The far-right group behind the legal effort to eliminate Roe v. Wade has its focus on a new target, according to a report.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) killed the abortion legislation in the Supreme Court. It's also the group that tried to stop the FDA certification of the abortion pill mifepristone.
The New Yorker reported its next goals include fighting against LGBTQ freedoms and issues that the ACLU supports. Group members consider the ACLU their nemesis.
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"For more than half a century, conservative Christians have decried the left’s ever-expanding demands for personal rights," said the report. "The right to free speech allowed pornography to permeate the culture. The right to freedom of conscience for atheists and religious minorities silenced school prayer. And the right to privacy was stretched to protect birth control, abortion, gay sex, and, eventually, same-sex marriage."
"In 2018, the organization’s lawyers drafted a Mississippi law banning most abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy; last year, A.D.F. successfully defended that law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe," the report also said.
Critics of the ADF say that they're inventing fights to keep a disappearing culture war alive and well. For example, a Colorado website designer who won a case at the Supreme Court earlier this year over building a gay marriage wedding site was never asked to make such a site. In fact, she spoke to her pastor about going into business making wedding sites and her pastor told her to call the ADF.
"And A.D.F. routinely sends out bulletins urging churches and ministries to be on the lookout for 'sogis' — prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity," said The New Yorker. "An A.D.F. legal guide warns churches that such prohibitions 'are not designed for the innocent purpose of ensuring all people receive basic services'; rather, 'their practical effect is to legally compel Christians to accept, endorse, and even promote messages, ideas, and events that violate their faith.'”
They even have their own toll-free hotline number for aggrieved Christians to call for help.
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The ADF and other far-right groups are now sounding the alarm that liberals want to change the gender of students. A lawyer for the ADF helped write the so-called "Don't Say Gay" law in Florida. The next state it's focusing on is West Virginia, where the group is working to ban trans athletes.
The reporter spoke with Kristen Waggoner, the group's chief executive and general counsel, about the debate over same-sex marriage and interracial marriage and asked why one can be blocked while the other can't. Waggoner claimed that in interracial marriage, the Supreme Court concluded in Loving v. Virginia that there were bans in place because "part of a whole system of laws were designed to subjugate a whole class of people out of group bigotry."
The report said the group argues being against same-sex marriage isn't bigotry, it's Christianity based on "the teachings of all the Abrahamic faiths."
The report noted that during the age of slavery, the Bible was used to justify the practice, claiming it was deeply rooted in the Abrahamic faiths. "And Abraham himself was polygamous," the report recalled.
