Unholy by Sarah Posner

Author:Sarah Posner [Posner, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

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As Trump’s short-lived and beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions proved himself to be a dutiful student of the Christian right’s tactics to upend the law, in alignment with its ideology that conservative Christians were the ones whose civil rights truly needed protection. For guidance, Sessions turned to the leading experts at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the powerhouse Christian right legal advocacy organization that had battled for years to ban same-sex marriage and abortion, elevate expanded religious rights for conservative Christians, and erase the separation of church and state. The ADF was omnipresent in every one of these fights in court, and in the court of public opinion. Having interviewed its lawyers, watched them argue in court and to Congress, and witnessed the organization mushroom in size and reach, I saw the ADF gradually transform itself, along with its legal theories, into a preeminent player in the legal mainstream. By the time Trump took office, the ADF and its affiliated lawyers were positioned to segue into high-ranking political positions, be nominated to the federal bench, and play an integral role in shaping the policy of the U.S. government.

Much of the organization’s raison d’être has been to cast Christians as the victims of LGBTQ rights. When the organization was founded in 1993, voters in Colorado had just approved Amendment 2, a ballot referendum that changed the state constitution to preempt state or local recognition of gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals as a protected class. But this attempt to block the advancement of civil rights drew an immediate court challenge, leading to the Supreme Court’s 1996 ruling in Romer v. Evans, striking down Amendment 2 as an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Alan Sears, a former Reagan administration lawyer and the ADF’s first president, provided early signals of the future strategy, both rhetorical and legal, in his 2003 book The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today. Sears argued that the legal challenge to Amendment 2 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 wrote, “is a snapshot of what will happen to the church in America.” In 2006, I saw Sears tell the first Values Voter Summit that “the homosexual agenda and religious freedom are on a collision course.” Perhaps he knew this because the organization he ran was making it so. The ADF, which today boasts an annual budget of nearly $50 million, has, more than any other Christian right organization, laid the groundwork for that draft executive order on religious freedom, leaked within the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, forecasting the Trump “religious freedom” agenda.

To the public, the ADF presents itself as a protector of religious freedom for all. But from 146 appellate and Supreme Court briefs that the organization’s lawyers filed—all the briefs I could find in public databases and on its website—a strikingly different picture emerges.

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