Coast to Coast, ADF Stands in Defense of Religious Freedom

• By Alan Sears
• Posted Oct 4, 2011
• No Comments »

Thanks to your generous prayers and support, the Alliance Defense Fund continues to work to protect the right of all Americans to hear and speak the Truth. The depth and breadth of our ADF activities this past week illustrates how much God is graciously enabling us to do in defense of religious liberty.  To cite just three quick examples:

In Washington, D.C., we carried the ongoing legal fight for New York City churches to meet in public schools to a whole new level, filing a petition for review on September 27 with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Bronx Household of Faith in an equal access lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education. School officials in New York have spent 16 years fighting to keep religious services out of public school buildings during off hours – even though many other community groups use those same buildings for their meetings.

“The government cannot target religious services for exclusion from public buildings when they are open to other similar types of meetings,” says ADF Senior Counsel Jordan Lorence, who has represented Bronx Household for nearly two decades now. “The U.S. Supreme Court has definitively ruled that the government cannot limit access to generally available public spaces merely because government officials disapprove of a form of expression. Equal access means equal access, and that includes religious services.”

Meanwhile, across the country in Washington state, word came that a federal judge had issued a preliminary injunction and ordered the city of Issaquah to allow a local construction company owner to freely hand out Christian literature in public areas at this year’s annual Salmon Days Festival (October 1-2).  I recently told you about the lawsuit ADF attorneys filed last month after Paul Ascherl was threatened with arrest at last year’s event by police if he didn’t restrict his handing out of tracts to two isolated “expression areas” located far away from any event traffic.

“Christians shouldn’t be threatened with arrest and quarantined in isolated ‘expression areas’ when they want to share their beliefs,” says ADF Senior Counsel Nate Kellum, who has been working with local ADF-allied attorney Nathan Manni on the case. “The federal judge did the right thing by halting the enforcement of a city ordinance that … violates the constitutionally protected right to free speech in public areas at a free event that’s open to everyone.”

And then last Sunday, October 2, pastors from more than 525 churches nationwide took part in the fourth annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday, coordinated by ADF. That’s more than five times as many as took part last year – a number that reflects the growing determination of American pastors to exercise their constitutionally protected right to decide for themselves what they can preach from the pulpit, despite a problematic Internal Revenue Service rule that activist groups often use to silence churches.

“Pastors and churches shouldn’t live in fear of being punished or penalized by the government,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley. “That’s why ADF started Pulpit Freedom Sunday: to get the government out of the pulpits of America.”

Nothing is more fundamentally American – or Christian – than the freedom to speak the truth of the Gospel in our society and our culture … and yet today that freedom is under legal attack all over America. Join me in praying for our ADF attorneys as they stand to defend our liberty.