legal processes aiming to unstitch the fabric of human rights protection."

In an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday, openDemocracy's Mary Fitzgerald argued that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Mississippi's abortion ban and undercuts Roe v. Wade, the nation will "join of a small cadre of increasingly authoritarian countries that have become more restrictive on abortion in recent years."

Fitzgerald went on to cite specific examples:

Poland's constitutional tribunal ruled on a retrograde abortion ban last year which effectively banned abortion in all cases apart from rape, incest or threat of life or health to the mother, after the ruling Law and Justice party packed the court.

Hungary's Viktor Orban is ramping up its talk on "family values," and a 2016 United Nations report criticized the country for obstructing abortion access.

Vladimir Putin's Russia has just joined the misleadingly titled Geneva Consensus Declaration: a document co-sponsored by the United States under the Trump administration with repressive governments including Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Mr. Orban's Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's Egypt, and signed by dozens more of the world's most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Uganda. (President Biden announced in January that the United States would withdraw.) The declaration's authors also claim that there is no international right to abortion.

"Later this month President Biden will host the Summit for Democracy, with a key focus on promoting human rights around the world," Fitzgerald noted. "But as U.S. courts continue to dismantle basic rights enjoyed in countless other modern democracies, the most pressing question must be: How can democracy do its job at home if only half the population is granted full human rights?"

A well-known Conservative Christian lawyer played a behind-the-scenes role in the December lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

According to The New York Times, Michael P. Farris — the chief executive of the conservative Christian nonprofit advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom — was responsible for circulating a comprehensive draft of what became the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in hopes of overturning the presidential election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

Per the publication:

"Our Country stands at an important crossroads," the complaint filed by Mr. Paxton said in its opening argument. Those words were lifted verbatim from the draft Mr. Farris had sent, as was a subsequent passage asserting that "either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former."

After making small changes to the draft, Paxton filed the lawsuit on December 7. The Times reports that the lawsuit was also filed in multiple other battleground states including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In total, 17 Republican attorneys general filed Supreme Court briefs in support of Paxton's lawsuit. However, the lawsuit was tossed out of court in just four days.

Farris' contribution to the legal effort to overturn the presidential election underscores how Christian conservatives also circulated claims of voter fraud perpetuated by Trump.

The chief deputy attorney general in South Carolina, one of several Republicans whom Mr. Farris and a team of other conservative lawyers were trying to convince to file the lawsuit. On November 30, Farris wrote an email addressed to South Carolina's chief deputy attorney general in an effort to convince him to file a lawsuit challenging the election results.

"Please find a much-improved version of the complaint attached," Farris wrote. "I will call you and update you on the alternatives."

Although Farris reportedly declined to be interviewed by the Times,he did respond by email admitting his involvement in the post-election effort to overturn the election.

"While it's true that I care about this issue on a personal level, it is not something that ADF works on in any capacity," he wrote. "As President and CEO, my charge is to focus on ADF's mission, which is to protect Americans' God-given freedoms. I have nothing to say about the details of the way forward on the issue of election integrity other than the hope that all Americans take the issue seriously."

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-mastermind-behind-the-draconian-heartbeat-bill-banning-abortion-as-early-as-6-weeks/

Americans woke up last Wednesday morning to a new reality: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark legislation granting a woman a right to an abortion, was violently under attack through the passage of a new “heartbeat bill” in Texas.

That law—which bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, makes no exception for rape or incest, and allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids a woman in getting an abortion—is the first so-called heartbeat bill to have become law and actually be enforced. The Supreme Court did not swoop in and prevent the law’s enforcement as some had hoped: That evening, the top court allowed the law to stand in a 5-4 decision, with the five right-wing lawmakers firmly in camp against Roe simply claiming it was a procedural issue that abortion providers had not addressed, voting in effect for Texan women to lose the right to abortion provided under Roe. 

For Janet Porter,the Texas law was a dream come true. The longtime religious-right activist took to Rumble, a posterboard of her book, “A Heartbeat Away,” propped up in the background as she announced the news. “That makes Texas the first state in the nation to actually enforce their heartbeat law of the 14 states who have passed them,” she told the camera.

“Grasp this for a moment,” she said, ecstatic, a smile spread across her face, her hands gesturing in excitement. “There is a place in the United States where nearly every child facing abortion is now legally protected. It is historic.”

“Today in Texas, if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected,” she said. “Soon, the nation will follow.” 

Porter is often seen as the mastermind behind so-called heartbeat legislation, which bans women from having abortions after a “heartbeat” is detected—as early as six weeks in some cases and, for many women, before they’re aware that they are pregnant.Medical expertssaythe term “fetal heartbeat” is scientifically inaccurate, noting that at six weeks, the embryo—which is not yet a fetus—will have not yet developed a heart.But the term “fetal heartbeat” pulls at heartstrings, and its marketability, for a lack of better term, has Porter to thank.

While Porter has made restricting access abortion her main priority, the longtime religious-right activist’s extremism has been well documented on these pages. As Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Porter took to her radio program to spread the racist birther conspiracy theory championed by Donald Trump. Once Obama was elected, the conspiracies didn’t stop: As Right Wing Watch reported, she falsely claimed “Obama would orchestrate food shortages to starve conservatives to death, use a swine flu outbreak as an excuse to lock them up in concentration camps, and use Obamacare to deny them healthcare and eliminate them.” On the pages of World Net Daily, a far-right conspiracy website, she frequently penned columns—her last, published Dec. 11, 2020, refused to accept Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

When she wasn’t spreading noxious conspiracy theories, the activist was attempting to beat back the advance of gay rights, claiming Christians would be labeled criminals, rounded up, and tossed in jailif gay people had rights.She also trumpeted “conversion therapy,” a range of dangerous and discredited practices meant to change one’s sexual orientation, and was labeled the “The Architect of the ‘Conversion Therapy’ Campagin” by the New York Times. The activist, purportedly so concerned about the lives of children, even served as a spokeswoman for Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who unsuccessfully ran for Senate, defending him after he was accused of child molestation and attacking the woman who accused him. 

At the heart of Porter’s activism is an effort to spread a fundamentalist version of Christianity. In 2010, her views became so extreme that VCY, the Christian radio station broadcasting her show,**canceled**it, citing “the drift of the program toward ‘dominion’ theology”—that is, the idea that Christians are called to take complete control over every aspect of human life in order to bring about the return of Christ. Among those aspects of human life: abortion and women’s bodies.

And so in 2011, Porter, working as the head of anti-choice group Faith2Action, found anOhio state legislator, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, to champion legislation she had drafted to restrict access to abortion. The Ohio bill was the first “heartbeat bill” of its kind and so extreme—limiting abortion at the detection of a “heartbeat,” making no exceptions for incest or rape—that other anti-choice groups and legislators balked at it. Questioning the constitutionality of such a measure, they wondered whether the legislation would do more harm than good for their cause. Supporters of the bill said incremental steps weren’t working and were eager to directly challenge Roe. Porter herself was explicit about her goal, stating in 2017, that her “heartbeat bill” was “the foot in the door” to totally outlawing abortion.

“It was not my original idea, but I’ve been a pro-life leader here in Columbus for 26 years, and I’m committed to pushing the courts as far as we can go to protect human life, and that’s clearly what this bill is all about,” Wachtmann stated in February 2011 shortly before he introduced the bill.

At that point, Faith2Action already had a full-throttle pressure campaign underway to get the legislation passed. Under Porter’s leadership, the group urged its supporters to send heart-shaped red balloons to the Ohio governor and state representatives ahead of Valentine’s Day, “encouraging their support of the Heartbeat Bill” and to “Have a Heart!”—a message Porter repeated in a column for the far-right WND site. The bill passed in the state House later that year.

When the legislation stalled in the state Senate in 2012, Faith2Action took out a full-page ad in the Columbus Dispatch and made thousands of robocalls asking its supportersto contact state senators. That ad featured Dr. John Willke, founder of the National Right to Life and another sponsor of the bill. Revered in anti-abortion rights circles, Willke had perpetuated the**false myth**that a woman’s body can resist conception in rape, which may be among the reasons why the bill did not provide exceptions for abortion in case of rape. Another is that Porter doesn’t think women should be allowed to have any abortion, stating in 2017, “We’re not for killing any child, especially an innocent child for the crime of his father.”

The bill had wide support among religious-right figures both in state and out of state. An archived version of Faith2Action’s site for the bill lists E.W. Jackson, Samuel Rodriguez, Mat Staver, James Robison, Rick Joyner, Wendy Wright, Ken Blackwell, Jay Sekulow, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and Frank Pavone as supporters. It also featured a list of current and former elected officials: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Jim Jordan (then an Ohio state legislator), Rep. Louie Gohmert, former Sen. Rick Santorum, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Rep. Steve King, and former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.

When the bill did reach then Gov. John Kasich, he vetoed it twice, preferring to signanother strict abortion banat 12 weeks and citing constitutionality issues with the “heartbeat” legislation.But the bill found a champion in his Republican successor, Gov. Mike DeWine, who signed Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” into law in 2019 before Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued. A federal judge issued a temporary stay on theabortion ban and extended it again this spring.

A slew of red states followed suit, passing their own “heartbeat” abortion bans. The legislation mostly faced the same fate as the Ohio law—that is, except for Texas.

The Texas law provides a loophole those others did not: Instead of the state attorney general or other state officials enforcing the law, the law explicitly prevents state governments from enforcing it and essentially deputizes every citizen to sue anyone who performs an abortion or aids a woman in getting one. That leaves abortion clinics at a loss of who to sue. The purpose by the law’s drafters: to prevent intervention from federal courts.

So when the Supreme Court had a chance to stay the legislation, the conservative majority essentially said that the nation’s top court had its hands tied, that abortion providers in the state had not addressed the “complex and novel” procedural questions and would have to do so before the Supreme Court would take it up.

The Texas law also provides a bounty to incentivize enforcement: Any person who successfully sues would get $10,000 and their legal fees covered. Defendants who are successful are not entitled to have their legal fees covered, and anyone who aided a woman in getting an abortion could be sued multiple times. The effect is that most if not all clinics in the state have stopped providing abortions after six weeks for fear of bankruptcy. 

The Texas law was sponsored by Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who asked conservative litigator Jonathan F. Mitchell how anti-abortion legislation could avoid the fate of other “heartbeat bills” that languished without enforcement after federal judges issued injunctions. Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general and active member of the Federalist Society, was already steeped in the religious-right effort to overturn Roe, **representing**towns sued by the ACLU over their ordinances that made abortion a crime. In 2017, while working alongside with Alliance Defending Freedom on a case about religious freedom, he trotted out a theory that he’d go on to use in Texas, claiming that no matter how unconstitutional a law was, if it did not charge a state official with the duty of enforcement, it couldn’t produce a federal lawsuit. Mitchell would become the primary architect of the Texas abortion law’s private-enforcement provision.

“We knew we had to have another way,” said Hughes, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We were going to find a way to pass a heartbeat bill that was going to be upheld.”

It’s unclear how much Porter, who was a supporterof the Texas law, had to do with this particular loophole, but the drafters of that particular bill have Porter’s popularization of the “heartbeat bill” to thank and the religious right’s decades-long campaign to overturn Roe of which she was a part.

National religious-right organizations, like ADF, have championed a state-by-state approach to chip away at the landmark legislation. This spring, the Supreme Court announced it will hear a case about a Mississippi law banning abortions at 15 weeks, a law that was based on ADF’s model legislation and a major threat to a woman’s right to an abortion. But so far, no effort has dealt as big of a blow to Roe as has Porter’s “heartbeat” legislation. Already, other states are consideringa law based on Texas’ version of the “heartbeat bill.”

As she celebrated last Wednesday, Porter, too, looked forward.

“The National Association of Christian Lawmakers just adopted the Texas version of the heartbeat law as their model legislation,” she said, a smile dancing across her face between sentences. “That means we’re about to see a lot more heartbeat bills become law and actually get enforced.”

Tags: Bryan HughesJanet PorterJonathan MitchellAbortionHeartbeat BillReproductive RightsAlliance Defending FreedomFaith 2 ActionWorld Net Daily

jig up wht pwr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-supreme-court-is-finished-republicans-have-killed-it/

...They've turned the courts into a kennel for right-wing puppies, willing to sit there with floppy ears and their tongues out, panting and waiting to decide cases in favor of the billionaires who put them there. That's why there is a cottage industry of right-wing legal groups like Judicial Watch,Alliance Defending Freedom,Claremont Institute and the Center for Individual Rights, all of them funded by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions in right-wing money. They make no bones about the fact that their job is to go out looking for plaintiffs to sue on behalf of big business and right-wing political interests to overturn laws they don't like. They have been behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act and every anti-abortion lawsuit ever filed, not to mention suits against immigrant rights, civil rights, LGBT rights — you name it. And waiting in federal courthouses all over the country are Trump and Mitch McConnell's judicial poodles....

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Breitbart.com writer Ken Klukowski has joined the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The right-wing pundit and lawyer has a history of pushing anti-LGBTQ commentary, including telling readers there’s a “homosexual agenda” moving forward in the courts and falsely claiming that research proves that same-sex parents are bad for children.

Klukowski has worked for a variety of right-wing organizations, including Breitbart.com, the American Civil Rights Union, First Liberty Institute, Liberty University School of Law, and Family Research Council. As a lawyer, Klukowski has filed numerous briefs supporting right-wing causes. He joined the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as a special counsel in late August. OMB, which is under the direction of Mick Mulvaney, “oversees the performance of federal agencies, and administers the federal budget.”

Klukowksi was previously the director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council. Family Research Council is an influential and extreme anti-LGBTQ group with high levels of access to the Trump-Pence administration. The organization has comparedLGBTQ people to pedophiles and advocated for the discredited and harmful practice of conversion therapy. It also  states on its website: “Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed.”

Klukowski is also an ally of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), another of the most influential anti-LGBTQ groups in the country. Sarah Posner wrote in The Nation that “Klukowski has said that he attended ADF legal trainings, and he also authored a rosy profile of the organization for Breitbart in 2012, in which he lauded its ‘massive and growing impact in courtrooms across America.’” He joins numerous other ADF-allied lawyers who have held government positions; Media Matters has identified more than 100 such allies who worked in Congress, federal agencies, state and federal courts, city and state governments, and local school boards in 2018.

As a commentator, Klukowski frequently warned against LGBTQ equality, claiming, for instance, that “the entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people.” He’s also attacked same-sex parenting, falsely claiming that research shows that having “two parents - one man and one woman” gives children the best chance to succeed.

Klukowski: “The entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people.”From a September 2010 op-edin the Washington Examiner by Klukowski, h/t GLAAD:

The Perry and Log Cabin cases, taken with the recent Massachusetts federal decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (currently on appeal), paint a picture of astounding judicial activism.

The entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people, as expressed through the democratic process. Agenda-driven judges are doing this by declaring brand new constitutional rights not found anywhere in the words of the Constitution, mowing down every law that stands in their way.

Klukowski: “The fundamental institution of human civilization should be preserved as it has been known through the entirety of American history and Western civilization.”In an August 2010 op-ed he wrote for FoxNews.com with Family Research Center’s Kenneth Blackwell, Klukowski warned Republicans against accepting same-sex marriage, writing:

The GOP platform could not be more explicit: Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The fundamental institution of human civilization should be preserved as it has been known through the entirety of American history and Western civilization. Supporters of same-sex marriage had the full opportunity to make their case to the party. They made it, and they lost.

Klukowski falsely argued that same-sex parents won’t give “children the best chance to become happy and successful.” In a 2011 Daily Caller op-ed written with Blackwell, Klukowski claimed that research proves that same-sex parents are inferior to opposite-sex parents. In reality, Cornell University’s Public Policy Research Portal wrote that there’s “an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.”

The data contradicts [MSNBC host Chris Matthews’] televised encyclical.

Children thrive best in a household with a father and a mother. Not just two individuals who call themselves "parents" — and if both adults are of the same gender, it is biologically impossible for them to both be the natural parents — but a father and a mother.

Men and women are equal, but not interchangeable. The research — as exemplified by our colleague Dr. Pat Fagan in his new report — show that the economics are compelling: While there are exceptions to every social norm, men and women tend to bring different strengths to raising children. Firmness and gentleness. Physical security and emotional security. Challenges and comfort. Discipline and nurturing.

Many families do not have the benefit of both parents. Often the reasons behind this reality rightly tug on our heartstrings. And millions of single parents deserve lavish praise for their magnificent work at raising wonderful children, with inspiring personal success stories.

But the ideal remains. Two parents — one man and one woman — raising their children in a loving and supportive marriage gives children the best chance to become happy and successful.

Klukowski: “The social science is clear that children thrive best not just in the two-parent home but in a home with a biological father and biological mother.”Klukowski also repeated his false claim about same-sex parenting during a February 23, 2012, appearance on Fox Business’ Stossel (via Nexis):

JOHN STOSSEL (HOST): If the state approves marriages between heterosexuals people, why not gays?

KEN KLUKOWSKI: Well, the states are softening in that regard and every chance that the states have had to speak in that regard where the voters of the states 30 of them have adopted -- have adopted constitutional amendments --

STOSSEL: It's not the tyranny of the majority just because we have majority rule. Why can't --

KLUKOWSKI: In this regard, the states are sovereign and the social science is clear that children thrive best not just in the two-parent home but in a home with a biological father and biological mother. People fall short of that all time but government has a vested interest in promoting the ideal even if we all fall short of it to one extent or another.

Klukowski criticized the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because “in the military you are often forced into quarters so close that they’re sometimes nothing short of intimate.”Klukowski wrote in his book Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

A fantastic example of a failure of leadership is President Obama calling on Congress to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law (DADT). Ever since the founding of the Republic, homosexuals have not been able to serve openly in the military. Setting aside religious beliefs, moral convictions, and natural law, this still makes sense, given that in the military you are often forced into quarters so close that they’re sometimes nothing short of intimate, with no privacy or personal space whatsoever in an extremely stressful, emotional, and adrenaline-filled environment. As a sop to the gay rights community, when Democrats had control of both Congress and the White House, President Bill Clinton softened this policy to say that it was still illegal for gays to serve in the military, but that no one could ask you about it so you were okay as long as you didn’t tell anyone or get caught doing anything.

…

The military is no place for social engineering. No doubt many homosexuals can be trusted not to make sexual advances, just as many heterosexuals can likewise be trusted in close quarters. But we don’t allow men and women to bunk together, or deploy them alone together in a forward position with no privacy, even though we trust them to remain professional and adhere to standards of conduct. Homosexuals should not get any special treatment denied to heterosexuals.

Klukowski: “The media is as much in the tank for gay marriage as it is for every other major part of President Barack Obama's agenda.”From a July 2013 Breitbart.com column criticizing PolitiFact’s reporting:

In case you just arrived from a different planet and didn’t yet know the media is as much in the tank for gay marriage as it is for every other major part of President Barack Obama’s agenda, you need only read Politifact’s recent post on Tony Perkins, where reporter Amy Sherman claims Perkins’s recent statements on how some wedding vendors are being forced to participate in same-sex marriages “under threat or even jail” are only “half true.”

In fact, Perkins’ claims are entirely true. For an organization that supposedly investigates facts (and incidentally is part of a solidly-liberal newspaper), to say Perkins’ claims are only half true is to post a story that is half fiction.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-christian-legal-army-behind-masterpiece-cakeshop/

The Christian Legal Army Behind ‘Masterpiece Cakeshop’

A special investigation into the rise of Alliance Defending Freedom.

By Sarah Posner

September, Representative Vicky Hartzler, a Missouri Republican, held a press conference with four of her congressional colleagues to announce their support for Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker. The conservative Christian and “cake artist” had been found in violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law when he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Phillips is now the plaintiff in one of the most closely watched cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Additional research by Eli Clifton, Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Evan Malmgren, and Jake Bittle.

Hartzler had just spent a good part of her summer pressing for a ban on transgender people in the military because she believes they constitute a “domestic threat.” She was one of 86 Republican lawmakers who had just signed onto an amicus brief supporting Phillips’s novel claim that baking and decorating a wedding cake is constitutionally protected artistic expression. Phillips has also argued that he should not be required to deploy his creative talents on behalf of a same-sex couple, because doing so would violate his religious beliefs.

“A government that tells you what you must say and what you must do, and punishes you if you don’t, is frightening,” Hartzler said. “That kind of state power should scare all of us.”

Nearby, Phillips stood quietly with his attorney, Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has mushroomed over the past few years into a Christian-right powerhouse. Founded 24 years ago because, as its longtime president Alan Sears once put it, “the homosexual agenda threatens religious freedom,” ADF now rivals some of the nation’s top private law firms in Supreme Court activity. It has trained thousands of lawyers, many of whom have gone on to government service at the federal, state, and local levels. The organization has helped shape “religious freedom” legislation; provides grants to other Christian-right organizations; and presses school districts to adopt its model policies on issues like transgender facility access. ADF now exerts far more influence than other legal organizations that litigate religious-freedom cases, such as the American Center for Law and Justice, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Liberty Counsel. As the courts have ruled in favor of marriage equality over the past decade, ADF has positioned itself at the very center of the efforts to curtail LGBTQ rights under the guise of religious freedom.

The preparation of the congressional amicus brief was led by Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and former GOP presidential contender; Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican once rumored to be under consideration by Donald Trump for a Supreme Court seat; and Representative Mike Johnson, a freshman Republican from Louisiana and a rising conservative star. Johnson is one of dozens of former ADF attorneys around the country who were trained in the organization’s “Christ-centered” legal principles and now serve in government or the judiciary. As an ADF staff attorney, he led many of its legal fights against marriage equality.

In just one year, Trump has nominated at least four federal judges who have ties to ADF.

The involvement of Cruz, Lee, Johnson, and other congressional leaders is just one mark of ADF’s remarkable ascent. The organization, which once aspired to be merely a Christian antidote to the secular ACLU, has fast become a training ground for future legislators, judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and other government lawyers—including, notably, in the Trump administration. Noel Francisco, Trump’s solicitor general, is an ADF-allied attorney, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions consulted with ADF when drafting Department of Justice guidance on religious-freedom issues. At the state level, at least 18 ADF-affiliated lawyers now work in 10 attorney-general offices; all of them were appointed or elected in the past five years. And in just one year, Trump has nominated at least four federal judges who have ties to ADF—Amy Coney Barrett, recently confirmed to the Seventh Circuit; Kyle Duncan, nominated to the Fifth Circuit; and Jeff Mateer and Michael Joseph Juneau, both nominated to district courts.

At the press conference, Johnson enthused about the potential impact of Phillips’s case, calling it “seismic.” Before quickly departing for a vote on the House floor, he explained that he and his colleagues were only seeking “a very careful balance” in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision enshrining marriage equality. “We have to figure out how everyone can coexist,” Johnson said. “An essential component of that is allowing everyone to live out their deepest convictions.”

At the core of Masterpiece Cakeshop is a radically revisionist idea: that laws protecting the civil rights of historically marginalized groups can violate the free-speech rights of the people who refuse to serve them. Although ADF has also charged that the Colorado law violates Phillips’s right to the free exercise of religion, a shadow looms over that claim, cast by the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Newman v. Piggie Park. There, the owner of a South Carolina barbecue chain claimed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “contravene[d] the will of God” and infringed on his right to the free exercise of religion, because his beliefs “compel him to oppose any integration of the races.” The Supreme Court rejected these claims as “patently frivolous.” Notably, ADF has put its free-speech claim, rather than the free-exercise-of-religion claim, front and center in its brief, casting Phillips as an artist whose freedom of expression has been violated.

An ADF victory on either claim in Masterpiece Cakeshop, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on December 5, could not only create new precedent but also erode advances in LGBTQ rights, ushering in enduring consequences for LGBTQ people and other protected classes. “We know the possible hurtful effects from the endless examples of how same-sex couples and LGBT individuals have been refused service or turned away in the cases that we’ve litigated,” said Jenny Pizer, law and policy director at Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ-rights organization.

Pizer said that discrimination occurs in a multitude of public accommodations, including medical, legal, lodging, retail, even access to schools. In its Masterpiece Cakeshop amicus brief, Lambda documented more than 1,000 incidents of LGBTQ people being refused service. According to the brief, these incidents expose “an ugly truth: with disturbing frequency, LGBT people are confronted by ‘we don’t serve your kind’ refusals and other unequal treatment in a wide range of public accommodations contexts.” Those refusals, Lambda argued, “wrongfully diminish lives that should have equal dignity under our laws and in our public spheres.”

If the Supreme Court were to accept ADF’s religious-infringement claim, Pizer said, “the vulnerability to arbitrary rejection” experienced by LGBTQ people would be present at “any moment during the day when we go through our daily lives—we work, we have to buy food, we have to live somewhere, we have to be able to access medical care, we have to be able to ride transportation services.” And if the Court were to accept ADF’s free-speech claim, Pizer continued, any vendor could simply claim that his or her work is “part of my living my faith, and my faith says I must not make this for you because if I make this for you, I am accepting you, and there’s something about you to which I object on religious grounds.” A ruling supporting either argument would leave “such an enormous hole in the civil-rights laws, there’s really nothing left.”

ADF’s dubious accomplishment, according to Greg Lipper, a First Amendment attorney, has been to “take an extreme position” and mainstream it so thoroughly that it has become “a viable theory at the Supreme Court.”

A CHRISTIAN “LEGAL ARMY”

The Masterpiece Cakeshop case, with its Colorado plaintiff, brings ADF full circle. The organization was founded in 1993 by a group of Christian-right heavyweights, including Sears, James Dobson, and evangelist D. James Kennedy, in the midst of a conservative panic over a gay-rights movement that was just beginning to score some legal victories. Colorado, home to Dobson’s Focus on the Family and its sprawling campus, was ground zero for the backlash. Voters there had just passed Amendment 2, a ballot referendum that amended the state constitution to block state or local officials from recognizing gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals as a protected class. Such protections—known in conservative circles as “SOGI laws,” short for “sexual orientation and gender identity”—remain a prime ADF target. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws protecting LGBTQ people in public accommodations; two more states prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. The statute that Phillips was found to have violated when he refused to serve a same-sex couple at his business was one such law.

After Colorado voters approved Amendment 2 in November 1992, gay-rights activists mobilized to protest the law and challenge it in court, ultimately prevailing in 1996 in Romer v. Evans, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Amendment 2 violated the US Constitution’s equal-protection clause.

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THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT HELPED PUT TRUMP IN OFFICE—NOW HE OWES THEM BIG

Katha Pollitt

For Sears, Dobson, and ADF’s other co-founders, these battles represented an existential threat to conservative Christians. The campaign marshaled to oppose Amendment 2, Sears wrote in his 2003 book, The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, was proof that “radical homosexual activists and their allies are looking for any opportunity to attack and silence any church that takes a biblical stand with regard to homosexual behavior.” The persecution that churches faced due to the “wrath of angry homosexual activists,” Sears argued, “is a snapshot of what will happen to the church in America.” Sears’s book, along with his 2005 The ACLU vs. America, has long been on the reading list for the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, ADF’s summer program for law students.

Over the past 24 years, ADF has experienced remarkable growth, today receiving contributions of more than $50 million a year—up from $14 million in 2002—and boasting 58 staff attorneys based in its headquarters in Arizona and in offices in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. It also has an international presence, including opposing LGBTQ equality in courts in the European Union and advising anti-LGBTQ parliamentarians in Romania.

ADF’s funding comes from individual donations, which by law are kept secret, as well as from charitable foundations, which by law must be disclosed on the donors’ tax returns. But much of ADF’s foundation funding—$77.6 million between 2008 and 2015, more than a quarter of the organization’s total donations during this period—comes through the National Christian Charitable Foundation, a conservative donor-advised fund that allows contributors to shield their identities from public view.

ADF's ranks include more than 3,000 allied attorneys who litigate ADF cases pro bono, as well as 1,800 graduates of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship.

One of the most prominent of ADF’s known donors is the family of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, which in its tax filings lists DeVos as vice president, has donated more than $1 million to ADF since 2002. When questioned at her confirmation hearings about the foundation, DeVos denied having any role in determining its grants, calling the listing of her name as an officer a “clerical error.” Another ADF donor is the family foundation of Representative Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who was elected despite having assaulted a reporter on the eve of the vote.

With this swelling war chest, ADF has been able to assemble what its founder Sears has called a “legal army.” Its ranks include more than 3,000 allied attorneys who litigate ADF cases pro bono, as well as 1,800 graduates of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship. Through these networks, ADF has exerted its influence throughout the conservative legal world, across law firms, state and federal governments, and the judiciary.

To become an “allied attorney,” one must agree with ADF’s 11-point statement of faith, which includes a commitment to believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ, that God designed marriage for one man and one woman, and that homosexual behavior is “sinful and offensive to God.” ADF states that its allied attorneys have so far donated more than 1 million hours of pro bono work, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Trenton Garmon, the attorney representing Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, is among the allied attorneys who have been inducted into ADF’s “Honor Corps” for donating more than 450 pro bono hours to the organization.

The Blackstone Legal Fellowship trains law students on how to apply ADF’s principles to the public realm, offering “the highest level training in Christian worldview and constitutional law to help break the stranglehold the ACLU and its allies have on our nation’s law schools and judicial system.” Fellows become integrated into the conservative legal ecosystem through seminars and talks from senior staffers from Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and other influential conservative organizations. They have also been addressed by two attorneys Trump has since nominated to federal judgeships: Amy Coney Barrett, of the Seventh Circuit, and Kyle Duncan, an ADF-allied attorney who has also received grant money from the organization, awaiting confirmation to the Fifth Circuit. (Citing his pending hearing, Duncan declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the Department of Justice, which did not respond to an interview request.) Blackstone Fellows are also placed in internships with prestigious law firms and think tanks.

Although they have since been removed from ADF’s website, testimonials from Blackstone Fellows available as recently as 2014 hint at an ideology firmly opposed to secular government and law. One fellow praised the program for its focus on hewing to the “orthodoxy of our Christendom in order to win back the rule of law.” Another said it “unveiled the scale of the attack against truth, and through awesome presenters, also gave the battle plan and weapons necessary to fight back.” One fellow spoke of being encouraged that “Christ’s Truth will never fail or be defeated. It is these attitudes and practices that I will use in recovering the rule of law in America.”

As ADF has built up its cadre of conservative Christian attorneys, it has also sought to shield them from the profession’s own prohibitions against bias. ADF campaigned against the implementation of a model antidiscrimination rule, added last year by the American Bar Association to prohibit discrimination based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender identity, claiming that it would “censor” attorneys’ speech. This year, ADF provided a grant to the Foundation for Moral Law, the conservative legal-advocacy nonprofit founded by Moore, to study the issue and produce a report.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM—FOR CHRISTIANS ONLY

This burgeoning “legal army” has helped ADF advance its foundational narrative: that conservative Christians, in particular, face persecution in the United States. It was the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that represented the arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby in its successful lawsuit to gain a religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to provide a contraception-coverage benefit. And it was the American Center for Law and Justice that won a major case in 2009 regarding the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. But no organization has played a more pivotal role than ADF in shaping and testing “religious freedom” as the Christian right’s latest legal strategy in the culture wars. And while the Federalist Society has positioned itself as the right’s screening agency for the federal judiciary, no other conservative Christian legal organization has propelled so many attorneys into state and federal government, where they are now in positions to oversee the restructuring of civil-rights and First Amendment law in ADF’s mold.

Although the organization pays lip service to supporting religious freedom for all people, a review of 146 of ADF’s appellate and Supreme Court briefs shows that its attorneys are focused almost exclusively on the religious rights of Christians. ADF filed 23 lawsuits challenging Obamacare’s contraception-coverage benefit, three of which reached the Supreme Court on the merits, including Conestoga Wood, which was consolidated with Hobby Lobby. ADF also took part in 22 cases advocating bans on same-sex marriage, including representing county clerks who objected to marriage equality in Virginia and Oklahoma.

We found just five instances in which ADF’s lawyers weighed in on appellate cases involving religious plaintiffs who were not Christian.

Other cases included the defense of prayer or evangelizing in public schools in New York, Michigan, and California, and the defense of Christian prayers during legislative sessions in Florida, Michigan, Indiana, California, and New York, including an important Supreme Court victory in 2014. ADF has also been an active litigant in the anti-choice movement, defending protesters outside abortion clinics in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, including another Supreme Court victory in 2014. The organization has defended restrictions on abortion like Arizona’s ban on the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy; an “informed consent” law in South Dakota; a late-term abortion ban in Nebraska; and Texas’s HB2, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year. Lately, ADF has also waded into the campus free-speech wars, claiming, for example, that a student counselor at Eastern Michigan University had the right to refuse to counsel LGBTQ clients. The Supreme Court has just agreed to review another ADF case, this one challenging a California law that requires crisis pregnancy centers to inform patients about state programs offering free or low-cost access to abortion, contraception, and prenatal care.

An ADF spokeswoman said the organization “has an extensive record of representing and advocating for non-Christian parties,” including cities, counties, school districts, veteran organizations, and student groups like the College Republicans and Students for Life.

Yet we found just five instances in which ADF’s lawyers weighed in on appellate cases involving religious plaintiffs who were not Christian. In only two of them did ADF express support for the religious-minority plaintiff—once in a case in which a rabbinical organization challenged a public-health regulation on circumcision, and once in support of an Orthodox Jewish day school claiming that a local permitting process violated its religious rights. ADF also weighed in on two cases in support of Muslim prisoners who claimed their religious rights had been violated, but in neither did it address the particular facts of the case, making only arguments about what it considered to be a proper interpretation of the relevant statute and, in one case, how that interpretation would affect Christian organizations.

Most striking was ADF’s amicus brief filed in the challenge to Trump’s second Muslim ban. That brief effectively supported the ban by laying out a case for why the courts should not consider Trump’s own anti-Muslim statements in determining whether the ban violated the US Constitution’s establishment clause, criticizing the district court for inappropriately “combing through a government actor’s tweets.”

The overarching story highlighted in this substantial body of ADF’s briefs—most of which are available in public databases—is the organization’s painstaking construction, case by case and argument by argument, of a legal narrative asserting that Christians are under threat of persecution from the advance of LGBTQ and reproductive rights, as well as from secular schools and universities, and that the law must allow Christians to disregard, disobey, or even dismantle laws protecting those rights in order to protect their own rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

THE “CHRIST-CENTERED” LAWYER

If one law firm in the country embodies the American establishment, it is arguablyJones Day. A powerhouse in Washington, and with thousands of lawyers around the world, including more than 40 former Supreme Court clerks, Jones Day has already funneled at least 14 attorneys into top posts or nominations in the Trump administration. Noel Francisco, Trump’s solicitor general, is a former partner there—and an ADF-affiliated attorney. In September, the firm opened up its expansive seventh-floor conference room, with its unobstructed view of the Capitol, to ADF for a briefing on the Supreme Court’s upcoming term.

ADF’s Kristen Waggoner made use of the occasion to rehearse the arguments she will soon present before the Court. She depicted Phillips, the Colorado baker, as a well-intentioned, pious artist whose rights are being trampled by a government that refuses to privilege the depth of his religious commitments. For Phillips, a cake is a means of artistic expression that carries “spiritual significance to him and to millions of others.” Waggoner insisted that Phillips had not discriminated against LGBTQ people, but rather that creating a cake for the wedding of Charlie Craig and David Mullins would have violated his religious convictions. The case, she said, isn’t “about the who, it’s about the what.”

Waggoner, who practiced law in Seattle for 17 years before joining ADF in 2013, is a graduate of theRegent University School of Law, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson to provide a “Christ-centered” legal education. In an interview with The Nation, Waggoner said that Regent offered her “unique” teaching and an opportunity to study “an originalist perspective on the Constitution” as well as “concepts like religious freedom.” Regent, she said, has produced many of ADF’s “best lawyers.”

While in private practice, Waggoner litigated a protracted case in which she represented a pharmacist who had refused, on religious grounds, to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives like Plan B. She has also long represented Barronelle Stutzman, a florist (or “floral artist”) in Richland, Washington, who was sued for violating the state’s antidiscrimination law when she refused to provide flowers for a gay customer’s wedding. ADF has asked the Supreme Court to review the case.

Waggoner worked alongside ADF on multiple cases, but she only joined its legal staff after she began to witness, in her words, “a government that is becoming far more coercive and less pluralistic.” Not long after she made that decision, in 2014, she told a Southern Baptist Convention conference that nondiscrimination laws were actually being used “to silence Christians, to force them to not live out their convictions” and “instead to cower in silence.”

Waggoner was chosen to argue Masterpiece Cakeshop by ADF’s new president, Michael Farris, a founder of the evangelical Patrick Henry College and the Home School Legal Defense Association, a conservative Christian advocacy group. Farris replaced the retiring Sears as ADF’s president in January. In an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s conservative radio program, Farris described Waggoner as “just dynamite” and expressed confidence that she “will present the argument with real, real aplomb.” Hewitt called Waggoner “an amazing woman” and encouraged his listeners to donate money to ADF.

AN ABOMINATION BEFORE GOD

...

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Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, a right-wing legal association which has been helping Republican presidents and politicians pack the courts, held its “Inaugural Wisconsin Chapters Conference” amid controversy at the Monona Terrace in Madison on May 4, 2018.

Before the Madison event even got underway, a group of 15 Wisconsin judges protested the use of state resources and the awarding of judicial education credits for attendance at an event organized by a “private advocacy group with a definite political agenda,” which featured a speech by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who is up for reelection this year.

The judges wrote to organizers of the event to ask if state money was used for a ACLU event featuring a Democratic candidate, “would the Office of State Courts financially underwrite the event and incentivize judicial attendance with credits towards the judges’ mandatory continuing legal education?”

Judges Protest State Subsidy for a Political Event

The Federalist Society is a considered by many to be a highly partisan political operation. The Federalist Society’s Executive Vice President, Leonard Leo, played a leading role in the nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch and other far-right Trump court picks, and Leo has long been involved in the Judicial Crisis Network, a dark money group that spent millions on TV ads backing the Gorsuch nomination.

But on April 25, 2018, State Appeals Court Judge Brian Hagedorn sent out an email to judges encouraging them to attend the Federalist Society conference. The email indicated that mileage and meals would be reimbursed by the state and that two judicial education credits would be awarded for attendance. The program also indicated that continuing legal education credits would also be awarded to lawyers who attended.

Fifteen Wisconsin judges wrote to Hagedorn and the Judicial Education Committee in protest.

The letter, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), states:

We find it highly inappropriate that the Office of State Courts is spending money on this event. We object that a single appellate judge – apparently a member of the Federalist Society – would broadcast this “invitation” to the bench on state email thus adding subtle pressure on circuit judges to attend. Finally, during an election year, we do not believe it is appropriate for the judicial branch to be underwriting attendance at a private event where the Attorney General, who is on the ballot in a politically partisan race, is the keynote speaker.

Schimel is a member of the Federalist Society and a dark money operation associated with the group aided Schimel’s campaign in 2014. The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo was listed as a director of the Rule of Law Project, which spent $200,000 in support of Schimel late in the 2014 race, prompting a federal complaint by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Schimel also received $2,000 from Leo personally.

Hagedorn was Governor Scott Walker’s chief legal counsel from 2011-2015 when CMD was forced to sue Walker for records related to his controversial changes to the “Wisconsin Idea.” Walker had to be represented by his legal staff after Schimel decided not to defend the governor in the case. CMD ultimately won that suit, proving that the controversial changes were not a “drafting error” as claimed, but originated in Walker’s office.

Hagedorn was a Federalist Society member in college and interned at the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization founded by leaders of the Christian Right. Today, it is called the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and members of this group were also at the event. Hagedorn is also reportedly planning a run for the Wisconsin Supreme Court against long-time Justice Shirley Abrahamson.

“The independence of the judiciary has been under especially heavy attack over the last decade from many sources,” the judges wrote. “The last thing the Office of State Courts should be doing is contributing to the problem by politicizing our judicial training.”

CMD confirmed with the Wisconsin Court System that the judges did in fact receive taxpayer money to attend, but was not given the details as to what exactly was covered.

Schimel Campaigns, Embraces Anti-LGBT Hate Group

The judges’ concerns about the political nature of the state-subsidized event proved to be justified.

To large applause, keynote speaker Brad Schimel took the mic in front of the backdrop of Lake Monona to promote his work over the last three and a half years and to thank attendees for their involvement in the Federalist Society.

Schimel kicked off his presentation by reminding the audience that “it is an election year.” He then catalogued his accomplishments in a campaign-like speech:

Act 10 still fighting, two months ago another lawsuit filed against Act 10, voter ID of course still fighting, Right to Work,still fighting sort of, mostly won on that one. The redistricting thing, we thought we’d have a decision in February and now we don’t know but quite a battle and I’m very proud of the team. They really shined at the United States Supreme Court.

That Supreme Court case was Gil vs. Whitford. The U.S. Federal Court for the Western District of Wisconsin decided that Wisconsin Republicans had engaged in such egregious, hyper-partisan gerrymandering after the 2010 census that new maps must be drawn. The case is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and Schimel has spent hundreds of thousands in taxpayer money hiring outside lawyers to help with that case.

Schimel also discussed the “regulatory certainty” he helped to create while in office that led to companies like Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics company, setting up business in the state. Previously, Schimel boasted of being the “bag man”for Governor Walker’s efforts to stifle regulations from multiple agencies at the Republican Attorneys General Association conference in January, according to a report by Maplight.

Notably, Schimel’s opponent in the November 2018 race, attorney Josh Kaul, was not invited to speak, his office reports.

Schimel concluded by recognizing his “friend from the Alliance Defending Freedom” in the room and stating that his time spent at the ADF’s conference last year was “some of the best time I ever spent.” One Wisconsin Now, a liberal advocacy group, pointed out that the conference was at a luxury resort in California and is demanding information about that trip.

“Brad Schimel needs to come clean on why, in his official capacity as Attorney General of the state of Wisconsin, he took over $4,100 for first class travel and accommodations to appear before a hate group,” said Executive Director Scot Ross, who wants Schimel’s office make his remarks publicly available.

Alliance Defending Freedom Participates in State-Supported Conference

The Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) group applauded by Schimel has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors neo-Nazi and other extremist groups.

SPLC reports that the ADF has “supported the recriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and claims that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society.”

Jordan Lorence, Senior Counsel at ADF, attempted to make the case that Christianity is under attack in America and defended businesses that want to discriminate against LGBT people for religious reasons in his discussion of ADF’s lawsuit pending before the U.S. Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The case involves a cake maker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

Republicans Make the Best Judicial Appointments

The Federalist Society event’s partisan nature was evident in panel discussions as well. The main takeaway in the panel “State and Federal Judicial Selection” was clearly that Republicans choose better judges. Carrie Severino, Chief Counsel and Policy Director for the Judicial Crisis Network, praised Trump over and over for his judicial nominations and blamed the Democrats for not confirming his nominees.

Severino, of course, made no mention of the fact that GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell orchestrated a two-year slowdown of judicial confirmations before Trump took office that left him with more than 100 seats to fill, or his unprecedented refusal to hold a confirmation vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

The Judicial Crisis Network received over $6.7 million from the mysterious Wellspring Committee in 2014 and funneled that money into judicial campaigns and elections and other activities.

Walker’s Chief Legal Counsel Katie Ignatowski was given ample time on the panel to let lawyers and judges in the room know what they need to do to get a judicial appointment or nomination from the governor, including to “be in organizations like the Federalist Society.” Around 25 percent of seated judges in Wisconsin have been appointed by Walker, Ignatowski noted.

Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Diane Sykes, Wisconsin Supreme Court Judges Rebecca Bradley and Daniel Kelly, and Trump’s highly controversial nominee for the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, Michael Brennan, were all in attendance at the inaugural event.

The Federalist Society has received millions in funding from right-wing foundations, including the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, the Koch family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, among others.

The program for the event is embedded belo

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/10/judges-object-state-funds-federalist-society-brad-schimel-hate-group

==

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/alliance-defending-freedom

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/alliance-defense-fund

==

  1. Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund)

Revenue: $35,145,644

The ADF may have changed its name, but it still promotes a familiar Religious Right agenda. The Arizona-based organization, which was founded by far-right TV and radio preachers, attacks church-state separation, blasts gay rights, assails reproductive freedom and seeks to saturate the public schools with its narrow version of fundamentalism. In recent years, the ADF, headed by Ed Meese acolyte Alan Sears, has worked aggressively to overturn a federal law that bars tax-exempt churches and other nonprofits from intervening in partisan elections. The group says church-state separation is not in the Constitution and calls the church-state wall “fictitious.”

 ==

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alliance_Defense_Fund

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) was founded in 1994 by more than 30 Christian ministries, as a response to the American Civil Liberties Union, to defend "family values." ADF's major focus is strategizing and coordinating with hundreds of lawyers and right-wing groups to defend what they define as "Christian legal issues." Examples include anti-gay cases like Boy Scouts of America v. Dale and Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network, and a national strategy to "protect marriage," following Vermont's decision to allow same-sex civil unions. People for the American Way notes that ADF's founding groups "are influential members of the Right, they are pro-life and anti-gay and their ultimate goal is to see the law and government of the US enshrined with conservative Christian principles." In 2004, ADF's total revenue was $17,921,146 (fiscal year ended June 2004), with net assets of $20,581,560. [1]

"In 1994, ADF solicited funds on Christian radio with an ad claiming, 'Pro-life demonstrations may soon be illegal. ... Religious broadcasting may soon be censored. Hiring homosexuals in Christian schools, churches, and even as Sunday School teachers may soon become the law of the land. ... Don't let Christianity become a crime' ... In 2003, ADF President, CEO, and General Counsel Alan Sears and ADF Vice President Craig Osten "expanded on that theme" in The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, "which ties homosexuality to pedophilia and other "disordered sexual behavior," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2005.

ADF claims a high success rate in their legal challenges: "God has granted wins in almost three out of four cases decided (John 15:5). Cases that strengthen our position in the battle for religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values." [2]

In its 2007 fiscal year, ADF spent $3,951,791 on direct litigation, according to Guidestar.[1]

Contents

Programs

According to its website[3], ADF runs six programs:

National Litigation Academy: Training Lawyers

"What motivated D. James Kennedy and other conservatives—including James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family and William Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ—to form the ADF was the impression that Christians were losing too many such battles," Peter Slevin wrote in the July 10, 2006, Washington Post.

"'It was just years of seeing the ACLU and its cronies attacking religious organizations or religious exercise,' Kennedy said. 'And, very frequently, there was nobody that even showed up to defend the Christian position.'

"To change the equation, the alliance hired Reagan-era prosecutor Alan Sears. He later brought in corporate lawyer Jeffery Ventrella. Mostly under Ventrella's watch, the ADF has schooled more than 800 outside lawyers, each promising to donate 450 hours to the cause."

Against student fees

ADF has been involved in several university cases. In 1998, ADF filed a lawsuit claiming that religious groups at Ohio's Miami University did not have equal access to university funding and facilities. The Center for Campus Free Speech warned: "this attempt to ensure 'equal access' for all voices could be overshadowed by the broader strategy behind this case. It is an effort to limit debate on campus that is being driven by the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). ADF is the right-wing legal foundation that is backing this suit and similar cases in Wisconsin and Minnesota attacking mandatory student fees.ADF's literature claims their lawsuits will 'eliminate millions of dollars from those who oppose biblical values, religious freedom, and the spread of the gospel'. They hope to forward their own political cause by dismantling student activities fees."[5] Other groups that have used legal challenges in an attempt to limit the use of student fees include the Pacific Legal Foundation and Individual Rights Foundation.[6]

Cupertino case -- the "banning" of the Declaration of Independence

On November 22, 2004, ADF lawyers filed suit on behalf of Stephen Williams against the Cupertino Union School District in Cupertino, California. Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek Elementary School, had been told not to use class handouts that proselytized for Christianity. His suit alleged that his First Amendment rights had been violated. Because one of his handouts included excerpts from the Declaration of Independence making reference to God, the ADF's press release about the case was headlined "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom". Fox News and other conservative outlets gave heavy play to that distorted version of the story. [7] Alan Keyes also repeated ADF's spin: "Someone was mentioning to me that there is a school district now in America where they will no longer teach the Declaration of Independence to the students. Why? Because it mentions God. ... [N]ow we’re being told that on account of some doctrine that has been promulgated by the courts, it is now unconstitutional to teach our children about the Declaration." [8] The truth, as pointed out in an answering press release from the school district, was that "The Declaration of Independence, sections of the United States Constitution, and other historical documents are re-printed in our textbooks, displayed in some of our school buildings, and taught in our social studies curriculum and lessons."

ADF encourages spiritual leaders to endorse candidates from the pulpit

In September, 2008 the ADF organized "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," which it described as "a legal effort designed to secure the First Amendment rights of pastors in the pulpit." Pulpit Freedom Sunday is associated with the ADF Pulpit Initiative. [9]

ADF encouraged the participating religious figures to send copies of their sermons to the Internal Revenue Service, in hopes of inducing a challenge to the law barring religious organizations and other nonprofit groups that accept tax-deductible contributions from using their affiliation with the nonprofit to intervene or attempt to influence partisan political campaigns. [2]

The ADF claimed that the event was needed "to restore the rights of pastors to speak freely from the pulpit without fear of punishment by the government for doing what churches do: speak on any number of cultural and societal issues from a biblical perspective." [10] ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley claimed that "ADF is not trying to get politics into the pulpit. Churches can decide for themselves that they either do or don’t want their pastors to speak about electoral candidates. The point of the Pulpit Initiative is very simple: the IRS should not be the one making the decision by threatening to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status. We need to get the government out of the pulpit." [11]

Founders

Staff

Tobacco document information

Two ADF founders, Bill Bright and James C. Dobson, appears on a list of religious leaders who "respect the views" of the tobacco industry that was found in the Philip Morris documents. The document was found in the files of Howard Liebengood of Philip Morris. [3]

Board

Accessed July 2012: [4]

Board of Directors (2006)

The following list of the Board of Directors is current as of July 10, 2006: [12]

Funding

Contact Information

Alliance Defense Fund

15333 N. Pima Road, Suite 165

Scottsdale AZ 85260

Phone: 1-800-TELL-ADF

Website: http://www.alliancedefensefund.org

Website: AllianceAlert.org

Related SourceWatch Resources

External links

Profiles

2004

2005

2006

References

Categories:

==

Founded by a group of high-profile Religious Right leaders such as D. James Kennedy and James Dobson, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) sees itself as a counter to the ACLU. As a legal group, it assists and augments the efforts of other right-wing groups to "keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel." The ADF has been active on issues including pushing "marriage protection," exposing the "homosexual agenda" and fighting the supposed "war on Christmas."

Alliance Defense Fund

15333 N. Pima Road - Suite 165

Scottsdale AZ 85260

Website: www.alliancedefensefund.org

Founders: Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts; Rev. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Rev. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media; Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Association; and 25+ other ministries.

Founded: 1994

President and General Counsel: Alan Sears

Officers, Directors, Trustees, and Key Employees: Alan Sears, Wayne N. Swindler, Marv McCarthy

Other Staff: 38 employees

Finances: $15,744,101 (2003 budget)

Major Donors: Bill and Berniece Grewcock Foundation, Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Bradley Foundation.

Read the latest news on the Alliance Defense Fund on the group's Right Wing Watch index page

Principal Issues

Background

Alan Sears' Background

Alan Sears was the Executive Director of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography under President Ronald Reagan. Sears was a federal prosecutor for former Secretary of Interior Don Hodel (former Christian Coalition President), and has produced several anti-gay works, such as The Homosexual Agenda in paperback, and Exposing the Homosexual Agenda on broadcast cassette.

Quotes

"The Alliance Defense Fund is a servant organization that provides the resources that will keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel through the legal defense and advocacy of religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values."

– The Alliance Defense Fund website, February 2006

Updated: August 2006

==

Alliance Defense Fund

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Christ died so we could write articles on

**Christianity**
A multi-chef broth
Devil's in the details
The pearly gates

:{v:(style="color:"):}: - :{t:(style="color:"):}: - :{e:(style="color:"):}:
“”...their (The ADF's) ultimate goal is to see the law and U.S. government enshrined with conservative Christian principles
—[1][2]

The Alliance Defense Fund (apparently now renamed the Alliance Defending Freedom) is a right wing religious legal group with an income of nearly $40 million in 2010.

Contents [hide]

[edit] Aims

The ADF is dedicated to:

[edit] Analysis

The group was conceived as a conservative counter to the ACLU. They have, on occasion, done some good -- if self-serving -- work for Christian groups that are unfairly prevented from using school property by officials who don't understand the Establishment Clause. But, then again, so has the ACLU.[5]

On the other hand, they have helped defend the right of the Boy Scouts of America to discriminate against gays. The very nature of their mission runs counter to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States.

Starting in 2008, they have cajoled right-wing pastors into observing Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an intentional violation of the tax-exempt status of those pastors' churches.[6]

Incidentally Bill O'Reilly likes them.[7]

[edit] Funding

Major donors include James Leininger, Erik Prince, Bill and Bradley Foundation, Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Berniece Grewcock Foundation, and the Bolthouse Foundation which insists that "man was created by a direct act of God in His image, not from previously existing creatures" [8] [9]

[edit] International impact

The Christian Legal Centre is a British organization suspected of receiving funding from the ADF. The CLC and ADF jointly set up the UK based Wilberforce Academy which tries to train Christians as public leaders. Overall the Christian Legal Centre is less successful than the ADF claims to be.

[edit] Future

The Christian Legal Centre has lost a high proportion of the cases taken on,[citation needed] while the ADF claims a high success rate.[10] Polling evidence suggests that the percentage of Christians in the United States falls by about 1% yearly. As the proportion of Christians continues to decline the culture in the United States is likely to more closely resemble that of Britain making it harder for the ADF to win cases.

[edit] Moment of supreme irony

In April 2013 ADF attorney Lisa Biron was found guilty of child pornography when she filmed her own 14-year-old daughter having sex with two men on multiple occasions and the ADF moved swiftly to whitewash their connection to Biron by removing mention of her on the ADF web site and Facebook page.[11] Biron got 40 years in prison. [12]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/alliance-defense-fund
  2. ↑ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alliance_Defense_Fund
  3. ↑ http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/christianity/christian-brian-johnson-sues-hand-out-bibles-gay-pride-rally
  4. ↑ If successful this could set a precedent allowing secularists to hand out material by authors like Richard Dawkins at Christian events. Can these Christians think things through? [1]
  5. ↑ http://www.aclufightsforchristians.com/
  6. ↑ No Theocracy, Thanks
  7. ↑ What is the Alliance Defense Fund, and why does Bill O'Reilly advocate donating to it?
  8. ↑ Christian Legal Centre fights more than 50 religious discrimination cases
  9. ↑ Alliance Defense Fund
  10. ↑ The Work of Alliance Defending Freedom where in 2015, they claim "80% of all cases litigated have been won" and "38 U.S. Supreme Court victories"
  11. ↑ Anti-gay activist lawyer guilty of child pornography after videotaping daughter, Salon
  12. ↑ Former Manchester lawyer sentenced to 40 years for producing child pornography

Categories:

==

BS

Legal Organizations

American Freedom Law Center

American Freedom Law Center

American Liberties Institute

American Liberties Institute

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Susan B. Anthony List

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The Colson Center for Christian Worldview

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The Claremont Institute

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img-OnlineForLife

Online For Life

Donate to help ADF defend people like you.

Join our Newsletter and always stay up to date.

Seth Morgan

Board Member

http://www.adflegal.org/

Alan Sears

President, CEO, and General Counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom |

Alan Sears leads the efforts of ADF through a comprehensive legal strategy that includes training, funding, and legal advocacy that has resulted in various important roles in 47 victories at the United States Supreme Court and in three out of four cases.

BS

Alan Sears serves as President, CEO, and General Counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).  He leads the efforts of ADF through a comprehensive legal strategy that includes training, funding, and legal advocacy that has resulted in various important roles in 47 victories at the United States Supreme Court and in three out of four cases.

Since the launch of ADF in 1994, Sears has provided strategic leadership in the training of 1,845 lawyers from 44 nations through the one-of-a-kind ADF Legal Academy.  These attorneys have provided more than $193 million in pro-bono/dedicated time.  His visionary efforts have also resulted in the graduation of more than 1,600 outstanding law students, representing more than 200 law schools from 20 nations from the world-class Blackstone Legal Fellowship leadership training program.

Sears earned his Juris Doctor from Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.  While serving in numerous positions within theReagan and Bush Administrations, he worked for the Department of Justice under Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese III,including service as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and Chief of the Criminal Section.  Sears was appointed as Director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and served as Associate Solicitor with the Department of Interior under Secretary Donald Hodel.

A graduate of the University of Kentucky, Sears has continued his education with professional instruction at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and Pepperdine University.

He has co-authored several books, including The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Todayand The ACLU vs. America,both with Craig Osten. His most recent books are In Justiceand Trial and Error.

Founders

Alliance Defending Freedom was created by a group of visionary Christian leaders with a mission to reverse the growing threat to religious freedom. The great work of our founders continues through our allies and attorneys worldwide.

Learn more about

Marlin Maddoux

Marlin Maddoux

Founder

Learn more about

Dr. James C. Dobson

Dr. James C. Dobson

Founder

Learn more about

Dr. D. James Kennedy

Dr. D. James Kennedy

Founder

Learn more about

Dr. Bill Bright

Dr. Bill Bright

Founder

Learn more about

Larry Burkett

Larry Burkett

Founder

Board of Directors

Our Board brings skill and diversity to the work of Alliance Defending Freedom. These faithful leaders serve on a volunteer basis.

Learn more about

Terry Schlossberg

Terry Schlossberg

Board Chairman

Learn more about

John Rogers

John Rogers

Board Member

Learn more about

Charles W. Pickering, Sr.

Charles W. Pickering, Sr.

Board Member

Learn more about

Tom Minnery

Tom Minnery

Board Vice Chairman

Learn more about

Mark Maddoux

Mark Maddoux

Board Secretary

Learn more about

Richard Korpan

Richard Korpan

Board Member

Learn more about

Marjorie Dannenfelser

Marjorie Dannenfelser

Board Member

Learn more about

Alfonso Aguilar

Alfonso Aguilar

Board Member

Learn more about

Chapman B. Cox

Chapman B. Cox

Board Member

Learn more about

C. Bradley Keirnes

C. Bradley Keirnes

Board Member

Learn more about

Seth Morgan

bs

Travis Barham serves as litigation staff counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom at its Regional Service Center in Georgia, where he litigates to preserve religious freedom and freedom of speech on college and university campuses across the nation. Barham joined Alliance Defending Freedom in 2006 and is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the 4th, 7th and 11th Circuits, and the state of Arizona. He is also admitted to federal district courts in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Barham has practiced law since 2006 and earned his J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law, where he graduated summa cum laude.

 ===

CDR rogers client

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/

The 800-Pound Gorilla Of The Christian Right

BY JOSH ISRAEL MAY 1, 2014 9:00 AM

NO links

The Alliance Defending Freedom wants to take America back to the 3rd century. Literally. On the website for its legal fellowship program, the organization explains that it “seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.”

“This is catholic, universal orthodoxy and it is desperately crucial for cultural renewal,” the explanation goes on. “Christians must strive to build glorious cultural cathedrals, rather than shanty tin sheds.”

While the Arizona-based organization has not made much progress in its mission of restoring the religious sentiments of the Byzantine Era, it has built a massive “legal ministry,” relying on 21st century attorneys and an eight-figure annual budget to reshape American law and society.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2012 and ruled that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages in 2013, dozens of legal challenges have been filed around the country over questions of whether insurance plans must provide contraception, whether states must allow equal access to marriage, and whether people with religious objections to birth control and homosexuality can opt-out of complying with those laws. In case after case, one organization has been at the helm of defending the Christian conservative position.

Many first heard of ADF earlier this year, when news reports identified it as one of the primary forces behind SB 1062, the vetoed Arizona bill that would have allowed businesses and individuals an exemption from LGBT nondiscrimination laws if complying would violate their “sincerely held” religious beliefs. That particular bill generated national outrage, but it was merely the latest effort in a decades-long effort by ADF, a tax-exempt organization committed to protecting the “God-given, constitutionally protected right to religious freedom” for Christians. Indeed, an ADF lawyer recently told a group of students that those who refuse to serve gay clients are modern-day heroes, like Rosa Parks’ civil disobedience in opposition to racial segregation.

Who exactly is the Alliance Defending Freedom? How did it become the go-to group for the Christian right’s cause?

Formed two decades ago, the Arizona-based ADF has used its steadily-growing resources to advance a conservative evangelical Christian legal agenda, fighting against what it calls the “concocted” “constitutional ‘right’ to abortion,” laws that promote “social approval of homosexual behavior,” and the “myth of the so-called ‘separation of church and state.'” ADF has had a hand in many of the most prominent legal battles of the past 20 years. In some cases, such as the Citizens United v. FEC, that consisted of filing an amicus brief in opposition to the challenged campaign finance restrictions. In others, including Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (which affirmed the right of St. Patrick’s Day Parade organizers in Boston to exclude LGBT groups) and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (which affirmed the right of some private organizations to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation), ADF provided funding and/or organized moot court preparations for the attorneys handling the cases. In the high profile Terri Schiavo case, ADF reportedly gave six-figure funding to the attorney representing her parents in their efforts to keep Schiavo on life support.

As it has grown enormously, other similar organizations have seen their own finances stagnate or have withdrawn from the legal arena entirely. And while ADF’s success has been mixed, allies and opponents alike agree that it has become the most powerful force fighting for its agenda.

Fending Off The ACLU

On January 21, 1994, a group — then called the Alliance Defense Fund, Inc. — circulated a press release announcing its formation. The new organization, formed by several of the nation’s largest evangelical Christian ministries, said it would “press the case for religious liberty issues in the nation’s courts” and “fend-off growing efforts by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which seek to immobilize Christians.” ADF promised it would “organize a network of local volunteer attorneys in communities nationwide” and distributed its funds to the public-interest law firms already at work on the defense of “the right of religious people to participate in public life, the freedoms of Christian students in public schools; defense of churches and ministries from threats to their tax-exempt status; protections for public displays of religion; and the defense of the unborn.”

Alan Sears

The founding board and original funders of the group included several of the nation’s most prominent conservative Christians: James Dobsonof Focus on the Family, Larry Burkett of Crown Financial Ministries, Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ, D. James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, and radio host Marlin Maddoux. Alan Sears, ADF’s president then and now, was a Reagan appointee and served as executive director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography under Ed Meese. Kennedy explained in 2006 that he and his colleagues had been motivated by “years of seeing the ACLU and its cronies attacking religious organizations or religious exercise,” while “very frequently, there was nobody that even showed up to defend the Christian position.’’

The group’s ambitious plans included three things: strategic coordination for the Christian legal community, training an army of Christian lawyers, and funding goals of raising $1 million in 1994, $6 million in 1995, and $25 million by 1997. It would distribute the money to those Christian lawyers around the country, in the form of grants, so they could counter the ACLU and its ilk.

Many of the existing organizations and law firms enthusiastically signed on to the idea. But one group had its doubts, even from the earliest stages. The conservative Rutherford Institute, perhaps best known for its representation of Paula Jones in her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, emerged as an early and consistent critic of ADF.

John W. WhiteheadJohn W. Whitehead

John W. Whitehead, Rutherford’s founder and president, told ThinkProgress that Tom Minnery, an ADF board member and high-ranking executive at Dobson’s Focus on the Family, visited him around the time of the Alliance’s formation to invite his group to join. “I told him I thought it was a vehicle to raise money,” Whitehead recalled, “I believe if you’re gonna be in this area, if you’re defending poor people, you shouldn’t be making money off it. Jesus was an itinerant preacher who was homeless. The guy that kept the money [Judas] turned out to be a government informant.”

Whitehead said that, because his group declined to join, it was blackballed by the ADF leadership — like an Amish shunning. “We got shunned right away. We were told straight-up we wouldn’t be mentioned in any of [Focus on the Family’s] publications.” Between 2000 and 2013, Rutherford’s fundraising dropped nearly 50 percent; ADF’s more than doubled. An ADF spokesman declined to comment on Whitehead’s recollections; Minnery did not immediately respond to a ThinkProgress inquiry about the matter.

I believe if you’re gonna be in this area, if you’re defending poor people, you shouldn’t be making money off it. Jesus was an itinerant preacher who was homeless.

Beyond just the financial aspect, the Rutherford Institute worried about ADF’s centralized operation. “The model I liked best was a decentralized model where people would donate their time,” Whitehead explained, but ADF had a “large bureaucratic structure” which he believes killed “the volunteer lawyer base” doing the legal work pro bono. “I told them don’t pay, make them give back,” he adds. His recollection is confirmed by a 1994 article about ADF’s formation, which noted that Rutherford “has voiced qualms about the centralized funding and coordination of Christian legal work – and not just because the ADF will direct no money its way. Rutherford’s western regional director, Brad Dacus, says that the ADF’s grantmaking review board will create an unnecessary and expensive bureaucracy with no sure way for donors to know how their money is spent.” Greg Scott, ADF’s vice president of communications told ThinkProgress that “ADF strives to be a careful steward of the resources graciously provided by our supporters. We voluntarily adhere to [Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability] standards, submit to regular independent audits, and spend only 7.2 percent on administration.”

But while Rutherford did not align itself with ADF, many of the other groups did. And as the Alliance’s fundraising and size exploded, one former ADF legal fellow observed, others involved in Christian conservative legal work would soon have little choice but to form an outwardly-idyllic “Donna Reed marriage” with it.

“We’ll do it for free—if you give us your money”

Though ADF’s early money came from its founders, soon supporters around the country were enlisted to “stand with” them.

ADF has been very successful at raising money from conservative Christian foundations. A ThinkProgress review of IRS filings posted by public.resource.org and searched via CitizenAudit, revealed a few million dollars worth of the organization’s supporters. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, funded by the billionaire founder of Amway and owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team, gave ADF at least $235,000 in unrestricted grants between 2001 and 2010. God’s Gift, the foundation run until her death this year by former medical supply company CEO Helen Lovaas, gave ADF $1 million between 2010 and 2012. The eponymous foundation of the late Southern Maryland Hospital Center founder, Dr. Francis P. Chiaramonte, gave ADF $75,000 annually between 2009 and 2012. And between 2010 and 2012, ADF received $150,000 from the Edgar & Elsa Prince Foundation, another DeVos-family-connected entity.

ADF_graphics-07

But ADF has shattered its founders’ original $25 million annual fundraising goal, raising $38,943,749 in the 2012 to 2013 fiscal year. While $7.7 million of that came from one unnamed supporter, more than $15 million came from an extensive direct-mail program. ADF’s Scott noted that the organization’s donor bill of rights includes a pledge not to disclose the identity of donors, but said that it “receives donations from tens of thousands of people each year who believe that religious freedom deserves the vigorous defense ADF provides.”

Rob BostonRob Boston

Rob Boston, who as director of communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State has often been on the opposite side of ADF on issues, said in an interview with ThinkProgress that the battle over LGBT rights and same-sex marriage has been a “cash-cow” for the Alliance and similar groups. “If you read their emails, their magazines, go to events, you hear a constant message of ‘we’re under attack, under siege, being persecuted,'” he explained. “It works, motivates people to give, makes them afraid, causes them to reach for checkbooks or credit card.” ADF did more than just raise the specter of a “homosexual agenda” — its president, Alan Sears, actually authored a book called The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today. The group made his treatise available to scared heterosexuals for a suggested $15 donation.

A December 2013 fundraising appeal warned of the Obama administration’s “anti-Christian agenda,” of “advocates of homosexual behavior,” “pro-abortion activists,” and “radical atheists,” and of Christians being “told to sit down, shut up, or be punished.” Noting three “inspiring stories of courageous Christians who took a stand for their faith with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom,” the plea continued:

If Alliance Defending Freedom had not been able to come to their defense, who would have been there to protect them? Right now, thousands of Christians who have been silenced or punished for attempting to freely live out their faith are praying for help that you can provide. Please be as generous as you can, and give a tax-deductible gift by December 31.

According to ADF, tens of thousands of people have responded to these and other contribution requests annually — and with that money has come more influence. Boston noted that with its growing financial reach, ADF is able to pay for the legal representation for litigants who it thinks “have a decent shot at winning” in cases relating to its area of focus: merging their “extremely narrow version of fundamentalist Christianity with power of state, and force everyone to live under that reality.” Many of ADF’s supporters fondly remember a time in the 1950s, Boston said, “when there was sort of a de facto rule of Christianity in country, before Griswold, when there was censorship of films and books, when women were kept on a tight leash and controlled because male-dominated religions didn’t want them in the work force, when gay people were so deep in the closet they’d never think of emerging.” And, he added, winning cases allows ADF to point to their victories to raise even more money, meaning they essentially can tell prospective donors: “Finally someone’s gonna stand up to the ACLU, to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to the secularist bullies. We’ll do it for free — if you give us your money.”

But, as Jennifer C. Pizer, director of Lambda Legal’s law and policy project, told ThinkProgress, even when ADF loses, that too can be an effective for fundraising messaging. By highlighting their defeats they can advance a “victim narrative,” she noted, which she believes “resonates with reactionary parts of our society.” While ADF is losing more and more of its LGBT rights cases, she laments, “They are succeeding in hardening that base of resentment against LGBT inclusion and building their own financial resources.” After the Supreme Court refused to hear ADF’s appeal in the one recent case, the group asked supporters to donate immediately to help it ensure that “no matter how long it takes – ultimately, freedom wins.” ADF’s Scott conceded that, with the question possibly going before the Supreme Court, the “current state of marriage litigation is an area of concern.”

Between July 2002 and June 2003, ADF raised an impressive $15.5 million. In November of 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples were guaranteed the freedom to marry. ADF denounced the “extremely disturbing” images of “homosexual couples receiving pseudo-‘marriages'” — and raised $17.7 million, $21.6 million, $25.3 million, and then $30.6 million in the years that followed.

But Boston noted, as ADF grew to be the movement’s “800 pound gorilla,” other groups doing similar work found themselves struggling for oxygen.

Muscling out all the other groups

The Rutherford Institute, which expressed early concern about ADF, was not the only conservative legal organization whose finances took a hit as the Alliance’s exploded. Groups like the Thomas More Law Center, the Traditional Values Coalition’s Education and Legal Institute, Concerned Women for America, and the Foundation for Moral Law all saw their annual fundraising decline or stagnate after the year 2000.

Joseph R. Murray IIJoseph R. Murray II

Joseph R. Murray II, who left a long career in religious law to become a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, told ThinkProgress that he began his career as one of ADF’s inaugural class of Blackstone Legal Fellows in the summer of 2000. As part of that program, he was assigned to work at the American Family Association’s Center for Law and Policy. After law school, Murray said, he joined the Center full-time and was kicked out of the Blackstone program over his unwillingness to sign a loyalty oath (he objected to his likeness being used in ADF promotional materials). ADF’s Scott responded to the claim, noting that “the Blackstone Legal Fellowship began and continues with an aspirational notion that Fellows will voluntarily maintain and enjoy, not a mere status, but a life-long relationship. About 95 per cent of the law students trained opt in at the end of the training phase to enjoy that privilege. If a student’s views diverge, they are free to voluntarily disassociate, though this is quite rare.”

Murray said the Alliance gobbled up smaller Christian law firms and hired lawyers away from competitor organizations. As ADF expanded its financial reach, it also started to get the bulk of the prominent litigants. “You’re only as good as your last case,” he explained, “That’s what you fund-raise on: ‘Here I am battling this evil judge who’s abusing power… I’m the last wall between you and judicial oligarchy.'” In the “mad dash” to get the cases that would “get the rank-and-file all revved up,” Murray said ADF increasingly garnered the most high-profile ones — and “if you didn’t have cases, you really didn’t have the ability to fund-raise.”

Murray recalled that there was significant resentment at the American Family Association for ADF, and disagreement about where it was “taking the movement.” And, he recounted, with ADF winning, “AFA shut down its law center” in 2007. Interestingly, the Association’s fundraising, which had been on the decline since 2001, jumped more than 64 percent in that year’s IRS filing as it refocused on other work.

ADF_graphics-06

Relations between the AFA and ADF appear to be cordial today. Bryan Fischer, the Association’s director of issue analysis for government and public policy, told ThinkProgress in an email, “We have nothing but the highest regard for ADF and their work. They are doing an outstanding job of defending the very first unalienable right the Founders included in the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of religious exercise,” adding, “If their funding is growing, it’s because more and more Americans recognize the indispensable nature of the work they are doing.”

Brian Tashman, a researcher at People for the American Way who tracks ADF and other groups for Right Wing Watch, concurred with Murray’s overall assessment that the Alliance’s growth coincided with some other similar groups’ decline. “Alliance Defending Freedom has clearly become the behemoth in the Religious Right’s effort to defeat gay rights and reproductive rights in the courts,” he told ThinkProgress, noting, “ADF has managed to build a lucrative model of stoking fear of religious persecution at the hand of gays and ‘big government.’ There’s plenty of funding out there for such groups, but ADF has clearly cornered the market.”

Alliance Defending Freedom has clearly become the behemoth in the Religious Right’s effort to defeat gay rights and reproductive rights in the courts.

Able to selectively pick cases, ADF now boasts that its attorneys win eight of every ten cases they litigate completion.

An 80 Percent Success Rate?

Though it began as mostly a grant-making body (nearly $40 million since its inception), ADF now employs a large cadre of in-house lawyers. Nearly $18 million of its $38 million budget last year went to salaries and benefits, compared to about $4.2 million in grants to allies. A dozen employees received more than $200,000 each in salaries and other benefits ($407,559 for president, CEO, and general counsel Alan Sears, $326,820 for chief counsel Benjamin Bull, $248,930 for executive vice president Wayne Swindler, and $232,350 for senior counsel Jordan Lorence.) The organization says it currently employs about 180 employees, nearly 50 of whom are attorneys.

This large group of lawyers now allows ADF to directly represent actual litigants. In California, ADF attorneys represented ProtectMarriage.com, the proponents of Proposition 8 who sought to defend the constitutionality of their 2008 ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in court. Because the state government declined to offer a defense, ADF argued that supporters of the ban had legal standing to do so — and that such a ban would promote the “responsible procreation” required for the survival of the human species. Liberty Counsel, another Christian legal group that opposes same-sex marriage, publicly criticized ADF for its handling of the case at the District Court level — and after ADF’s legal arguments failed to sway an appeals court, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected its claim of having legal standing to appeal at all.

Despite their failure to maintain California’s same-sex marriage ban, ADF is currently leading the effort to defend other states’ prohibitions. In Oklahoma, it is representing the Tulsa County Clerk who does not want to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In Virginia, the Alliance is playing a similar role on behalf of Prince William County’s Clerk of the Circuit Court. Those cases are now before courts of appeals after district courts ruled both bans unconstitutional. And in recent weeks, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne (R) appointed four ADF attorneys to be “Special Assistant Attorneys General” to help his office defend against two challenges to that state’s ban.

A spokeswoman for Horne told ThinkProgress, “The ADF attorneys are experts in the field and have extensive litigation experience with these particular marriage-related claims. They will coordinate closely with the Assistant Attorney Generals who have been working on these cases to date, and who will continue working on them.” She added that the ADF attorneys were serving at “at no cost to Arizona taxpayers,” and that Horne, “while relying on the ADF attorneys’ expertise and experience, retains the decision-making authority in the case.”

ADF is also actively involved in an array of challenges to the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Most notably, it represents Conestoga Wood Specialties, a family-owned company whose owners say providing contraception benefits would violate their religious beliefs. That case, consolidated together with a similar challenge by the Hobby Lobby company, is currently awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

It has also launched a project called “Pretty Ugly,” aimed at “exposing the truth and combating the evils” of Planned Parenthood. A former Planned Parenthood Federation of America official told ThinkProgress that while it’s “not like they haven’t had any victories,” ADF has not yet had “good case to sink their teeth into” on abortion rights and their attempt to find former Planned Parenthood “whistleblowers” has thus far not been very successful. She noted that Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, is a current ADF board member.

Of late, ADF has been doing more international work as well. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted ADF’s work providing legal advice and other support to preserve a law in Belize criminalizing sodomy. ADF representatives also reportedly have advised supporters of Russia’s anti-gay legislation.

Jennifer C. PizerJennifer C. Pizer

Much of the Alliance’s other recent work has focused on attempts to establish a right of companies to circumvent nondiscrimination protections for LGBT individuals and couples based on their religious objections. Lambda Legal’s Pizer frames this as a “game plan with a central focus on use of religion to empower discrimination, secure a right to discriminate.” She believes that ADF and its allies recognize they’re going to lose the fight over whether same-sex couples can legally marry and are “attempting to build a legal foundation for what happens after that. That has been the use of religion to demand exemption from [nondiscrimination] laws that apply to everyone.”

But Pizer said ADF’s claim of 80 percent success in cases litigated to completion “inspires significant skepticism,” as many cases “aren’t litigated to a final judgment.” As an example, she noted that she worked on the opposite site of a case in which the Alliance represented doctors who refused to provide fertility treatments to a patient because she was a lesbian. After seven years of litigation, the California Supreme Court sided with Pizer’s client on the principal legal issue of the case — and then a settlement was reached. “Many of the discrimination cases, they often litigate to a legal ruling of some kind,” she explained, but settle rather than spending the time and money needed for a damages trial. ADF’s spokesman clarified that most of its cases are litigated to conclusion and noted that “it is not unusual to win a legal point without litigating it,” such as a successful 2011 ADF “letter-writing campaign to universities with onerous and unconstitutional speech codes,” an agreement by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to reinstate a professor fired for his comments about Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and a decision by a South Carolina charter school to rescind its ban on religious Christmas carols.

Refraining from participating in or promoting any type of legislation?

On the “frequently asked questions” section of ADF’s website, the group repeatedly points out its sole area of focus: “legal cases and projects impacting religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.” Noting that the Alliance does not “duplicate our allies’ work, nor aid them in areas outside the scope of our mission,” the document states:

This means that, while we defend legislative initiatives pertaining to our mission in court, and join forces with allies in many legal endeavors, Alliance Defending Freedom refrains from participating in or promoting any type of legislation or political parties, including handing out voter guides or reviews of judges. Alliance Defending Freedom also does not lobby government officials.

But this does not appear to be completely accurate. Beyond the group’s reported work in drafting the Arizona bill, ADF’s attorneys clearly backed it, wrote an editorial in support of it, and testified in support of its passage.

This was far from the first time in recent years that ADF weighed-in on legislation and encouraged legislators to vote a certain way on public policy proposals. Earlier this year, ADF posted videos of its litigation counsel Kellie Fiodorek testifying before Indiana’s House Judiciary and Senate Rules Committees in support of Indiana HJR3 and H1153, “bills that would allow Indiana voters to vote on a state constitutional amendment protecting marriage,” according to the Alliance’s news advisory. ADF has also dispatched attorneys to testify against same-sex marriage and civil union legislation in Maine (2009), Maryland (2011), Washington (2012), Colorado (2013), Delaware (2013), Hawaii (2013), Illinois (2013), Minnesota (2013), and Rhode Island (2013) — and claimed to have helped with writing the language of North Carolina’s 2012 constitutional ban.

Other January 2014 ADF press releases noted that senior legal counsel David Hacker would be testifying before Colorado’s House Education Committee “in favor of House Bill 1048, a bill that protects religious freedom for student groups at state institutions of higher education,” and that senior counsel Austin R. Nimocks would give testimony to the Maine House Judiciary Committee “in support of LD 1428, the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act.”

Back in 2011, ADF senior counsel Steven H. Aden not only testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee “in favor of a bill that would ban all abortions committed on the basis of a child’s sex or race,” but joined its sponsor, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), for a press conference in support of the measure. Aden pronounced the Franks bill to be not only constitutional, but also in “best tradition of this nation’s commitment to civil rights and equality for all of its citizens.” That year, Nimocks also appeared before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to encourage it not to repeal the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act.

So far, ADF has not yet been particularly successful on the legislative front. Several states considered bills like Arizona’s this year, but most were similarly rejected (Mississippi enacted one). More and more states now allow same-sex marriage. Indeed the lead Senate sponsor of Delaware’s now-enacted marriage bill told ThinkProgress last year that the in his state ADF actually helped pass the bill by testifying against it.

ADF’s Scott explained that the Alliance “is sought out for its expertise on issues related to its primary practice areas, just as opposition groups (ACLU, Lambda Legal, etc.) are. ADF has provided legal advice, review, and testimony regarding countless policy proposals at every level of government over the last 20 years. This is not unusual at all, and this is exactly what we did in Arizona.” He said that the news articles that identified ADF as author of Arizona’s SB 1062 “misreported our role.”

But while it does not yet appear that ADF has become the American Legislative Exchange Council of the Christian conservative movement, its Faith & Justice magazine noted in 2012 that Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed four bills into law, each endorsed by its ally, the Center for Arizona Policy, and “all of them written with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys.”

Still, the bulk of its work remains in the court system — especially now that the battles over same-sex marriage and birth control access have mostly moved from the legislative arena to the judicial branch. And in that area, ADF continues to have some real impact. Americans United’s Rob Boston noted that some of ADF’s success has come from a “fairly conservative judiciary,” with a right-leaning Supreme Court. But, he says, because it has been savvy about carefully selecting winnable cases, the group has made progress toward its theocratic vision. “It’s a sophisticated legal operation. I don’t agree with what they’re trying to do but I acknowledge they’re doing it well.”

It’s a sophisticated legal operation. I don’t agree with what they’re trying to do but I acknowledge they’re doing it well.

ADF’s Greg Scott noted that ADF has won 17 of 18 cases so far regarding the contraception mandate, has succeeded in about 133 of its 135 attempts to ensure the “constitutionally-correct handling of faculty, staff, and student freedom” at universities, and won a key 2011 Supreme Court case in defense of an Arizona program to promote school choice. While he noted that “we have our hands full defending Christians,” because the “suppression of Christian belief and practice is a primary target of freedom’s opponents,” he said the Alliance has defended some non-Christian clients. “ADF upholds the idea that no one should be either suppressed or coerced by the government when it comes to the expression of views or the free and peaceful exercise of one’s deepest convictions,” Scott added.

Attorney Jon B. Eisenberg, who has found himself on the opposite side of ADF in several cases, told ThinkProgress that the Alliance lawyers he’s encountered have been consistently professional and great lawyers. “They’re a formidable adversary, and it’s probably because they have so damn much money,” he observed. “In the legal profession, money buys success. And the more money you have, the greater your chance of succeeding in litigation — because you can afford the finest lawyers money can buy, because you can deluge the other side and overcome them in a war of attrition, or both. Money tends to win.”

Bruce W. Green, who worked for ADF in the late 1990s and early 2000s and is now City Attorney for Lufkin, Texas, told ThinkProgress that he believes the group’s continued growth has come from its fundraising skill and its commitment to its core issues. Sears, he said, excelled at fundraising because he is “very good at maintaining contact with donors, letting them know the results of the efforts, where the finances went, and how they were used. People seemed to respond to that.” And because the organization has stayed true to its mission, Green added, it has long been a “growing organization.”

And with close to $40 million coming in annually, the Alliance Defending Freedom is poised to continue to make its voice heard.

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