Fighting Gay Rights and Abortion With the First Amendment
Source: New York Times
Fighting Gay Rights and Abortion With the First Amendment
By JEREMY W. PETERS NOV. 22, 2017
WASHINGTON The details were spare when the event appeared this summer on Attorney General Jeff Sessionss public schedule. He would speak on religious liberty to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom. No exact location was specified. No news media would be allowed in.
Only after an outcry over such secrecy and the anti-gay rights positions of its sponsor did a transcript of Mr. Sessionss remarks emerge on a conservative website. Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack, he told the gathering in Orange County, Calif. The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the free exercise of our faith have become acute.
Mr. Sessionss focus was not an accident. The First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon of social conservatives fighting to limit the separation of church and state and to roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
Few groups have done more to advance this body of legal thinking than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has more than 3,000 lawyers working on behalf of its causes around the world and brought in $51.5 million in revenue for the 2015-16 tax year, more than the American Civil Liberties Union.
Among the alliances successes has been bringing cases involving relatively minor disputes to the Supreme Court a law limiting the size of church signs, a church seeking funding for a playground and winning rulings that establish major constitutional precedents.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/us/politics/alliance-defending-freedom-gay-rights.html