Which conservative Christian political group has had the greatest impact? The Moral Majority? The Christian Coalition? Family Research Council?
The lesser known Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom is the “movement’s most influential arm,” argues journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in “The Next Targets for the Group that Overturned Roe,” a nearly 10,000-word article in The New Yorker.
Kirkpatrick defends his point early, summarizing the group’s 14 Supreme Court victories over the past 12 years: “Overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.”
Reps. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise speak to the media outside of a closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill, October 29, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Kirkpatrick also shows how well ADF is wired into far-right GOP politics. Last fall it sponsored a reception for newly elected U.S. lawmakers. Hosts for the event were Reps. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, both currently vying to become the next speaker of the House.
Founded by James Dobson and other politically conservative Christian leaders in 1993, ADF is now a $102 million group with 70 in-house lawyers and a network of 4,900 more lawyers around the country. (One helped write Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.)
ADF coordinates with Focus and its other activist offshoots — Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., and Family Policy Alliance working in the states — to draft legislation restricting transgender rights and more, then defends that legislation when it’s inevitably challenged in the courts.
Here are four highlights from Kirkpatrick’s in-depth profile.
From defense to offense. Originally founded as a legal-defense fund for conservative Christians who believe their religious freedom was being violated, ADF has increasingly gone on the offense. ADF is now working to see the Supreme Court establishes “parental rights” as a constitutional principle, which could increase the effectiveness of book and curriculum bans.
From the gospel to secular culture wars. Originally founded as a legal-defense fund that would help “keep the door open for the gospel,” ADF now is going after — and raising funds to fight — “less explicitly religious concerns,” including “corruption in the bureaucratic state,” which is conservative code for eliminating government departments and cutting spending.
ADF has an extensive training program and network of law clerks who work with powerful judges. Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court’s newest justice, taught at an ADF summer program for five years, but she testified in 2017 she didn’t know ADF ran the program.
Making ‘personal freedom’ mission No. 1. For decades, conservative Christians opposed the left’s passion for personal rights, including speech, pornography, birth control, abortion and gay rights. But that’s changed.
“ADF now gushes ‘rights talk,’” writes Kirkpatrick. “In fact, Kristen Waggoner, its chief executive and general counsel, sometimes sounds as if she worked for her organization’s nemesis, the ACLU.”
The personal freedom argument helped ADF win a controversial recent Supreme Court victory that allows Lorie Smith to refuse designing wedding websites for same-sex unions, even though she had not been asked to do so.
Protecting your ‘freedom to discriminate.’ ADF wants to protect the rights of some Americans, but for decades it has attacked “the homosexual agenda.” It is now working to limit the rights of transgender children and adults. A spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, told Kirkpatrick ADF is “hellbent on eradicating LGBTQ people from public life.”
Likewise, a law expert said ADF “puts freedom to discriminate over freedom from discrimination.”
When Kirkpatrick asked ADF’s Kristen Waggoner if some of its recent victories could be used to exclude Jews or protect racists, she acknowledged that was a possibility.
ADF also has filed a suit to stop an anti-racist curriculum that is used in schools in Charlottesville, Va., the site of 2017’s violent and antisemitic Unite the Right rally.
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