Conservative Christian “pro-family” groups affiliated with Focus on the Family are adding state legal groups to their arsenal so they can combat old legislation they say violates their values and freedoms.
Focus on the Family began creating a network of state-based family policy councils in the 1980s to promote its own legislative agenda, which includes opposition to abortion, LGBTQ rights, vaccine mandates and Critical Race Theory, as well as support for what it calls parental rights.
Today the network has affiliates in 41 states, and a handful of these groups have launched state-based legal groups:
- The Pennsylvania Family Institute, founded in 1989, was the first, launching its Independence Law Center in 2006.
- The Family Foundation in Virginia opened its Founding Freedoms Law Center in 2020.
- The Minnesota Family Council and Minnesota Family Institute founded True North Legal, which has been working since 2021.
- This August, the Massachusetts Family Institute announced creation of the Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center.
- The Indiana Family Institute is said to be in the process of launching its own in-state legal partner.
Victoria Cobb
“There is an ever-growing need to challenge what is happening in our culture through litigation and the judicial branch,” said Victoria Cobb, president of Virginia’s Family Foundation. “People realize that every day more and more Americans are losing their constitutional rights at the hands of the secular left.”
“When there are bad laws, there are plaintiffs,” said Cobb, who says the Family Foundation’s combined legal and legislative power helps the group prevail in both “the court of public opinion and the courtroom.”
The Focus-affiliated legal groups in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts did not respond to requests for comment. Focus also helped found the powerhouse conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which works with some of the state legal groups on a national level.
In Virginia, conservative anger over Democratic domination of state government and the Virginia Values Act overflowed in the 2021 election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The Family Foundation weighed in with complaints over laws restricting public gatherings during the COVID pandemic, limits on pro-life pregnancy clinics, bans on “conversion therapy” for gays and lesbians, and school policies on race and transgender students.
Founding Freedoms Law Center has been involved in a number of cases:
- Defending Wilson Fauber, a pastor whose controversial social media posts about guns, sexual “grooming” of students and the “abomination” of homosexuality threatened the loss of his Realtor’s license and career.
- Defending Jon Tigges, a man who became a conservative media hero after he was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing for his acts at a divisive meeting of the Loudoun County School Board that dealt with transgender issues.
- Supporting a public school teacher who refused to use “biologically inaccurate pronouns for her students, as well as having to undergo interactive teacher training on ‘LGBTQ+’ matters.”
- Helping school board members, including one who wanted to offer public prayers at school board meetings and one who sought to publicize her district’s transgender policies.
- Defending employees who were fired after claiming religious objections to COVID vaccine mandates.
Pennsylvania’s Independence Law Center has worked on cases involving prayer at public school board meetings, school book bans, transgender athletics, abortion pills and the right of Christian organizations to hire staff that support their policies on sexuality. Another case concerned Child Evangelism Fellowship and its effort to distribute Bibles to elementary school students.
The Massachusetts Liberty Law Center hit the ground running after its August founding. The group is helping with a lawsuit against state officials and the leader of an abortion-rights group, claiming the state singles out Your Options Medical Centers, a network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, to commit viewpoint discrimination against them.
The suit takes aim at a state campaign that sought to steer women away from the pregnancy centers with billboards and statements that warn the centers “are not a safe or trusted place to go for reproductive health care.”
In a statement, Liberty said, “We told you that the time to retreat is over; together, it’s time to advance. That is exactly what we did last night, when we filed suit in partnership with the American Center for Law and Justice against Governor Healey, the MA Department of Public Health, and their cronies at Reproductive Equity Now.”
The state legal groups behind these cases say Christians are quickly losing their freedoms and they’re seeking new litigants who could benefit from their free assistance.
“The volume of need is enormous,” said Victoria Cobb of the Family Foundation in Virginia.
Related articles:
Focus on the Family affiliate is the unifying force behind campaign to restrict transgender rights | Analysis by Steve Rabey
This is how unhinged Focus on the Family has become | Opinion by Mark Wingfield