Faith group ready to clash with gay rights
Alliance is using First Amendment to limit separation of church, state
WASHINGTON — The details were spare when the event appeared this past summer on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ public schedule. He would speak to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom at a summit on religious liberty. It would be in Orange County, California, but no exact location was specified. No news media would be allowed in.
Only after an outcry over the secrecy of the event — and the anti-gay rights positions of its sponsor — did a transcript of Sessions’ remarks emerge on a conservative website. “Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack,” the attorney general told the gathering. “The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the ‘free exercise’ of our faith have become acute.”
Sessions’ focus on religious freedom in his speech was not an accident.
The First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon in the legal arsenal of social conservatives fighting to limit the separation of church and state and roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. And few organizations have done more to advance this body of legal thinking than his host, the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Few groups like it have a larger footprint, with more than 3,000 lawyers working on behalf of its causes around the world. Few are better financed. It brought in $51.5 million in contributions and other revenue for the 2015-2016 tax year, more than the American Civil Liberties Union for that same period.
Among the alliance’s successes has been bringing cases involving relatively minor disputes to the Supreme Court — an Arizona town that limited the size of signs announcing religious services, a Missouri church that asked for state funding to make its playground safer — and winning rulings that establish major constitutional precedents.
Citing religious freedom
But it hopes to carve out an even wider sphere of protected religious expression at the court this term when the justices hear two more of its cases, one a challenge to a California law that requires “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are run by abortion opponents, to provide women with information on how to obtain an abortion, and another in which it represents a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.
While the abortion case is the latest legal volley in a generation-long battle by social conservatives to limit the impact of Roe v. Wade, the Colorado baker’s case, which the court will hear next month, will test whether groups like the alliance can persuade the court to similarly blunt the sweep of Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage into law, as well as the anti-discrimination laws protecting gay men and lesbians.
If there is a battle somewhere to restrict protections for gay men, lesbians or transgender people, chances are the alliance is there fighting it. They have defended the owners of a wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who did not want to perform same-sex ceremonies. They have tried to stop a Charlotte, N.C., law that gave transgender people the right to use the bathroom of their choice. They backed the failed attempt by the Arizona Legislature in 2014 to allow businesses to cite religious freedom in turning away same-sex couples.
“We think that in a free society people who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman shouldn’t be coerced by the government to promote a different view of marriage,” said Jeremy Tedisco, a senior counsel and vice president of United States advocacy for the group, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “We have to figure out how to live in a society with pluralistic and diverse views.”
But civil liberties groups and gay rights advocates say that Alliance Defending Freedom’s arguments about religious liberty and free expression mask another motivation: a deepseated belief that gay people are immoral and that no one should be forced to recognize them as ordinary members of society.
“They are a very powerful part of this broader movement, which is trying to bring a very particular biblical worldview into dominance at all levels of government and society,” said Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group.
“They’ve got some very big, very clear goals,” said Montgomery, who has studied Alliance Defending Freedom since the group’s founding in 1994.
Active in other countries
One of those goals was to defend laws that criminalized gay and lesbian sexual conduct.
In a brief the alliance filed urging the Supreme Court not to overturn a Texas law that made homosexual activity illegal, its lawyers described gay men as diseased and as public health risks. The court decided 6-3 that the law was unconstitutional.
The United States is not the only place the group has been active. Before Belize’s highest court struck down a law last year that banned “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” the group sent activists there to work with local lawyers who were trying to keep the prohibition in place. In India, an Alliance Defending Freedom-affiliated lawyer was part of the legal team that has defended a similar law in the country’s supreme court. That law remains in place, though the Indian court recently signaled that it may revisit the issue.
Tedisco said the group has never supported the criminalization of homosexual activity.
How the alliance is approaching the case of the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, is an illustration of its evolving public relations strategy.
A sophisticated multimedia campaign, called “Justice for Jack,” portrays Phillips as the victim of heavy-handed state bureaucrats. Set to soft piano music, one video describes how Phillips has received death threats, hateful phone calls and lost 40 percent of his business.
Back in Washington, the alliance’s close connections with Sessions’ Justice Department seem to be deepening. In September, the department filed a brief arguing that Phillips should not be forced to violate his faith.
“There is no clear line between his speech and his clients,’” it said. “He is giving effect to their message by crafting a unique product with his own two hands.”