On March 15, 2023, two conservative Christian lawyers asked a federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, for a ruling that they privately considered an almost impossible long shot. They demanded a nationwide ban on mifepristone, a pill used in half the abortions in America. The drug had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than twenty years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The hearing itself, Bauslaugh noted, offered “fund-raising opportunities.” Donations had been flat lately; Bauslaugh blamed the economy, but surely the reversal of Roe had sapped some donors’ motivation. The mifepristone case was plunging A.D.F. back into a galvanizing battle.
Yet A.D.F. now gushes “rights talk.” In fact, Kristen Waggoner, its chief executive and general counsel, sometimes sounds as if she worked for her organization’s nemesis, the A.C.L.U. Arguing before the Supreme Court last winter, she told the Justices that she’d come to defend a bedrock First Amendment principle: the right to resist government attempts to coerce a citizen into publicly denying her deepest convictions.
With only 1.4 per cent of adolescents in the U.S. identifying as transgender, L.G.B.T.-rights groups accuse A.D.F. of whipping up a panic over questions better left to doctors, teachers, and parents. Waggoner, though, told me that A.D.F. was merely reacting to an ominous turn in American life.
A handful of legal organizations specialized in either religious freedom or Christian cases, but most were run by a single lawyer without enough financial resources for a long-term strategy. A.D.F. would be different: it would begin by raising money andenlist lawyers. Sears dedicated his life to fund-raising so completely, he told me, that he came to empathize with panhandlers: “I had a suit, not a sign, but I learned to beg.
In 2001, A.D.F. started hiring in-house lawyers and representing its own clients. But Sears continued to give grants to other organizations and firms—even those competing for the same cases. This largesse helped the organization become a hub for conservative Christian donors—they could give to A.D.F. and trust that their money would be spread across the legal battlefield.
Sears was determined to prevent A.D.F. from capitulating to the language of the gay-rights movement. In 2000, he created a summer program, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which taught first-year law students conservative Christian thought. The organization sent visiting Blackstone lecturers a “lexicon,” which all participants at A.D.F. events were expected to follow.