Alliance Defending Fdm sears adf1

oops see old name / 2x

five related nodes

see leo 4

KIRK

see adf3 oops 2

see hos

DONORS TRUST HERITage KOCHADEMIA ACADEMIC BILL OF RTS

SEE CNP GINNI

see incubators

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john oliver 525

softball trans dtr, not trans

mike johnson say christmas.com

acb blackstone

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rww

11/12/2025

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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6 25 AN

MINNE ASSASSIN ADF SUPPORTER EVANGE

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...

Targeting Medical Journals

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

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no lnx nyt

Edward Martin wears a gray suit and blue tie as he speaks at a desk with a microphone at the Capitol.

Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent letters to science and medical journals, accusing them of bias.Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press

Teddy RosenbluthRebecca Robbins

By Teddy Rosenbluth and Rebecca Robbins

April 18, 2025

A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.

The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.

Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.

One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.

The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.

In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”

He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”

And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”

The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.

It was not clear how many journals had been targeted. Several prominent medical and science publishers said they had not received letters. Others declined requests for comment. News of the letters was earlier reported by MedPage Today, a medical news website.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington also declined to comment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy had any involvement.

Laura DiMasi, a spokeswoman for the American College of Chest Physicians, confirmed that the organization had received the letter but declined an interview request.

Most of what medical journals publish is highly technical, aimed at an audience of specialists. But they and the organizations that publish them have increasingly come under attack. Right-leaning sites like Breitbart have derided them as “woke medical journals.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, has been attacking the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which publishes a journal and runs a variety of reproductive health programs. It has received federal funding for an effort to promote maternal health. The alliance recently urged the Trump administration to cut funding and investigate the group, saying it was pushing liberal ideas about diversity and gender.

Several journals or their publishers have publicly opposed Mr. Trump.

In January, the American Public Health Association, which publishes a journal, was among several groups that sued the Trump administration over a memo freezing federal funding. That policy that has now been rescinded, though the administration has since halted other funds.

In March, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called mass layoffs at H.H.S. an “attack on public health.”

In 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic — the first time the journal had taken a position in an election in its 208-year history. The journal Nature endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in the 2020 election and spoke out against a second Trump term during the 2024 election.

Medical journals are afforded the same First Amendment protections as any other news media outlet.

Kent Anderson, a consultant for scientific publishers who has written about conservative attacks on medical journals, said that Mr. Martin’s inquiry could have a chilling effect among publishers.

“This is a fishing expedition from a U.S. attorney, and that makes people nervous,” Mr. Anderson said. “It may make them think twice about an editorial about treating women who have a spontaneous abortion or about transgender teens dealing with a health issue, because it may make them think that somebody is going to knock on the door.”

Mr. Kennedy had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)

He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.

“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”

As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.

Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”

Before becoming director of the N.I.H., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly chastised the editor in chief of a prominent journal, Science, claiming he had “publicly denigrated scientists” who opposed Covid-era lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya was widely denounced by mainstream scientists during the pandemic for proposing that the virus should allowed to spread naturally through the population.

Dr. Bhattacharya also co-founded a new journal pitched as an alternative to traditional scientific publishing. It has published contrarian views on Covid.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

Rebecca Robbins is a reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services Department, Donald Trump

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When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years in its Dobbs v. Jackson's Women Health Organization ruling of 2022, two of the far-right social conservatives who helped make that happen were Justice Samuel Alito and longtime judicial activist Leonard Leo.

Known for his extensive work with the Federalist Society, Leo spent years lobbying to push the High Court to the far right. Overturning Roe was among his top goals, and in 2022, Leo got his wish.

In an article published on September 17, The Guardian's Martin Pengelly details the connection between Alito, Leo and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis — a German billionaire with "close links to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party."

READ MORE:[SCOTUS is meant to be a court — not our supreme ruler

Alito, according to Pengelly, once "accepted expensive concert tickets" from und Taxis."

Pengelly reports, "(Justice Clarence) Thomas and Alito….. have been the subject of numerous reports about undeclared gifts from right-wing donors, fueling an ethics crisis now stoked by news of Alito's acceptance of concert tickets valued at $900 from von Thurn und Taxis…. Von Thurn und Taxis told German media that Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, attended a concert at her castle in Bavaria last year as 'private friends.'"

[According to Pengelly](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/17/samuel-alito-leonard-leo-gloria-von-thurn-und-taxis-napa-institute), Alito and und Taxis are both linked to the Napa Institute, which the Guardian reporter describes as an "ultra-conservative Catholic U.S. group whose board members include" Leo.

Pengelly notes, "Also among Napa Legal Institute directors is Alan Sears, founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF was the principal driver of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case in which the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, with Alito writing the ruling handed down in June 2022.

READ MORE:['The real villain': How the Supreme Court is quietly working to keep Trump out of jail

*Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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jon berry cbg fedsoc liar mofo2025

blackstone

promo vid MLK change culture i shit you##### 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.

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GOT BEAT w liberty counsel sears

Kim Davis ordered to pay over $260,000 after denying same-sex couple marriage license - Alternet.org

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when the former president Donald Trump appointed the Texas attorney James Ho to the fifth circuit court of appeals in 2017, lawyers at the prominent law firm Gibson Dunn – where Ho worked before his appointment – had a problem: how to replace the politically connected Ho. Turns out, they didn’t even need to change the home address for his replacement. Ho’s wife, Allyson, moved into her husband’s position and his old office.

Meet the Hos.

Few people outside of legal circles have heard of the Hos, yet the couple is tied to the case before the US supreme court that will determine women’s access to mifepristone, a drug commonly used in medication abortions. The court hears arguments in the case on Tuesday.

Ho served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone. The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.

The payments don’t violate the court’s code of conduct, according to Stephen Gillers, a New York University emeritus professor of law and author of Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics. But some court watchers argue that Ho’s failure to recuse himself from the case illustrates why public trust in the judiciary is eroding. One recent survey found that 63% of judges noted a dip in the public’s positive perception of them.

“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the non-partisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

In an email to the Guardian, James Ho wrote that he “consulted our court’s ethics advisor prior to sitting in that case, and was advised that there was no basis for recusal. In any event, my wife’s practice is to donate honoraria to charity.”

The Hos are just one of the increasing number of power couples in the conservative movement in which the wife of a prominent official works in the background, laying the groundwork for Republican policies that their spouses will rule upon or legislate. In the mifepristone case, the wife of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, Erin, is the attorney of record for Alliance Defending Freedom and argued the case before Ho. The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas rankled the legal world when he refused to recuse himself from a case involving questions about the January 6 insurrection and the “Stop the Steal” campaign to which his wife, Ginni Thomas, was closely tied.

For Aronson, these are examples of “serious concerns about what is becoming an apparent pattern of coordinated activity by some of these couples in this extremist movement, including the Thomases, Hawleys and Hos”.

Ho’s rulings have included zealous language, referencing what he called in one decision “the moral tragedy of abortion”. He has suggested that protection orders in domestic violence cases “are too often misused as a tactical device in divorce proceedings – and issued without any actual threat of danger”. Orin Kerr, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor, tweeted that one of Ho’s opinions “reads like a politician’s op-ed, not a legal opinion; judges should stick to law”.

What Alabama’s IVF ruling reveals about the ascendant Christian nationalist movement

Read more](https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/02/christian-nationalism-alabama-ivf-ruling-politics)

In the mifepristone case, in which Ho supported rolling back decisions made by the Food and Drug Administration to loosen restrictions on the drug, he wrote: “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them. Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients – and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

He has chafed legal traditionalists from the moment of his swearing-in, when he opted for the ceremony to be held in the private library of Harlan Crow – the conservative mega-donor who, ProPublica revealed, has lavished Clarence Thomas with trips on his yacht and paid the$6,000-a-month private school tuition for the justice’s great-nephew. Ho worked as a clerk for Thomas in 2005.

Ho vowed to boycott hiring Yale Law School graduates as clerks after students interrupted conservative speakers on campus, noting “cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency” at the Ivy League school.

His caustic writings have drawn the spotlight while his wife, Allyson, has been working more inconspicuously, helping lay the legal foundation for conservative policies in her own work.

She appears frequently as a speaker for the Federalist Society, the group that has led the conservative effort to reshape the judiciary. She has also worked pro bono for the Christian right organization First Liberty Institute, a group that describes its mission “to defend and restore religious liberty in our schools, for our churches and houses of worship, inside the military, and throughout the public arena”.

It’s unclear what Alliance Defending Freedom paid Allyson Ho to do, yet ending abortion is central among the organization’s goals. The group helped writethe Mississippi law that led to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade and ended the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion.

Her husband’s financial disclosures list descriptions of “Academy” or “Freedom Summit”, next to some of the payments. The ADF hosts various legal trainings as part of its ADF Legal Academy that “seamlessly combines outstanding legal training with an unwavering commitment to Christian principles” and a Young Lawyers Academy.

The Alliance Defending Freedom said: “ADF often invites lawyers of various backgrounds and experiences to speak at events. ADF offers honorariums for speaker participation. Allyson Ho is an exceptional lawyer with vast and diverse legal experience.”

A request to speak with Allyson Ho sent to Gibson Dunn has not been answered.

The Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both Republicans, appointed Allyson to the state’s committee responsible for recommending and vetting its recommendations to fill judicial vacancies. Neither Cruz nor Cornyn’s offices responded to the Guardian’s request for the names or dates of service for the judicial vetting committee nor did they respond to questions about what role, if any, Allyson had in her husband’s nomination to the bench.

[

‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists aim to fight back on 51st Roe anniversary

Read more](https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/22/roe-v-wade-abortion-anniversary-2023)

In 2023, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, hired Allyson and Gibson Dunn, at a rate of $1,313 per hour – with a $7m cap – to represent the state in a decade-long legal battle in which a federal judge determined Texas had failed to protect foster children. The state had previously been represented by attorneys on its own payroll. The move to hire Allyson and her firm signaled that Texas could be looking to fight backagainst court orders mandating Texas comply with federal monitors appointed to ensure the safety of vulnerable children in its care by appealing district court rulings to the fifth circuit court of appeals – the court on which James Ho serves.

The mifepristone case might just be the beginning of the Hos’ influence, Gillers, the NYU professor, said.

“If Trump wins the election, you’ll see Ho on the short list of nominees to the supreme court,” he said. “He is obviously behaving in a way that makes him a very prominent candidate in a Republican administration.”

That appointment could once again leave an empty office – one that some might want Allyson to fill.

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united States District Court Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas on Monday ordered three Southwest Airlines attorneys to attend "religious-liberty training" through theAlliance Defending Freedom, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Starr was nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2019 and confirmed to the federal bench in a 51-39 party-line vote by the then-Republican-controlled Senate.

StarR wrote that "the airline twisted his words and disregarded his order in the case of a flight attendant who claimed that she was fired for expressing her opposition to abortion," reports David Koenig of the Associated Press. "Starr found Southwest in contempt for the way it explained the case to flight attendants last year after losing a jury verdict. In a blistering 29-page order, the judge said the airline acted as if its own policy limiting what employees can say is more important than a federal law protecting religious speech."

Koenig notes that "for Southwest, the sanctions add insult to injury. They stem from a roughly $800,000 judgment against the airline and the flight attendant's union. Although that was less than the jury's $5.1 million award, Charlene Carter also got her job back."

Carter had "sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent confrontational anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs," writes The New Republic's Tori Otten.

In his latest decision, Otten continues, "Starr specifically mandated the lawyers take the training as part of court-ordered sanctions for religious discrimination. He described ADF as one of several 'esteemed non-profit organizations that are dedicated to preserving free speech and religious freedom.'"

Starr "also ordered Southwest to issue a statement telling its employees that the airline 'may not' engage in religious discrimination against them. Instead, Southwest said that it 'does not' do so, prompting Carter to demand additional sanctions against the company," Otten explains.

Otten also adds that "Carter had made no request for Southwest to undergo religious liberty training. ADF is not representing Carter, nor is it otherwise related to the case at all, so it's unclear why Starr felt the need to involve the group.

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https://www.alternet.org/another-important-fact-a-lie/

no lnx

'This was a lie': Another fact in the anti-LGBTQ Supreme Court wedding website case was false

David BadashandThe New Civil Rights Movement July 25, 2023

Exactly one day before U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in what has been called an “entirely hypothetical make-believe” case pitting conservative Christian beliefs masked as First Amendment speech against the rights of LGBTQ people to exist equally in the marketplaces of both commerce and ideas, a bombshell report revealed one critical fact in the case turned out to be false.

Apparently, so is a second one.

That first false “fact” – a claim in court documents that a San Francisco man, a graphic designer, years ago had reached out to the plaintiff, a Colorado Christian woman, to ask her to design among other items a wedding website for him and his soon-to-be husband, was almost certainly a lie. The man was and is married, to a woman, when the alleged inquiry came in, and had never even heard of the Christian designer, much less crossed state lines and his own Rolodex and personal skill set to ask her to create a wedding website she allegedly had never before even advertised, much less constructed.

The bombshell news on June 29 came via a report by Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic.

And now, Melissa Gira Grant has more news – more proof of a possible fraudulent claim before the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention all the lower courts that sided with the State of Colorado, and not the Christian designer, Lorie Smith (photo), who allegedly had one request for a same-sex wedding website while allegedly having never created any wedding website at all.

“So,” Grant said on social media Tuesday afternoon, “the Colorado website designer in the fake same-sex wedding website case, 303 Creative, it turns out, had made a wedding website, before filing her legal challenge.”

READ MORE: GOP Congressman Admits ‘Most of What We Do Is Bad’ as McCarthy’s Republicans Push for Federal Government Shutdown

Over at The New Republic, the subhead reads: “An archive shows that the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case did once design a wedding website, contrary to what her lawyers presented during her legal challenge.”

Boom.

“The destination wedding website looks uncontroversial enough. The thumbnail preview of the site shows the happy couple’s names in teal and purple type, a mostly out-of-focus photo of a wedding dress trailing on a sandy beach and a couple’s bare feet, and a date and a location in Mexico,” Grant writes.

“In 2015, a web designer named Lorie Smith featured the wedding website in her portfolio of recent work—you can still access an archived copy of Smith’s site on the Wayback Machine. But you won’t find the wedding website in Smith’s live online portfolio anymore. The page detailing her role in the wedding website’s creation was removed some time before she filed a legal challenge—one that claimed she was unable to enter the wedding website business because Colorado’s anti-discrimination law would compel her to create same-sex wedding websites. The wedding website Smith made before she filed her case—and highlighted in a portfolio on her own site—is being reported for the first time in The New Republic.”

Smith’s legal team, the right-wing Christian nationalist Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, insists The New Republic’s reporting is simply a “media smear.”

READ MORE: ‘Ghouls’: Fox News Blasted for Declaring Jews ‘Survived’ the Holocaust by Being ‘Useful’

But facts are facts.

The U.S. Supreme Court took a case with what are now two “incorrect” pieces of information, and made a decision that, as the ADF suggests on its website, affects every person in the United States. Not only did the Supreme Court make a landmark decision on, at best, a faulty case, one that some legal experts have made clear it should never have even agreed to review, so did every lower court that ruled against Smith.

Responding to The New Republic’s latest bombshell report, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “Lorie Smith and her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom repeatedly told the Supreme Court that she had never, ever made a wedding website, because she was afraid a same-sex couple might then request her services. That was a lie.”

“The wedding website that Lorie Smith DID make was scrubbed from the internet, though some of it can still be seen via the Wayback Machine,” he adds, pointing to TNR’s reporting.

Alex Aronson former Chief Counsel, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Senate Judiciary Committee, writes: “Evidence continues to mount that the anti-LGBTQ extremist group Alliance Defending Freedom committed a fraud on the Supreme Court in its cooked-up 303 Creative case.”

Drexel University Professor of Law David S. Cohen states simply, “Apparently nothing about this case was true.”

NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins sums it all up: “This case continues to absolutely reek and nothing is being done about it.”

McCarthy invites lawmakers to screen movie with 'anti-Jewish canards' to boost workplace morale

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Impossible' to respect Supreme Court after anti-LGBTQ ruling: legal expert ›

SCOTUS anti-LGBTQ case includes 'falsified' claim: report ›

'Embarrassing': Sotomayor slams SCOTUS decision that marks 'gays and lesbians for second-class status' ›

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The Mysterious Case of the Fake Gay Marriage Website, the Real ... ›

What the Supreme Court's gay wedding website ruling means for ... ›

Supreme Court rules for designer who refused to work with gay ... ›

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https://www.alternet.org/trump-appointed-judges-conservative-christians/

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Trump-appointed judges have ruled favorably to conservative Christians but not other religions: study

Alex Henderson July 17, 2023

During his one term as president, Donald Trump left his mark not only on the U.S. Supreme Court, but also, on the lower federal courts.

One third of the High Court is now comprised of Trump-appointed justices: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The Court was leaning conservative long before Trump's presidency, but Trump pushed a specific type of Republican: strict social conservatives who are favorable to the Religious Right's evangelical fundamentalist agenda.

According to a study by New York University's Stephen J. Choi, the University of Virginia's Mitu Gulati and the University of Chicago's Eric A. Posner, the judges Trump appointed to the lower federal courts were likely to be favorable to the Religious Right — although not to Muslims.

READ MORE: 'Huge victory for democracy' as Supreme Court rejects fringe Trump-backed election theory

The New York Times' Adam Liptak notes, "The study found, for instance, that judges named by Mr. Trump had 'stronger or more numerous religious affiliations' with churches and other houses of worship, with religious schools, and with groups likeAlliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, which have won a series of major Supreme Court cases for conservative Christians. Trump appointees were also much more likely to be members of theFederalist Society, the conservative legal group, than other Republican appointees: 56 percent versus 22 percent."

The study found that Trump-appointed judges had "stronger or more numerous religious affiliations" with churches and with Religious Right groups like First Liberty and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Choi noted, however, that"the specific religion in question" often had a lot to do with how Trump-appointed judges ruled.

"Trump appointees voted in favor of plaintiffs claiming that their right to free exercise of religion had been violated about 45 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent for other Republican appointees and 33 percent of Democratic appointees," Liptak observes. "The gap grew for cases that involved only Christians, to more than 56 percent, compared with 42 percent for other Republican appointees and 29 percent for Democratic ones."

Liptak adds that "the numbers flipped when it came to Muslims, with Trump appointees at 19 percent, compared with 34 percent for other Republican appointees and 48 percent for Democratic ones."

READ MORE: 'Arrest the reporter': Donald Trump demands Supreme Court jail journalists over abortion decision leak

According to the researchers, "The pattern that emerges is consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism)."

READ MORE: 'One of the very best decisions I ever made': Clinton honors Ginsburg on anniversary of nomination

Find the New York Times' full article at this link (subscription required).

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Christianity is on the verge of extinction': Here’s why evangelicals embrace QAnon ›

Far-right white evangelicals love Trump for many reasons — including their terrifying obsession with the End Times: report ›

'The atheists, globalists and Marxists': Trump attempts to sway skeptical evangelicals ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Trump keeps edge among evangelicals, but there is an opening for ... ›

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Why evangelicals are still loyal to Donald Trump - POLITICO ›

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https://www.alternet.org/hate-group-lurking-behind-efforts/

no lnx

2023 marks the 30th anniversary of the far-right Christian fundamentalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). A long list of Religious Right organizations had gained considerable influence in the Republican Party by the timeADF was founded in 1993, from Focus on the Family to the late Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition to the Family Research Council. But ADF, formerly the Alliance Defense Fund, was focused specifically on pushing anti-gay and anti-anti-abortion laws.

In an article published by The Guardian on June 19, journalist Adam Gabbatt stresses that ADF is still well-funded and has "extended its tentacles into nearly every area of the culture wars."

"With the U.S. besieged by a right-wing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people and others, blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures," Gabbatt explains. "But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded right-wing legal organization, experts say."

READ MORE: How Pat Robertson helped shape the radical Christian nationalism Barry Goldwater warned against

Gabbatt notes thatADF "aims to overturn same-sex marriage, enact a total ban on abortion, and strip away the already minimal rights that trans people are afforded in the U.S."

Rabia Muqaddam, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, warns that ADF's goal is to place "a certain type of religious view at the center of American life."

Muqaddam told The Guardian, "(The ADF campaign) extends to abortion, it extends to LGBTQ folks, to immigration, to what kind of religion we think is America, what kind of people we think are American. It's as dramatic as that. I think we are in a fight to preserve democracy and preserve America as a place where we do tolerate and encourage and empower everyone."

According to Muqaddam, ADF helped create the Mississippi anti-abortion law that was at issue in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended abortion as a national right with its 5-4 decision in Dobbs in 2022.

READ MORE: How Trump exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Right

"Alliance Defending Freedom has been instrumental in the dismantling of Roe and the ongoing efforts to eliminate abortion nationwide,” Muqaddam told The Guardian. "They enacted a law that they knew was unconstitutional, they enacted it for the purpose of generating case after case after case to push it out to the Supreme Court until they found a court that was sympathetic to their argument…. I think that's exactly what is happening in the LGBTQ context as well. Their goal is to limit individual rights as much as possible."

Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) points out that ADF equates anti-gay laws with "religious freedom" and "religious liberty." The SPLC also lists ADF as a hate group.

Hodges told The Guardian, "Just about every anti-LGBT legislation that you've seen probably in the past decade was probably copied or paraphrased off of a model legislation built by Alliance Defending Freedom. They provide legal advocacy support, litigation and policy models for government officials."

READ MORE: 'Patriots might have to resort to violence': Survey shows 'most' GOPers sympathize with Christian nationalism

The Guardian's full report continues at this link.

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===

R.G. Cravens @ Hatewatch: Documents Reveal ADF Requested Anti-Trans Research From American College of Pediatricians.

===

During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump — with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — appointed not only three U.S. Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch), but also, a long list lower federal court judges. One of them wasU.S. Circuit Judge James C. Ho, who, according to Reuters, is now boycotting Yale Law School clerks because of “cancel culture.”

During a Federalist Society speech in Kentucky on Thursday, September 29, Ho claimed that Yale “not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it.” And Ho, stressing that he is no longer hiring law clerks from Yale, encouraged other right-wing judges to boycott Yale as well.

Ho said of Yale, “Cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency.”

One of the incidents Ho cited involved Kristen Waggoner, who now heads the far-right Christian fundamentalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The Southern Poverty Law Center considers ADF, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, an anti-gay hate group.

During a March 2022 appearance at Yale, Waggoner was disrupted by pro-gay law students.

Ho told Reuters, “I don't want to cancel Yale. I want Yale to stop cancelling people like me."

Ho, born in Taiwan in 1973, has lived in the United States since childhood and is well-known in right-wing legal circles. The judge has had his critics on the libertarian right, but he is popular among social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists and was once a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. Known for being a major culture-warrior, Ho has been active in the Federalist Society since the 1990s and has also worked with theFirst Liberty Institute (a right-wing Christian fundamentalist legal group). After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020, Trump considered nominating Ho for the Supreme Court but ending up picking Barrett instead.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/libs-tiktok/right-wing-media-spread-doctored-footage-drag-queen-concoct-fear-pride-events

A drag queen who performed at the Idaho Pride event targeted by white nationalists in June is suing a right-wing blogger who doctored footage of his performance to falsely claim he had exposed himself to children. Even though the video was swiftly debunked by local news, right-wing media — including Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik and others who initially helped drive harassment against the Pride event — pushed the edited footage, leading to abuse against the performer.

On June 11, police in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, arrested 31 members of the Patriot Front near Pride in the Park, a planned Pride event. Authorities said evidence showed the white nationalists, who had gathered at the park from across the country, were planning to riot at the event and in multiple areas around the town. Patriot Front has a history of anti-LGBTQ actions, including burning trans pride flags and vandalizing a memorial for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated it as a hate group.

The event was also targeted by a far-right biker group that announced it was holding an event nearby at the same time as Pride in the Park, with organizers saying there were “going to be going after the groomers” while alluding to possible violence.

One of the performers at the event was Eric Posey, whose drag name is Mona Liza Million. Following Pride in the Park, right-wing blogger Summer Bushnellposted footage from Posey’s performance that blurred his crotch. In her posts, Bushnell erroneously claimed Posey had exposed himself to minors and called for her audience to report the video to police. The video, which was debunked by local news two days after the event was held, led to harassment against Posey after it went viral on social media. Now Posey is suing Bushnell, claiming she defamed him in an effort to gain popularity as part of the nationwide effort to malign LGBTQ people and Pride Month events.

A key instigator in manufacturing outrage over the event was Chaya Raichik, who runs the social media account “Libs of TikTok.” Raichik not only targeted Pride in the Park after Idaho-based white nationalist Dave Reilly called for her to do so, but she also helped spread Bushnell’s video weeks after it had been debunked by both the media and**authorities**. On July 31, Raichik retweeted a tweet with Bushnell’s video and calling Posey a “pedophile,” with Raichik adding, “This is what a ‘family-friendly’ drag show looks like.” Commenters reacting to Raichik’s post falsely accused Posey of being a “groomer” and “pedophile,” while others threatened extreme acts of violence against him, including multiple threats to castrate him.

Although the tweet she quoted was later removed for violating Twitter’s rule on hateful conduct, Raichik’s tweet was never deleted.

[twt vid libs]

raichik was joined in sharing the doctored video by anti-LGBTQ trolls including right-wing podcaster Liz Wheeler and Gays Against Groomers, with the latter writing, “If gay rights do get rolled back, it will only be because of things like this.”

The renewed social media pickup of the doctored video led to an article published by right-wing blog Post Millennial headlined “Drag queen accused of exposing self to children at 'family friendly' Pride event.” The article promoted conspiracy theories that antifa was involved in targeting the Idaho Pride event, and the header for the article included a still from Bushnell’s video, with the edited video embedded.

The Idaho Family Policy Center, a right-wing Christian nonprofit that partners with extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom and multiple other anti-LGBTQ organizations, posted a petition on September 8 denying law enforcement’s debunking of the video and claiming it had “reviewed the unedited footage and can confirm it portrays public exposure of the performer’s genitalia.” Included with the petition, which called for drag performances to be banned from taking place around children, was a still from Bushnell’s video. The petition remains active as of publication date.

[petition pix blur]

Far-right conspiracy theory outlet Infowars posted an article also featuring a still from the doctored video. The article suggested the targeting of the event by Patriot Front was “a federal false flag operation” and criticized the “mainstream media” for “ignoring a potential child sex crime occurring at the very same event.”

The article cited a press release from the local sheriff’s department saying police were investigating the video. The announcement came after a local outlet had already debunked the claims and released the unedited video, and despite law enforcement officials acknowledging that their investigation stemmed entirely from reports by individuals who had seen Bushnell’s doctored footage and none of whom had seen the performance in person. The stunt culminated on July 1 with the city prosecutor stating what had been demonstrated weeks earlier — Posey had not exposed himself.

Disregarding available evidence, right-wing media widely used the release to push the false narrative and disseminate the doctored footage. Stephanie Hamill, a contributing writer for Media Research Center and ambassador for Turning Point USA, tweeted Bushnell’s video while adding that the “dancer's genitals were reportedly exposed on the main stage with children viewing the ‘dance.’”[twt vid]

right-wing author Janie Johnson tweeted a link to the video to her nearly 200,000 followers, attempting to excuse the white nationalists who targeted the event and writing, “Wonder what ticked the Idaho dads? This drag demon exposed himself to children.”

The incident is nearly identical to another manufactured controversy pushed by right-wing media in which an edited photo of a drag performer reading to children at a library in 2019 was blurred and paired with the claim that they were exposing themselves to children. That smear, too, was quickly debunked, which did not prevent the ensuing harassment and an attempt from lawmakers to strip libraries of their funding.

The targeting of Posey and the broader attacks on Pride in the Park followed an escalating campaign of harassment against drag and Pride Month events that falsely accused participants of abusing children. This harassment, and the escalating rhetoric of maligning LGBTQ people as groomers, has largely been enabled by the failure of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to adequately handle the targeted harassment.

---

ref no lnx

upon realizing that threatening a community gay pride event with a bunch of guns might not be the best look, officials with the far-right Idaho bikers club Panhandle Patriots are backing off somewhat, claiming that the two spokesmen who told an evangelical organizing event that they intended to “go head to head” with the annual Pride in the Park gathering in Coeur d’Alene on June 11 gave out “incorrect information.” Complaining that the media have misrepresented them, they’ve announced they’re changing the name of their event the same day from “Gun d’Alene” to “North Idaho Day of Prayer.”

But their hateful rhetoric identifying the LGBTQ community as pedophilic “groomers” is still going full roar. "We're going to be going after the groomers," the group’s founder recently told his comrades. Their vice president, Justin Allen, recently told another gathering that presenting LGBTQ-friendly material to children in a park setting was “unacceptable”: "I am not a violent man. But I am not a peaceful man, either."

Two weeks ago, two leaders of the Panhandle Patriots—Allen, their vice president, and Jeff White, their “sergeant at arms”—got up before a “gameplan” organizing session to oppose “inappropriate materials in our schools and libraries” at a northern Idaho evangelical church and told the gathering their group was planning to confront the Pride in the Park event. White told them:

We are having an event the very same day. That very same day we actually intend to go head to head with these people. A line has to be drawn in the sand. Good people need to stand up. And she was talking about the repercussions. We say, Damn the repercussions. Stand up, take it to the head. Go to the fight.

However, a spokesperson for the Patriots who only identified herself as “Bear” told the Coeur d’Alene Press that those men had misspoken, claiming White was only a club member and not a spokesman: “We are wanting this to be an extremely peaceful event,” she said.

Earlier this week, the group issued a statement blaming the media for misrepresenting its intentions: “It is the media’s goal to instigate a conflict, take photos of that conflict, and then produce media stories labeling our group and everyone associated with us as violent, racist, and hateful while ignoring the antics of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and LGBT extremists,” it said.

As a result, it was changing the name of the event to the “North Idaho Day of Prayer,” adding: “The event popularly known as Gun d’Alene will be moved to a later date that is yet to be determined.”

“Gun d’Alene,” in fact was billed as an anniversary of the day in 2020 that armed “Patriots” flooded the streets of Coeur d’Alene in response to hoax rumors of the impending arrival of buses full of evil black-clad “antifa” vandals who mysteriously never showed up anywhere they were rumored to be going. Dozens of people showed up on armed patrol, toting AR-15s and wearing body armor, at a downtown shopping strip mall.

Panhandle Patriots claimed that “our event has been hijacked by extremist groups. On the Left, we have seen evidence to suggest that Antifa radicals are planning on coming to disrupt our event to provoke violence. It has also come to our attention that a White Nationalist group called White Lives Matter is also planning to attend. While these two groups are planning on causing violence, the media plans on using them to condemn and tarnish our peaceful group.”

In spite of the surface shift in tone, the statement continues in typical far right fashion, urging Idahoans to turn out in numbers “to take a stand against the progressive left-wing, which is moving into Idaho, and into our schools and libraries, with intent on grooming our children and turning them into LGBT activists.” It concludes by identifying the Pride organizers as “groomers”:

As always, the Panhandle Patriots are a Christian group that stands against violence in all its forms, and will not allow our event to be hijacked by extremists on either side of the political spectrum. We implore the Christian community to come together and show these LGBT groomers that North Idaho stands firmly against their sick agenda and that God still rules in the Panhandle.

An online media site called the Idaho Tribune helped stir the extremist pot further with an article—widely distributed on far-right social media—headlined “Antifa Coming to Coeur d’Alene for June 11 LGBT Event in CDA Park to ‘Protect Gay & Trans People.’” It claimed that “Antifa members from across the country are planning on coming to Coeur d’Alene Idaho” for the event, based on a single Twitter account urging community defense.

“Antifa and LGBT groups have taken a particular interest in North Idaho as the predominantly conservative area is viewed as a challenge to the progressive liberal groups,” it claims. It also risibly claims that “antifa” is helping to campaign for conservative Republican Gov. Brad Little.

Journalist Daniel Walters of The Inlander was unable to find any person living in the region with the name of the article’s ostensible author, "Samantha Collins." The likely person behind the website is white nationalist David Reilly, who lost a 2021 campaign for the Post Falls school board and has been involved in attempts to secretly take over the Democratic Party apparatus in Kootenai County.

Among the Panhandle Patriots themselves and their supporters, the rhetoric has been similarly incendiary and eliminationist. Walters attended one of their gatherings, where one audience member claimed he’d seen "groomers—that's the only word for it" distributing condoms to little kids surreptitiously at Coeur d’Alene’s Fourth of July parade.

"We're going to be going after the groomers," the group’s founder, Michael "Viper" Birdsong—who took an active role in the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol—told his cohorts. "Violence is the last thing we'd ever want to bring. But it doesn't mean we're not incredibly good at it," he added. "Mess around with a kid and find out."

Another northern Idaho white nationalist and notorious antisemite with a huge social media following, Vincent James Foxx, has posted modified copies of the flier for Pride in the Park,with its lines drawn to resemble a warped Star of David. He also has posted the names of every sponsor on a spreadsheet with addresses and contact information.

Panhandle Patriots say they intend to start their day on June 11 at around noon in downtown Coeur d’Alene, from where they say they plan to march through the downtown area to finish up at the waterfront park where their event is scheduled on Lake Coeur d’Alene....

===

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

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wed, 09/28/2011

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}:**, Perkins, who is a member of Pressler’s **:{board of reference}:**, 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

Filed under:

===

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), theFederalist 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."

rww 921

right-wing groups continue to resist honest teaching about racism in American history and the country’s institutions while inflaming and mobilizing right-wing voters with wild claims and dire warnings about the march of “critical race theory.” The Heritage Foundation, a mammoth right-wing think tank and marketing operation, has packaged its anti-critical race theory material into an eBook entitled “Knowing Critical Race Theory When You See It and Fighting It When You Can.” The 18-page “eBook” is little more than a glorified pamphlet that builds on Heritage Action’s “toolkit” for opposing critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic approach to the study of systemic racism. Since last summer, right-wing activists and organizations have sounded alarms about the supposed threat of critical race theory to white people and to the future of the United States itself. Right-wing groups are using such manufactured fears to drive conservative voters to the polls in school board races and in future elections.

The new Heritage Foundation eBook is being promoted via Facebook ads claiming that critical race theory “is invading our K-12 schools, workplaces, state and federal governments, and even the military.”

If you missed this invasion, Heritage says, it’s because you didn’t recognize it. “There’s a good chance that you—and your children—have encountered it,” the Facebook ad claims. “And there’s an even better chance that you didn’t realize it.”

The Heritage Foundation eBook claims that it can help people identify when critical race theory is being stealthily employed. One way to identify critical race theory, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to watch for curricula or training sessions “that teach that racism is systemic and structural” and “demand that Americans work to dismantle laws, traditions, norms, institutions, and free-market enterprise—the entire American system itself.”

The eBook quotes as an example of “CRT at work” this statement from a Michigan State University professor: “It’s important to try to help youth understand how bias and oppression are institutional, structural and systemic, and not simply interpersonal.”

Heritage contrasts that statement with a section labeled “THE FACTS,” which states, “Racial discrimination is illegal in America,” and suggests that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cleared things up on that front. “There is not evidence to suggest that our social order is oppressive and dangerous,” the eBook declares. In reality, the well-documented impact of systemic racism is evident in disparities that exist in “every facet of America life, including employment, wealth, education, home ownership, healthcare, and incarceration,” in the words of a Business Insider article published last year.

Heritage also highlights the concept of“white privilege” and warns its readers about the supposed threat of any “curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it.”

Another warning sign, according to the Heritage Foundation, is any reference to “equity,” which the Heritage eBook claims has become the “functional opposite” of “equality.” Here’s how Heritage explains the dangers of equity, using language that echoes rhetoric used by right-wing activists opposed to progressive taxation: “Attempts by government officials to take the fruits of your achievements and give them to those who did not earn it will hurt those whose rewards are diminished as well as the intended beneficiaries.” According to Heritage, “This betrays the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, and everyone should have the same opportunity to pursue success.”

Among the action steps recommended in the section on how to stop critical race theory are to “engage” with local school boards and to report examples of critical race theory trainings to the Heritage Foundation’s “news” service, to anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, or to Parents Defending Education, a group launched earlier this year that is promoted by right-wing media. Readers are also urged to become a “Heritage Action Sentinel,” a member of what Heritage Action describes as “a grassroots army of committed conservative activists who are the front line against the liberal agenda.”

Melody Clarke, a senior regional coordinator for Heritage Action, spoke at a Tuesday evening protest organized by the Alliance Defending Freedomand other right-wing groups outside the Loudoun County school board meeting. Clarke promoted saveourschools.com, a Heritage Action website that urges people to report evidence of critical race theory in schools, including “pictures of books, handouts, assignments, etc.”

Tags: Melody Clarke Critical Race Theory Public Education School Boards Heritage Action Heritage Foundation

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/dark-money/

salon

More than a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic ruling in _{Citizens United v. FEC}_, opening the door for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political causes (although not directly to political candidates). As corrosive as that decision was to democracy, it came with a slight proviso. As Justice Anthony Kennedy _{wrote}_: while "the Government may not suppress [corporate] speech altogether," it may "regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements." Citizens United found, in other words, that corporations could spend without limit, but government had a right to force public disclosure that spending to the public.

Since then, it's become abundantly clear that money in politics takes numerous forms, far beyond the obvious subterfuge of a corporation donating to a political action committee that then funds a political candidate. In the nonprofit world, big-money donors pump hundreds of millions into politically-motivated 501(c) organizations, which are not required to disclose their donors. Those groups then funnel this money into _{patently political ventures}_, even though they are technically forbidden from engaging in significant lobbying. That two-step process describes the phenomenon known as "dark money," which allows wealthy individuals and corporations to exert enormous influence on the political system behind a veil of anonymity.

Last year alone, more than _{$1 billion in dark money}_ was spent in the 2020 election, a record high. Contrary to some people's assumptions, "both sides" actually do it — dark money flows to and from Democrats as well as Republicans. In truth, anonymous money has been part of America's political bloodstream for _{decades now}_, but not until relatively recently has the debate around it rose to a national level. Last month, in the firs major case of its kind since Citizens United, the issue of nonprofit donor disclosure returned to the highest court in the land.

In this case, _{**Americans for Prosperity Foundation** v. Bonta}_ (consolidated with another, functionally identical case, _{**Thomas More Law Center**v. Bonta}_) the Supreme Court will decide whether political nonprofits can be compelled to disclose who their largest donors are. This case in question specifically concerns donor disclosure rules in California, but its implications are unmistakably nationwide. And while the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and the Christian-oriented Thomas More Center are distinctly right-wing in ideological terms, they have some surprising allies before the high court.

As things work now, the IRS annually collects from every nonprofit a form called Schedule B, which lists the personal information of each nonprofit's largest donors. The stated legal purpose is to regulate or prevent various financial crimes like fraud and money laundering. California is unique in requiring nonprofits to submit their Schedule B forms to the state attorney general's office — if they want to keep on raising tax-deductible donations.

To be clear, California collects the information, but does not release it to the public. But this seemingly innocuous bureaucratic regulation has sent shockwaves throughout the conservative nonprofit world — not to mention a number of liberal-leaning or civil-libertarian nonprofits as well, _{including}_ the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.

Broadly speaking, the strange coalition of plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity argue that the state's interest in collecting Schedule B's — which, once again, would not be made publicly accessible — does not outweigh the burden that the law would impose upon them. They further argue that this burden may be acute for nonprofits that advocate for or against controversial causes, like abortion. Furthermore, the plaintiffs have argued that if their donors are unmasked — by means of a hack or leak, for instance — these donors could be at risk of severe reprisal, causing a chilling effect on future donations.

John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative-libertarian group, told Salon in an interview he sees this as "a free association problem."

"Whether it's a conservative organization or a liberal or progressive organization," Bursch said, "they all recognize that publicly exposing donors to groups that engage in public advocacy risks chilling — causing people to not donate, or to donate below thresholds where they won't appear on a Schedule B."

Bursch currently represents the Thomas More Law Center,a Christian conservative legal nonprofit that briefly embraced Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election and is now battling on behalf of donor privacy. He alleges that there have been several cases when donors have felt threatened because of their connections to Americans for Prosperity Foundation or Thomas More. _{Court documents}_ detail purported instances of doxing, death threats and even assassination attempts. It's worth noting that the plaintiffs also fear "economic reprisal," such as boycotts or criticism of their businesses, activities that are clearly _{legal and constitutionally protected}_ expressions of free speech.

To make their case, the plaintiffs draw upon an unlikely parallel: the Supreme Court's seminal 1958 ruling in _{NAACP v. Alabama}_, where the justices found that Alabama officials could not force the NAACP to turn over its membership list due to the possibility of violent public retaliation against its members.

At the time of that decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan _{wrote}_ that the NAACP had made "an uncontroverted showing" that the "revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility." Alabama's effort to expose NAACP members was largely understood by racial justice advocates as a clear attempt to dismantle the civil-rights group through the use of racial terror.

Bursch acknowledged that the historical circumstances around NAACP do not resemble those of the current case, but insisted, "To think that [Thomas More] donors might not face life or death is not really accurate."

Unsurprisingly, many critics of the corrosive force of money in politics reject any comparison between the cases. In a statement to Salon, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., drily observed "an enormous gap between the Supreme Court case cited by petitioners — a civil rights-era decision where NAACP members had reason to fear state-sanctioned bombings, assassinations and other violence — and theproblem of billionaires secretly running dark-money-funded political covert ops in our country."

Daniel Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Election Reform Program, echoed that analysis in an interview with Salon: "I always pause at any contemporary actor analogizing themselves to the NAACP in the South in 1958. And that includes folks on the right and left. AFP, whether or not it is right on the merits, represents some of the most powerful interests in the country. This is not comparable to the NAACP in the South prior to the civil rights movement."

There's another important difference between the two cases: While the plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity case are alleging a largely hypothetical risk of reprisal, they are demanding a result that in goes further than in the NAACP decision. As Vox's Ian Millhiser _{explained}_, "the plaintiffs insist that they are entitled to facial relief — meaning that the state's disclosure rule must be tossed out for all nonprofits, regardless of whether donors to those nonprofits face harassment, or even if they want to keep their donations secret."

Weiner said that a universal ban on mandatory donor disclosures is not warranted, arguing that the plaintiffs' case goes no further than claiming "that the law should not be applied to them. It's hard to see how all this adds up to 'the law is facially invalid,' which is a really sweeping position to take in light of a couple incidents."

Bursch responded that Americans for Prosperity "is precisely the type of case where a facial ruling would be appropriate," saying, "It's almost nonsensical to suggest that thousands of charities should have to individually sue California to keep their donor information confidential."

Even though California has no plans to release "dark money" donors' names, Bursch argues there is still likely to be a chilling effect, claiming that the state does not maintain a secure record-keeping system and leaves an "_{open door}_" for hackers. It's true that in 2012, a Schedule B for Planned Parenthood was leaked in California, potentially revealing hundreds of donors' names and addresses. But such occurrences have been rare.

As mentioned above, nonprofit donor disclosure is a particularly hot topic when it comes to dark money, which typically moves through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, or "social welfare organizations," which collect money from anonymous donors and then spend it on campaigns or candidates on said donors' behalf.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation, however, is a (501)(c)(3), meaning that in order to preserve its tax-exempt status, it's supposed to designate its funds for "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals," according to _{IRS rules}_. However, Americans for Prosperity, the group's sister organization, is a 501(c)(4), meaning that it can more significantly engage in political advocacy and lobbying — largely in favor of reduced taxes, deregulation and other business-friendly policies — and has done so _{vigorously}_.

Bursch claimed earnestly that dark money has "nothing" to do with the current Supreme Court case, reminding this reporter that 501(c)(3) charities like AFPF are barred by federal law "from participating in any political advocacy, which is where the dark money issue arises." Explaining the relationship between Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated foundation, he said, "My understanding is that the 501(c)(3) can't fund the 501(c)(4). So, although they share a name and perhaps some common goals, the work they engage in is completely different. You can't cross those lines."

AFP did not respond to Salon's request to comment on its relationship with AFPF, which has been known to cross some lines.In 2010, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee_{accused}_ AFPF of financing blatantly political commercials that criticized the Obama administration, alleging that the ads "made the Americans for Prosperity Foundation a de facto political action group in violation of the federal tax code," according to the New York Times.

Bursch said that he believed or understood that AFP and AFPF had a "different office, different directors, different employees and different purposes." In fact, a comparison of _{AFP}_ and _{AFPF's}_ 2018 tax filings shows that a significant number of officers, directors, trustees and key employees work at both entities, including Nancy Pfotenhauer, Mark Holden, Robert Heaton, Emily Seidel, Slade O'Brien and various others.

Supplemental information on AFPF's filings also states that "certain employees of Americans for Prosperity Foundation may perform services for Americans for Prosperity, a related organization, through a service contract between the organizations." (This relationship also goes the other way.) AFPF is additionally listed as AFP's "direct controlling entity," a designation whose legal meaning is not entirely clear but certainly suggests an intimate relationship.

Not all contributors to political nonprofits count as "dark money donors," to be sure. Some are ordinary citizens, no doubt, genuinely interested in contributing to what they believe are nonpartisan endeavors. But it's precisely the lack of donor disclosure that makes the whole process opaque.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., a staunch critic of money in politics, affirmed the need for more effective disclosure in light of the AFP and AFPF's purposefully mysterious relationship. "Because we're dealing with dark money, we don't really know the relationship between AFPF and AFP," he said. "When a 501(c)(3) gives money to a 501(c)(4) to engage in electioneering activities, that's what dark money is all about." (Salon could not find clear evidence that money has flowed from AFPF to AFP, let alone how it might have been used.)

"The Federalist Society and the Federalist Society Foundation both share the same goals and aspirations," Johnson expressed. "People are trying to exert influence. That's the reason why they contribute to these organizations that have a political agenda."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.mediamatters.org/msnbc/media-are-ignoring-far-right-white-house-lawyer-steven-menashis-judicial-nomination

All major broadcast and cable TV news networks aside from MSNBC have failed to cover President Donald Trump’s far-right judicial nominee Steven Menashi since his confirmation hearing on September 11. Menashi, a special assistant and associate counsel to the president who previously worked as acting general counsel at the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, has published inflammatory comments about women, LGBTQ people, and people of color. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on October 31 to determine whether his nomination for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit will be considered by the full Senate.

During his September 11 confirmation hearing, Menashi “refused to answer most questions related to his work at the White House, specifically when asked if he had a role in the administration’s policy of separating migrant parents and children at the border and limiting the number of refugees allowed in the country.” Members on both sides of the aisle expressed frustration with his refusal to be forthcoming about his past work. Menashi and his backers in the White House have continued to stonewall in the wake of his hearing, notably against inquiries about whether he was involved in White House efforts to hide the explosive transcript of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that is at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

After Menashi’s hearing, broadcast news outlets CBS, ABC, and NBC did not have a single mention of him in their coverage. MSNBC was the only major cable network to cover him, reporting on the hearing for around 10 minutes and 30 seconds across three shows. But Fox News and CNN apparently did not find Menashi’s extreme views and stonewalling during his hearing notable enough to cover.

According to HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery, who has written extensively about the nomination, the Trump-Pence White House and Senate Republicans are attempting to push through Menashi’s nomination at “an incredibly fast turn-around,” noting that “it’s no mistake that the Republican-led [Senate Judiciary] committee kept its agenda empty until the last minute” when scheduling his September 11 hearing.

Bendery noted that the expedited process “helped to stave off prolonged protests by progressive groups,” which may have also contributed to the scant media coverage prior to the nomination.

Major advocacy organizations have continued to oppose Menashi’s confirmation. On October 22, The NAACP sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee noting that he “has a vile, offensive record of attacking communities of color and opposing civil rights protections.” Leading LGBTQ organizations have also asserted that he “has clearly and consistently expressed his animosity towards the LGBT people and people living with HIV through his personal writings.” He has made comments skeptical of open LGBTQ service in the military and criticized the Human Rights Campaign’s advocacy for hate crime legislation, among other positions. Additionally, CNN’s investigative journalism project KFILE reported on his other inflammatory writings regarding race and advocacy around sexual assault prevention:

Steven Menashi, a Stanford-trained lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito,wrote dozens of editorials and blog posts in the late 1990s and early 2000s for a number of college and professional publications decrying “leftist multiculturalism” and “PC orthodoxy.” He complained about “gynocentrists,” wrote that the Human Rights Campaign “incessantly exploited the slaying of Matthew Shepard for both financial and political benefit” and argued that a Dartmouth fraternity that held a “ghetto party” wasn't being racist.

He attacked academic multiculturalism as “thoroughly bankrupt” and, in 2002, defended then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi amid a worldwide controversy over comments asserting the superiority of Western civilization over Islamic culture -- for which Berlusconi himself ultimately apologized.

The Trump administration is dramatically reshaping the judiciary, installing “a historic number of federal appeals court judges for this point of a presidency,” and it has selected unusually partisan nominees. Those judges are predominantly white and male and include several who are tied to extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom. Additionally, several nominees have been withdrawn for being unqualified or extreme.

The effects of the Trump administration judiciary will be felt long after the end of his presidency, so it’s time that media prioritized covering the extreme background of many of Trump’s nominees before they start their lifetime appointments.

Methodology

Media Matters searched Nexis and SnapStream transcripts for cable and broadcast TV coverage appearing in original programming on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC between September 11 and noon on October 30 for mentions of the words “Menashi” or “Second Circuit.”

2x here, more markup

kim davis

Conservative legal group defends clerk's stand against gay marriage ...

https://www.reuters.com › article › us-usa-gaymarriage-kentucky-lawyers

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:{:{Sep 2, 2015 - :(style="color:#777777;"):}:The thrice-divorced :{Davis:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: is an Apostolic Christian who announced ... Christian group, :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: have been involved in a ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The controversial group at the center of the Pope Francis-Kim Davis ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com › news › acts-of-faith › 2015/09/30 › pope...

Sep 30, 2015 - The story behind the group representing Kim Davis. ... ideological position than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was litigating the case.

Anti-gay marriage clerk Kim Davis takes her fight from Kentucky to ...

https://www.theguardian.com › world › oct › romania-anti-gay-marriage-c...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Oct 13, 2017 - :(style="color:#777777;"):}:Anti-gay marriage clerk :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: takes her fight from Kentucky to ... groups, including Liberty Counsel and :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}:, have ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Did Liberty Counsel do right by Kim Davis? - Courier-Journal

https://www.courier-journal.com › story › news › local › 2015/09/03 › kim-...

Sep 3, 2015 - Video | Vatican Doesn't Want You To Think Pope Endorses Kim Davis. 0:00. 0:00. AD. 0:00 ...... based Alliance Defending Freedom. But Greg ...

Bevin's lawyers: Kim Davis should pay legal bills for marriage fight ...

https://www.kentucky.com › news › politics-government › article225247295

Jan 30, 2019 - Matt Bevin publicly supported Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis during ... This case was initially instigated by Alliance Defending Freedom (an ...

Kentucky … again! Supreme Court hears homophobe's T-shirt case ...

https://www.patheos.com › blogs › thefreethinker › 2019/08 › kentucky-a...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{1 day ago - :(style="color:#777777;"):}:Image via YouTube/:{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: ... court rulings on Friday concerning Kentucky's :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: was the case of Blaine Adamson, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

:{:(style="color:#222222;"):}:

The religious right lost the fight over gay marriage in the U.S., but it ...

https://www.latimes.com › la-fg-romania-referendum-20181005-story

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:{:{Oct 5, 2018 - :(style="color:#777777;"):}:To that end, the :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: has held conferences and ... the U.S. group that defended Kentucky court clerk :{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: when ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Religious Right's Romanian Anti-LGBTQ Referendum Fails | Right ...

www.rightwingwatch.org › post › religious-rights-romanian-anti-lgbtq-ref...

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:{:{Oct 9, 2018 - :(style="color:#777777;"):}::{Kim Davis:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}: and Liberty Counsel's Harry Mihet on tour promoting marriage ... As we have noted, the :{Alliance Defending Freedom:(style="font-weight:bold;color:#6a6a6a;"):}:, the European ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/christian-charity-gave-more-than-50-million-to-hate-groups/

TheNational Christian Foundation is America’s eighth largest public charity, but it doesn’t build houses, educate children, feed the hungry, or provide other goods or services one might commonly associate with a charity. It’s also not a household name like the Red Cross, but that doesn’t prevent it from having vast influence. According to a new investigation from Sludge, the far-right, evangelical NCF “has donated $56.1 million on behalf of its clients to 23 nonprofits identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.”

These nonprofits include multiple anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate groups. In fact, as reporter Alex Kotch points out, Inside Philanthropy has said that NCF “is probably the single biggest source of money fueling the pro-life and anti-LGBT movements over the past 15 years.”

In addition to not being a direct service charity, the NCF is also not a conventional foundation that a wealthy donor uses as a vehicle to grow and then give away their money to multiple other charities over time. Instead, it’s a donor-advised fund, offering its Christian donors “expert guidance and creative giving solutions,” Kotch writes.

Helaine Olen, writing in The Atlantic, calls these donor-advised funds a “waiting room for charitable donations,” in which anyone, not only the wealthy, can place money into the fund, let it grow, and then have it distribute the money gradually to organizations of the donor’s choice.

According to Kotch, these funds allow their clients “immediate tax breaks on donations.”

They also give individual donors who pay into the fund anonymity. While Sludge was able to use publicly available tax findings to determine which organizations NCF funded, the names of the fund’s donors stay hidden.

The biggest recipient of NCF funds, according to Sludge’s investigation, is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of lawyers, who, Kotch writes, “have supported criminalizing homosexuality, sterilizing transgender people, and claimed that gay men are pedophiles.”

Kotch continues:

Alliance Defending Freedom took in $49.2 million from NCF from 2015-17. ADF received $46.3 million in contributions and grants during the 2016 fiscal year (from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016). It got $16.8 million from NCF in the calendar year of 2015, meaning that, if these years were aligned, NCF’s donations would have represented over one-third of ADF’s annual contributions.

The Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science,” including linking homosexuality to pedophilia, is another frequent beneficiary of NCF funds. Sludge found it received $5.3 million from 2015 to 2017.

While anti-LGBT organizations are the primary recipients of NCF’s funds, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant organizations also benefit:

Anti-Muslim groups ACT for America ($98,000), American Freedom Law Center ($40,000),David Horowitz Freedom Center ($40,000), and Virginia Christian Alliance ($3,600) have received thousands from NCF since mid-2014, and anti-immigrant nonprofits American Border Patrol ($100) and The Remembrance Project ($2,500) also got NCF funding.

Donor-advised funds, in general, are not required to have policies addressing hate groups. As Kotch explains, “these giant funds absolve themselves of any responsibility, saying that as long as the Internal Revenue Service has granted 501(c)(3) status to an organization, it’s fair game.”

At least one expert Sludge spoke to believes funds like NCF are funding hate groups intentionally, and could, if they chose, deny a client’s request to fund them.

Aaron Dorfman, president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, told Sludge, “With the dramatic escalation of violence and intimidation by white nationalists and right-wing extremists, it’s way past due for sponsors of donor-advised funds to cut off any dollars flowing to hate groups.” And, he continued, “they have every right to exercise discretion by refusing a donor’s request to fund a hate group.”

NCF did not respond to Sludge’s requests for comment. Read the entire article here.

ctr-attack on gay marriage: religious rights/freedom [hobby lobby]

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; andRepresentative 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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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, TheHomosexual 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 byMoore, 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 theBecket 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 defendedrestrictions 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

In the context of Phillips’s claim that he objects to the wedding—and not to the gay customers themselves—it is striking that more than a quarter of the 146 ADF appellate briefs we reviewed are arguments for restricting LGBTQ rights. Until very recently, ADF routinely trafficked in slurs against the LGBTQ community, consistently depicting LGBTQ people as promiscuous, uncommitted, and unfit to parent in dozens of its briefs opposing marriage equality.

In a 2006 case in Maryland, ADF maintained that “sexual fidelity is rare among homosexual men” and that “the average homosexual relationship is short.” In a 2009 case in West Virginia, arguing against a lesbian couple’s adoption of a baby they had fostered, ADF noted that the couple had insisted that the court be “forced to treat their home as just as good as any other.” But, ADF wrote, “this cannot be.” Although the organization had long opposed allowing same-sex couples to marry, in another parenting case, this one in Arkansas in 2010, it used the fact that the couple could not marry as an argument against allowing them to adopt. “It is logical to prevent children’s exposure to the illicit sexual conduct and revolving-door of adult sexual partners that often accompany cohabitation,” ADF argued.

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Our review of ADF’s briefs also found that the organization repeatedly argued in court that sexual orientation is not a suspect class, and as such that laws denying LGBTQ rights should not be subject to strict scrutiny. That argument is based partly on ADF’s contention, common on the Christian right, that sexual orientation and gender identity, unlike race, are matters of choice.

In a 2012 case before the Montana Supreme Court, for example, Tim Fox—then counsel for an ADF-allied organization, the Montana Family Foundation, and now the state’s attorney general—filed a brief on behalf of ADF. In it, Fox argued that sexual orientation and gender identity should not be considered a suspect class like race because LGBTQ people are not marginalized by society and indeed possess significant political power, as evidenced by the “zealous political advocacy” that then-President Obama engaged in on their behalf. In a New Mexico case the following year, ADF argued that “citizens advocating to redefine marriage are among the most influential groups in modern politics; they have attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history.”

Over the past 14 years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected many of these arguments. In 2003, the Court struck down laws criminalizing sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas. In 2013, in United States v. Windsor, the Court struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which restricted access to federal benefits. Two years later, it formalized marriage equality with Obergefell.

Since Windsor, seeing the handwriting on the wall, ADF has pivoted away from arguments that LGBTQ people aren’t worthy of marriage equality to arguments that marriage equality violates the rights of Christians. By making this argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop, ADF is bringing its foundational fear—that the advance of rights for LGBTQ people turns Christians into their victims—to the Supreme Court. In The Homosexual Agenda, Sears opined that churches would be forced to abandon their faith; once it became clear that the law does not force churches to perform or condone same-sex marriages, ADF expanded its universe of victimized Christians.

Now the organization aggressively seeks to limit the scope of Obergefell, trying to restrict LGBTQ couples from equal access to public accommodations by framing bakers, florists, county clerks, and website designers as persecuted by the application of civil-rights laws. ADF’s brief in Masterpiece Cakeshop, for example, argues that the law “must respect Phillips’s freedom to part ways with the current majority view on marriage” and asserts that true freedom “does not crush those who hold unpopular views, pushing them from the public square.”

But back in 2004, when court clerks in California, with the blessing of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, ADF challenged that action directly to the California Supreme Court. The organization argued there was no legal justification whatsoever for the clerks to violate state law by issuing such licenses. In its brief, ADF claimed that “the Clerk has ignored the law—an improper action regardless of motives or reasons.” The “real and only issue” in the case, the brief continued, was that “public officials must follow the laws—even laws with which they disagree.”

Apparently, in ADF’s view, only conservative Christians have the right to resist.

Increasingly wary of being called discriminatory in the wake of a decision last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center to label it a hate group, ADF has redoubled its efforts to portray its views as mainstream. ADF attorneys have adamantly rejected any comparison of the organization’s stance to that of segregationists. At the Jones Day briefing in September, Waggoner declared it “offensive” to compare opponents of same-sex marriage to “those who are engaged in racial bigotry.” The following month, ADF promoted and took part in a press conference in front of the US Supreme Court, featuring several African-American conservatives who championed the ADF line that race is an immutable characteristic but homosexuality is a choice.

However, speaker after speaker attacked homosexuality itself, using language that would have been right at home in ADF’s earlier briefs. The Rev. William Keen spoke of “some sins that are considered an abomination before God,” and Janet Boynes, an “ex-lesbian” activist, called homosexuality a “false identity that is rooted in sexual or emotional brokenness,” a “disorder,” and a “rebellion against God’s plan.”

ADF IN POWER—IN WASHINGTON AND IN THE STATES

In 2007, a scandal engulfed then-Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, after he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s public bathroom. ADF attorney Austin Nimocks responded by writing a column for the conservative website Townhall. “Those pushing the homosexual agenda, including their accomplices in the media, typically portray presentable and socially successful persons who have purportedly made a lifelong and stable commitment to another person of the same sex,” Nimocks wrote. But the Craig scandal, he continued, “is the true story of homosexual behavior. When the advocates of homosexual expression attempt to sell us the all-American pictures of lifelong, committed same-sex couples, who participate in intimate behavior only in their bedrooms, it is important to know that this is the exception—not the rule.”

At the time, Nimocks had been on staff at ADF for just four months. His eight-year career there—litigating on the front lines of ADF’s long battle against marriage equality; arguing cases defending same-sex-marriage bans before the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the Wisconsin Supreme Court; testifying before legislative bodies against “SOGI laws” and arguing for religious exemptions—had just begun. He would go on to become one of the organization’s leading attorneys, as ADF’s director of legal advocacy for marriage and family.

Today, Nimocks is a top litigator in the office of the Texas attorney general, along with two other former ADF attorneys, David Hacker and Heather Hacker. There, Nimocks has played a leading role in two legal challenges to Obama-era rules protecting transgender rights, in which the Texas AG’s office led a consortium of attorneys general from other states. Each time, Nimocks’s team won nationwide injunctions: one against a Department of Education guidance protecting transgender students’ rights in public schools, and the other against an Affordable Care Act rule prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in health care. The education ruling represented a significant victory for ADF, which had been fighting both the Obama guidance and the school districts that adopted it, claiming that it “[put] the privacy and safety of children at risk.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 “CHRIST-CENTERED” LAWYER

AN ABOMINATION BEFORE GOD

...

much more

https://www.mediamatters.org/people/alliance-defending-freedom

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/06/15/Alliance-Defending-Freedom-attorney-compares-leftists-to-communists-and-Nazis-says-they-fe/220455

TRAVIS BARHAM (ALLIANCE DEFENDING FREEDOM LEGAL COUNSEL):

Let's turn the pages of history back to another address [Winston] Churchill gave in 1938 to the people of the United States. This was during his wilderness years, when he was out of power and out of favor. From the sidelines, he watched and mourned as Europe was besieged and began falling to the Nazi yoke, and he tried to rally to the defenders of liberty to get busy about defending liberty before it was too late. Looking out before me today at the defenders of liberty on each of your campuses, I am struck at how each of you has a very similar task.

In this address, Churchill spoke to the people who hoped that tyranny would stop after conquering just a few countries like Czechoslovakia. You will likewise meet fellow students and perhaps even fellow citizens who share the same misguided hope. They may see a student get silenced or even arrested for speaking outside the speech zone. They may see a group get kicked off campus or defunded for its conservative views. They may see a fireman with 30 years of distinguished experience -- distinguished service, including serving as the highest ranked fireman in the country -- get fired for a Bible study book he wrote on his own time.

Or they may see a fitness executive get fired simply for expressing Christian beliefs. But all too often they will shrug and say, as Churchill summarized the mood of his day, "Well, that is out of the way. Anyhow, now let's get on with our regular daily life." But we must ask, as Churchill asked, are these hopes well-founded? Or are we merely making the best of what we had not the force and virtue to stop? That is the question we must ask ourselves today. Is this the end, or is there more to come?

Churchill reminded his audience of something that is true once again today, especially on university campuses. We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme. It leaps out upon us from the Dark Ages. Religious intolerance, deprivation of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the state. In his day, the threat to freedom came from the communists and Nazis, and he observed that they are the same thing spelled in different ways. Today, we could add radical leftists to that list, as they share the same philosophies and authoritarian tendencies, though thankfully not the same murderous tactics. Again borrowing from Churchill, like the communists and Nazis, radical leftists tolerate no opinion but their own. Like the communists and Nazis, they feed on hatred. Like the communists and Nazis, they must seek from time to time and always at shorter intervals, a new target, a new prize, a new victim.

Previously:

TPUSA invited a slate of sexists to speak at its Young Women's Leadership Summit

It's not just *Masterpiece Cakeshop:*Alliance Defending Freedom is attacking nearly every aspect of LGBTQ equality

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4. Alliance Defense Fund

President, CEO and General Counsel: Alan Sears

2007 Revenue: $31,674,124

Location: Scottsdale, Ariz.

Web site: www.alliancedefensefund.org

Overview: Founded in 1993 by a coalition of more than 30 Religious Right leaders, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has become the nation’s most prominent Religious Right legal group.

ADF founders, which included James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, the late Bill Bright and the late D. James Kennedy, originally conceived the organization as a funding pool that would finance legal cases brought by other groups that advanced the Religious Right’s view in the courts.

This strategy was employed for a few years, but the ADF now directly litigates cases itself and is headed by Alan Sears, formerly an anti-pornography crusader in the Edwin Meese-era Justice Department. The ADF is rigidly anti-gay and promotes its Christian fundamentalist vision in public schools and government institutions.

A flavor of Sears’ views can be found in the titles of the books he has coauthored: The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today(2003) and The ACLU vs. America (2005). Sears, 52, is so concerned about the “homosexual agenda” that he once opined that SpongeBob SquarePants might be part of a gay plot to indoctrinate children.

The ADF has become one of the leading proponents of the “war on Christmas.” While it raises a lot of money fighting this “war,” actual litigation over the issue is rare. Other ADF cases seem to have been filed as ploys to raise cash. In 2005, the ADF sued a California public school after claiming that officials had ordered a teacher to stop using the Declaration of Independence in class. The claims were exposed as false, and the case quickly unraveled and was dropped – but not until the ADF had used the manufactured controversy to win media appearances and raise money.

The ADF has worked aggressively to lure churches into a right-wing political machine. This year, it announced plans to urge evangelical pastors to openly defy federal tax law by endorsing or opposing candidates from the pulpit. The drive sparked a backlash from a group of Ohio clergy and tax law experts, who asked the IRS to investigate ADF lawyers for urging churches to violate tax law.

Working with a network of pro bono attorneys nationwide, the ADF offers training for both established lawyers and law students. The latter are “equipped with a distinctly Christian worldview in every area of life, particularly in the areas of law and public policy,” boasts the ADF Web site.

Sears Quote: “Homosexual activists have noticed very astutely that the use of humor is a primary vehicle to help them reach their goal of cultural acceptance. Humor had been used by the entertainment industry in the past to stir up antiwar sentiment (the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup, M*A*S*H, Dr. Strangelove) and to promote feminism (Nine to Five) and cross-dressing (Some Like It Hot and Tootsie). Homosexual producers and directors readily admit that humor is their best weapon to soften up the American public for the future promotion of their agenda. If you can get people to laugh about something, you are then on the way to convincing them to accept the behavior as normal.” (The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, coauthored with Craig Osten, 2003).