![]() Accessed February 15 2021.Īlliance Defending Freedom n.d. Meet Barronelle Stutzman | ADF case story. ![]() Accessed February 15 2021.Īlliance Defending Freedom 2018. The unintended victims of bathroom bills and locker room policies. Accessed February 15 2021.Īlliance Defending Freedom. National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, 2 April. The rise and fall of the bathroom bill: State legislation affecting trans & gender non-binary people. As a result, while these cases have been legislative and policy failures for ADF they nevertheless provide useful insight into the rhetorical project of Christian persecution.Īli, Diana. I argue that by emphasising the perceived vulnerability of white cisgender women and girls in these cases, ADF litigators and cultural producers advance a narrow conception of religious freedom rights located in the specific cultural politics of neoliberal, white evangelicalism. I then analyse both legal and cultural outputs of the organisation in two key cases: the so-called bathroom bills limiting transgender access to public facilities in several states, and the service denial of florist Barronelle Stutzman. I begin by locating ADF strategy within the longer history of Christian persecution rhetoric articulated by the Moral Majority during the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, spoke at an ADF event this summer.In this article I trace the legal and cultural advocacy work of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the single largest Christian conservative legal organisation operating in the US today. FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACESĭespite what many would consider its “extreme” views, ADF has not been relegated to the margins. Like any 501c3 nonprofit, ADF is not required to disclose its donors, and many of its 3,200 allied attorneys do not publicize the pro bono work they do on behalf of the organization, which makes the group’s efforts difficult to track, according to Beirich. aimed at restricting trans people’s access to sex-segregated facilities.Īccording to an in-depth NBC News report published in April 2017, many of these “bathroom bills” filed across multiple states resemble one another - and that’s because they used language strongly similar to the model legislation called the Student Physical Privacy Act, which was drafted by ADF.ĪDF operates on a budget of over $50 million, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ rights group. In addition to its work in the courts, ADF has also been linked to so-called transgender bathroom bills that have been introduced in recent years in state legislatures across the U.S. Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said her organization first became aware of ADF in 2013, when it discovered the nonprofit was advising anti-LGBTQ organizations overseas - in places including Belize and Jamaica - on how to keep anti-sodomy laws on their books. “ADF is not litigating any cases, pursuing any legislation, nor supporting the passage of any laws domestically or internationally that criminalize sodomy.” “RELENTLESSLY EXTREME”ĪDF was founded in 1994 by a group of influential Christian leaders, including Alan Sears, co-author of the 2003 book "The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today,” and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and author of the 2004 book “Marriage Under Fire,” which claimed same-sex marriage would “destroy the fundamental principles of marriage, parenthood and gender.” “ADF is one the nation’s most respected and successful Supreme Court advocates, working to preserve our fundamental freedoms of speech, religion and conscience,” Tedesco wrote in an email to NBC News.
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