First Amendment—What First Amendment?

Although in the Senate hearings Amy Coney Barrett has shown herself to be a little hazy on the First Amendment, she taught constitutional law from 2011 to 2016 at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer training program for Christian law-school students. Blackstone Legal Fellowship was established by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing “Christian” advocacy group, for the purpose of inculcating a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law.” The ADF’s stated goal is the defense of “religious freedom, sanctity of life, and marriage and family.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom advocates and litigates their version “religious freedom” for their version of “Christians.” Other religious groups, not so much. In fact, ADF views it as a zero-sum proposition: their religious freedom generally means restricting other religions’ freedom.
Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and other conservative evangelicals established the Alliance Defending Freedom in 1993 to generate opposition to the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Annals of Bi-Partisanship

What started out as a child-molestation case ended with the Supreme Court ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma belongs to the people who there first: Native Americans.

The convicted child molester brought suit contending that because he was a member of the Creek Nation and the offense occurred on reservation land, the state of Oklahoma did not have jurisdiction. The state countered that because the treaties going back to the 1830s had been ignored in practice all along, and officially ignored since Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the reservation had no authority on its own land. The Supreme Court said otherwise.

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