Chicago Tribune - Legal Groups Putting God on the Docket - Christian Advocacy is Flourishing as New Law Field for Faithful

Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, and his son, Jordan Sekulow, a law student at Regent University host a radio show from the Regent University Law School in Virginia Beach, Va. (Gary C. Knapp, Chicago Tribune / August 9, 2007)

September 5, 2007
By Lisa Anderson, Tribune national correspondent

WASHINGTON Whether they like it or loathe it, most Americans recognize the American Civil Liberties Union as a constitutional watchdog. Far fewer know of the American Center for Law and Justice, a leader in the flourishing field of Christian legal advocacy that may be less famous but is no less determined to see its views prevail in the nation's courts and, ultimately, its culture.

The best-financed and highest profile of these conservative Christian legal groups, the ACLJ, headed by aggressive chief counsel Jay Sekulow, has led the way in transforming the complaints of the religious right from raucous protests on the courthouse steps to polished presentations inside the highest courts in the land.

These cases cover a broad range of religious issues, from defending a Texas high school's practice of prayer at football games to an Illinois pharmacist's right not to dispense drugs that violate his religious beliefs. Most aim at establishing precedent and all revolve around the conviction of the ACLJ and its colleagues that religious freedom, particularly that of Christians, is under attack by those who want to expunge all religious reference from public life.

Founded by televangelist Pat Robertson in 1990, the ACLJ has an annual budget of $35 million and employs about 130 people, including 37 lawyers, around the world, Sekulow said.

"They're a very, very significant player in constitutional law, particularly regarding the 1st Amendment," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the non-profit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who often has crossed swords with Sekulow.

Sekulow, he said, "had this very clever idea of using what might be called religious arguments in the past and transforming them into free-speech arguments. So children who want to engage in religious speech in a public school are engaging in a free-speech right, not a free-exercise-of-religion right."

Sekulow persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1990 case to uphold the rights of public high school students to have Bible club meetings after-hours on school premises on the basis on equal access and free speech.

Last month the group persuaded a federal court in Illinois to deny Wal-Mart's efforts to dismiss a suit brought by a pharmacist suspended after refusing to sell "Plan B," an emergency contraceptive the pharmacist considered equivalent to abortion. The court ruled that the pharmacist may proceed with the case under the Illinois Right of Conscience Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"It was a good decision," said Sekulow, noting that the Illinois case is one of more than a dozen the ACLJ is handling that involve "conscience clause" objections by medical professionals faced with duties that violate their religious beliefs.

"Those are newer kinds of cases," said Sekulow, sitting in the ACLJ's headquarters, an elegant 19th Century blue brick townhouse across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court. "You really don't see the pro-life protests on the courthouse square or in front of the abortion clinic. Now it's more these kinds of cases. Nuanced. There's federal legislation involved in this. There's state legislation. There's state regulatory issues. It's Title VII. So it's much more nuanced."

At 51, Sekulow cuts a distinctive figure in the Christian legal fold, not just because he is a sharp legal strategist who eschews emotional or religious arguments but also because he is a Brooklyn-born Jewish convert to Christianity, or a "Messianic Jew," as he puts it. In fact, in the first of the 12 cases he has argued before the Supreme Court, he won a unanimous ruling in 1987 that members of Jews for Jesus had the constitutional right to distribute religious literature in Los Angeles airport terminals.

Moreover, in recent years Sekulow has achieved a significant measure of political influence; he is consulted by the Bush administration on the choice of judges.

Responsible for Roberts

"He is, I think, more responsible than any other person for John Roberts being chief justice," said Peter Irons, a constitutional scholar, civil liberties lawyer and author of the recently published "God On Trial: Dispatches From America's Religious Battlefields."

Sekulow said he was invited soon after President Bush took office to join what came to be called "the four horsemen." The group, which also included former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, Leonard Leo of the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese, was formed "to be a kind of outside counsel on the judicial nomination issues, particularly the Supreme Court," Sekulow said. He also worked on the nomination to the Supreme Court of Samuel Alito, which the ACLU strongly opposed. Alito took the bench in 2006.

In many ways, the ACLJ represents the conservative mirror image of the American Civil Liberties Union, the 87-year-old non-profit group that many on the political and religious right love to hate for its rigorous insistence on the separation between church and state.

Although those words do not appear in the Constitution, that is the common interpretation of the 1st Amendment's clause banning government establishment of religion. Many conservative Christians take issue with that, including Bill Saunders, human-rights counsel at the Family Research Council, which promotes conservative family values and a Judeo-Christian view of the world.

"Free expression means the government should accommodate religious expression, not be hostile to it," said Saunders, who believes that groups like the ACLJ are needed to defend religious freedom.

Televangelist Robertson envisioned the ACLJ as a counterweight to what he, and many other Christian conservative leaders, describe as the ACLU's liberal, anti-faith stance and its threat to the presence of religion and the freedom to practice it in the public square.

"That is a grotesqueword carefully chosenmisrepresentation. When they say 'public square,' it's really 'government-sponsored,' " said Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

With a staff of five, including three attorneys, the program was established in 2005 to "ensure that the government does not promote religious beliefs nor interfere with the free exercise of religion." Gunn noted the ACLU has been engaged in religious liberty cases almost since its beginning, without regard for the faith, or lack thereof, of those it represents.

He noted among the first of the organization's many religious liberty cases was West Virginia vs. Barnette, a 1943 case in which the ACLU successfully argued that it was unconstitutional to compel Jehovah's Witness students to salute the American flag against their religious beliefs.

Not surprisingly, because both assert the defense of religious rights, the goals and strategies of the ACLU and the ACLJ sometimes parallel each other.

"A lot of times, you'll see the ACLU arguing that someone's rights were being violated and the ACLJ making exactly the same argumentbut in reverse," said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

ACLU Counterpoint

"They cast themselves as a counterpoint to the ACLU and, in some ways, they're right," said Katherine Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest and executive director of Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors the political and religious right. "The ACLU represents tolerance, freedom and protection of the Constitution, whereas these folks represent intolerance, oppression and the dismantling of our constitutional freedoms," she said.

Sekulow readily admits he has taken more than one page from the ACLU's strategy book and, on occasion, has joined forces with them.

"The ACLJ, Americans United and the ACLU are actually on the same side in a lot of free exercise [of religion] cases," Irons said, "but they're on opposite sides in the Establishment Clause cases."

Meanwhile, the ACLJ is expanding its international influence through its France-based European Center for Law and Justice and its Moscow-based Slavic Center for Law and Justice, both established in 1998. The ECLJ, which just received special consultative status from the United Nations, is working to "create a paradigm for breathing room for religious liberty" as the European Court of Human Rights develops law in that area, Sekulow said. In Moscow, he said, the goal is to facilitate "the ability of churches to operate. Period. It's a much more fundamental concern."

Looking ahead, Sekulow isn't too concerned that the political clout the ACLJ has enjoyed under Bush may wane with the end of his administration.

"I'm already implementing the post-Bush strategy," he said cheerfully.

View the complete article featuring the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and Jay Sekulow at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/nearwest/chi-christian_lawsep05,0,6757620.story