For some time, many within our organization have been concerned that our name, Alliance Defense Fund, does not sufficiently, accurately convey who we are and what we do. It was the name chosen by our Founders, for good reasons at the time. Back then, we were not engaged in any direct litigation ourselves – we provided legal and financial resources for other Christian attorneys. So, the term “fund” was very appropriate.

Nowadays, though, we do our own litigating. We actively defend clients and engage the opposition. We are moving beyond our country’s borders, seeking out means and opportunities to protect the freedom of people of faith all over the world.

“Alliance Defense Fund” did not really capture any of this very well. So, after thorough research, careful planning, and intense preparation, we are making a transition. Beginning this month, the new name of Alliance Defense Fund is “Alliance Defending Freedom.”

We want this new name to communicate two crucial themes: stewardship and reputation.

Our old name caused confusion for almost everyone – allies, Allied Ministry Friends, clients, the media. This is poor stewardship. The nature of the work we do requires us to secure resources and assure clients and allies by conveying quickly and clearly who we are, what we do, and why it matters. Anything that impedes this understanding is a hindrance to our ministry. It damages the efficiency, and ultimately, the impact of what we do, thereby, making it unworthy of the God who has given us our mission.

Our new name changes this. Alliance Defending Freedom tells people what is important to us: building alliances. It tells people what we do: we defend. It tells people what our goal is: freedom. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. It resonates. This is good stewardship.

Our reputation is what people think of when they hear our name. We do not want them thinking of us as a “fund.” We want them to associate us with freedom. We want them to know that we are passionate about defending freedom…that defending it is the mission of our lives…that we defend it “for faith” and “for justice.” This is why we have built our new logo around these two phrases – to affirm our purpose of opening doors for the Gospel, and to ensure equality before the law for people of faith.

We hope this new name will resonate with you because we value deeply all of those who stand with us, work with us, and fight with us in the cause of religious freedom.

After all, this is what our ministry has always been: an alliance defending freedom. With this rebranding, we are just making it official.

Many wondered at Chuck’s sudden conversion to Christianity. He seemed to wonder at it himself. He spent each day that followed, for nearly 40 years, dazzled by his own implausible redemption. It is the reason he never hedged or hesitated in describing his relationship with Jesus Christ. Chuck was possessed, not by some cause, but by someone.

Over my almost three decades working in Washington, D.C., I crossed Chuck Colson’s path many times.  I can attest to his utterly transformed nature, a man at joy with God whose genuine compassion overflowed to everyone he met.

Colson showed that he embraced the full spectrum of Christian belief and social reform. Colson challenged many with his unrelenting work for prison reform and to reach out to the least of those among us, criminal convicts.

But Colson also fully embraced unpopular views that are thoroughly Biblical but opposed by the worldview lords of our day.  He was the driving force behind the Manhattan Declaration, urging Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians to support religious liberty, the prolife ethic and the proper definition of the institution of marriage, and stand strong against those forces seeking to eliminate or distort them.  My last time I spoke with Chuck Colson was about  1 1/2 years ago at a rally for marriage, where he pulled me aside to express his great regard for Alan Sears and the work of ADF to protect marriage.

Colson enthusiastically embraced all aspects of the Christian life. Like Zaccheus in Luke 19, Colson heard the Gospel of Christ’s redemption, plunged into it fully and was completed changed by it.  He understood that the only appropriate response a person can have to Christ’s love toward us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8) was total transformation.  Chuck Colson’s challenges us with his example that we show the full glory of God’s grace to each one of us by being thoroughly converted by Christ and His word in all areas of our life.

Even at the time of Roe, some were concerned that legalized abortion would lead to compelled participation in abortion, a concern that was not misplaced as ACLU attorneys were working in Montana to force Catholic hospitals to perform sterilizations.  The Supreme Court acknowledged but dismissed that concern, holding only that “the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, … the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.”  The Court cited favorably the resolution of the AMA House of Delegates stating:

RESOLVED, That no physician or other professional personnel shall be compelled to perform any act which violates his good medical judgment. Neither physician, hospital, nor hospital personnel shall be required to perform any act violative of personally held moral principles. In these circumstances, good medical practice requires only that the physician or other professional personnel withdraw from the case so long as the withdrawal is consistent with good medical practice.

Similarly, in Doe v. Bolton while the Supreme Court struck down some parts of a Georgia abortion law, it left standing a provision that allowed any medical professional or hospital to decline to participate in abortions, saying that this provision was an “appropriate protection to the individual and to the denominational hospital.”  Thus, in the seminal abortion decisions that President Obama and the abortion industry celebrate this weekend, the same Court acknowledged the right NOT to assist in abortions in violation of conscience.

To be absolutely sure however, the U.S. Congress passed the Church Amendments, turning back ACLU efforts to treat Catholic hospitals receiving Medicare funds as public hospitals and force them to perform sterilizations (and ultimately abortions), and prohibiting recipients of certain federal funds from requiring medical professionals or any person to participate in abortions, sterilizations, or other procedures in violation of conscience.  This was so uncontroversial it passed with only a single vote against in either house – a vote total unthinkable even for a bill to honor mom and apple pie today.  In fact, noted right wing extremist Senator Ted Kennedy spoke in favor of the law on the floor of the Senate, saying that it protected the constitutional right not to participate in abortion and he supported the “full protection to the religious freedom of physicians and others.”  In 1973, as the opinions reflect, there was no doubt that whatever right the penumbral emanations of the constitution gave to women and doctors to participate in abortions, it certainly protected the right not to participate in abortions or other medical procedures that violated one’s conscience.

It is in the face of this history that the Obama Administration announced on Friday that it will, with only a 1 year reprieve, fine virtually every faith-based ministry in the country that does not pay for contraception and abortifacients (Plan B, Ella, IUD, etc. included).  This decision is certainly an affront to religious liberty –perhaps the greatest in our nation’s history.  But it is also completely unsupported, indeed rejected by the very cases that the Obama Administration would use to support its cause.  Roe and Doe, as bad as those decisions are, reject the Administration’s claim that a woman’s “right” to contraception and abortifacients justify the federal government compelling Christ-centered ministries to violate their conscience by buying these for them.  When you hear abortion industry supporters rely upon those decisions to justify this assault on conscience, don’t believe it.  Even Roe itself is conservative compared to the radical anti-life advocacy of the present Administration.

Following the September 15, 2011 announcement by Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-FL) that his House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee had launched a massive investigation of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates’ use of federal funding and compliance with federal abortion funding restrictions, members of the ADF Life Team briefed Congressman Stearns and his staff on the experiences of ADF in identifying waste, abuse, and potential fraud by Planned Parenthood and its affiliates.

In addition to other information, ADF advised Congressman Stearns of the 15 federal and state audits which had determined there had been Title XIX-Medicaid overpayments to Planned Parenthood affiliates in excess of $46 million. By all accounts, Planned Parenthood’s primary motivation has been to enhance its profits by taking advantage of “overbilling” opportunities in complex, well-funded, but understaffed federal and state programs.

Most recently, in a December 7, 2011 letter signed by seven former Planned Parenthood employees, including ADF friends Abby Johnson of Texas and Susan Thayer of Iowa, these seven former employees, which include a former Planned Parenthood abortion doctor, two former clinic managers, and one former clinic director, told Congressman Stearns that Planned Parenthood indeed used federal money for abortions despite federal prohibitions.

The seven former Planned Parenthood employees told Congressman Stearns that they could “state categorically, from personal experience, that abortion is indeed deployed [by Planned Parenthood] as a means of family planning.” They also expressed to Congressman Stearns that, since Planned Parenthood receives $1 billion or more in a three year period, close governmental oversight is indeed warranted.

Planned Parenthood’s pro-abortion allies, including the Obama Administration, are doing all they can to resist Congressman Stearns’ long overdue investigation. But who can disagree that, in the words of former Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, “a million here, a million there, and pretty soon you are talking about big bucks.”

Let the Stearns’ investigation proceed apace!

Perhaps one of the best illustrations I can offer for what I mean by that is the success God has given us with an effort designed to impact more than 750 government-run facilities that have been using unconstitutional meeting policies to prevent Christians from legally gathering on their premises.

Last June, ADF sent 151 letters urging the governmental entities that oversee these hundreds of facilities – which include schools, libraries, parks, and community centers – to change the policies, which either have been or could be used to refuse or restrict churches, religious groups, or individuals from reserving places that are otherwise open to the public.

So far, 60 of the 154 government entities contacted by ADF have changed their discriminatory policies, with 19 others saying they are in the process of changing their policies – making for an outstanding success rate without any litigation required (so far). This is building a real return on the precedents you have allowed ADF to win in earlier battles.

Of the remaining government entities, eight entities refused to change their policies, while 61 have yet to respond and eight others have requested additional information.

“We hope the remaining officials will follow the lead of the others and uphold everyone’s First Amendment-protected right of free speech,” says ADF Senior Legal Counsel Joel Oster. “Christians shouldn’t be excluded and restricted from using public meeting rooms and other facilities simply because they plan to express a Christian viewpoint.”

“The government officials who changed their policies have done the right thing,” he adds, “acknowledging that the Constitution prohibits the government from deciding who can and cannot use space based upon the viewpoints to be discussed at gatherings.”

By the grace of God, ADF and our allies have reopened more than 2,300 – yes, 2,300 – facilities once closed to the Gospel. This is miles of reclaimed ground, tangible space where tens of thousands of people can now gather, pray, and praise the One who made all this possible.

That’s a lot of lost ground regained. And while we still have a lot of territory to win back, we pause to give thanks for our Lord’s provision, and for all the Christians across this country whose religious freedom has been restored and who now have an open door for sharing the Gospel in their community.

We also give special thanks for all those whose gifts and support for ADF has equipped us to make these crucial interventions all over the country. May He continue to guide and bless our efforts, and may we gain back more and more lost legal ground for His glory.

If you’ve visited our website or looked at any of our written materials, you know that ADF defines itself as “a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and direct litigation.” It would be hard to overstate the third element on that list, for it’s the funding that makes possible the crucial resources that are supporting our legal work across the country and around the world.

Seventeen years ago, the very idea that ADF could be making the kind of national and even global impact we’ve been blessed of God to achieve was beyond the fondest hopes of even the six noble souls who first envisioned this work: Dr. Bill Bright, Larry Burkett, Dr. James Dobson, Dr. D. James Kennedy, Marlin Maddoux, and William (Bill) Pew. But together, they dreamed of launching an organization that could successfully defend religious liberty and retake the crucial legal ground lost over the previous decades to an increasingly aggressive secular culture.

While each of those men contributed immeasurably to the creation of what became ADF, it fell in large part to Bill Pew and his wonderful wife, Margie, to supply the crucial funds that laid the financial foundation for this ministry. Until now, I couldn’t tell you how they graciously covered the costs for research, initial events, and start-up. They were particularly instrumental in helping avert some of the severest financial challenges of our early years, and solely funded the first two gatherings of what’s become the signature event for many Ministry Friends: the Liberty Summit.

Bill served on our ADF Governing Board until his death 13 years ago. When he went to be with the Lord, Margie continued on in faithful prayers and other support of our good work. Last week, she went on to join Bill … and like him, leaves behind a legacy of three sons, 15 grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, quiet faith, dependable friendship, and legendary generosity.

John Roll – the federal judge killed in the January 8 shooting in Tucson – leaves a different, but no less vital legacy.  His professional accomplishments and personal character are an example to every Christian lawyer of how to combine profound faith in God with exemplary service in the legal arena.  A man “of unusual personal graciousness,” in the words of Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, Judge Roll enjoyed unusual – and universal – respect throughout the legal community for his absolute fairness and consummate judicial skill.

His life is a reminder that many in public service are genuinely seeking to follow our Savior and to live out their faith in ways that transcend and transform their environment.  Please join me in giving thanks for his humble, godly life, and for that of Margie Pew.  And let us pray for those who, like them, continue to stand faithful, helping all of us keep a door open for the spread of the Gospel.

That opposition took a significant new legal hold in a ruling issued January 4^th by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.  The court ruled 3-0 that the memorial cross that has stood at Mount Soledad since 1954 violates the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s tragic that the court chose a twisted and tired interpretation of the First Amendment over the common sense idea that the families of fallen American troops should be allowed to honor these heroes as they choose,” says Alliance Defense Fund Senior Counsel Joseph Infranco. “No one is harmed, constitutionally or otherwise, by the presence of a cross on a war memorial.  There is great harm to tearing these memorials down.  The memorial cross should stand in honor of the sacrifice made by American troops.”

“War heroes have earned the right to be remembered.  The memory of those who sacrificed their lives for our freedom shouldn’t be dishonored because the ACLU finds a small number of people who merely claim to be offended.

Memorial crosses of one kind or another have stood on Mount Soledad since 1913.  In 2005, 76 percent of San Diegans voted to preserve the current cross by transferring the memorial from city property to the ownership of the National Park Service, but that move was contested in court.  In 2006 — after years of litigation and faced with a court-ordered deadline to remove it — the land on which the memorial sits was taken by an act of Congress, passed with an 80-percent margin in the House and unanimous support in the Senate.  As a result of Congress’ action, the land was designated as a Federal Memorial and transferred to the U.S. Department of Defense.  Those developments set off the lawsuit that the 9th Circuit ruled on last week.

Last year, in the similar case of the Mojave Cross, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a land transfer initiated by Congress that passed the land under the monument back into the hands of a private veterans’ group was not unconstitutional.  What’s more, the high court declared that any religious significance associated with the cross does not render it constitutionally ‘off limits’ as a public memorial.

That ruling would seem to have implications for the Mount Soledad case, since, in the words of one San Diego newspaper, this latest case “raises the issue of whether a Latin cross is a religious symbol only for Christians, or a secular one when in the context of a war memorial” and whether “such a symbol should be allowed on land owned by the government.”

ADF is committed to the defense of our nation’s religious memorials, and to the religious liberty of our nation’s veterans – and of those who made the supreme sacrifice for their country.  Please be in prayer for our continuing efforts, and for the judges who are making such fateful decisions with regard to the future of our religious freedoms.

It is axiomatic that those who control the foundation of an issue regulate the content of any ensuing discussion. In 1973, the Supreme Court failed when it chose to tiptoe around the fundamental question of human life in Roe v. Wade. Justice Blackmun wrote in the majority opinion, “[w]e need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” to hold the issue of abortion legal. Legislation from the bench aside, the results of this case have been of great disservice to our nation and the framework of our society.

It is with this impression that I came to read The Times (UK) Columnist Antonia Senior’s piece “Yes, abortion is killing. But it’s the lesser evil” in June of this year. Initially intrigued by Senior’s reflections upon the issue of abortion after the birth of her daughter, I became flummoxed by her seemingly inconsistent conclusion. She admits, “[A] foetus [sic] is a life by any subjective measure. . . . Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better . . . .” However, she then completely discounts the incredible significance of her admission by claiming women’s rights are so inexorably tied with their right to fertility control that ending legal abortion will be a return to women’s subjugation. Sputtering for leverage, Senior explains that if it weren’t for perceived blessings of biology (i.e., the inability to physically bear children), men could never have “managed to hang on to political and cultural hegemony for so long.” Correlating restricted abortion access with misogyny, she finally concludes by stating that, when an issue is nuanced, one should choose the lesser of two evils. For Senior, babies and women’s autonomy are mutually exclusive; to gain the one you must be prepared to kill the other.

Her resolve seems so absolutely selfish in this regard. It is simply astounding how one can admit the existence of a new life and simply dismiss it, nay kill it, in favor of pursuing a “career.” As I’ve continued my education, I’ve found this ideology degrading motherhood increasingly prevalent. I’ve always understood that the two sexes were created to be complementary not identical; equal in status but with different roles. Sadly, motherhood as a vocation has fallen into ridicule as today’s “higher” culture extols the supposed virtues of indulgence and instantaneous gratification. Sexual intimacy is considered a right per se.

However, this is not so. We are never justified in doing evil that good may come of it. As such, a woman’s “right to choose” comes down to choosing whether to be sexually active. If she chooses to engage in sexual behavior, then both she and her partner must be prepared to accept the normal consequences. The argument put forward for abortion in cases of pregnancy due to rape or incest is often presented simply to sow discord and color the issue. Women who procure an abortion in cases of rape or incest are a statistical anomaly. Yet even those cases, horrific as they are, would never vindicate the direct killing of an innocent child.

As this debate boils down to framing, we must not lose perspective. Abortion advocates, like Senior, subscribe to a crumbling ideology, struggling in their attempts to justify murder.

David Michael Manni is an Alliance Defense Fund Blackstone Fellow (2010) and a second-year law student at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida. His column received second place in the 2010 ADF “Blackstone Op-ed Quest.” The opinions expressed here belong solely to the author.

Thanks to an incredible $1.25 million matching grant, you have the unique opportunity to help train exceptional Christian law students like David at the 2011 Blackstone Legal Fellowship. Click here to watch a video or give a gift that will be doubled.

While intuitive, the third implication gives us a glimpse of a startling future when applied to religious freedom.  If it’s true that we protect the things we value, and that we won’t protect things we don’t value, won’t religious freedom, the protection of religion, exist only so long as we value religion?

In other words, when society stops valuing religion, what motivation is there for society to protect religious freedom?

In the beginning, America protected religious freedom more robustly than any other country in history because of the value its founders placed on religion.  Religiously oppressive European governments forced immigrants to the New World.  Religion that was not valued in the Old World found a new home in the New World.  And when the New World became a new country, its founders expressed their commitment to the value of religion by protecting it in America’s first constitutional amendment.

But the New World is changing.  In the same way that children grow into the likeness of their parents, the New World is quickly becoming the Old World.

The American society decreasingly values religion, seriously jeopardizing the future of religious of freedom.  A society that does not value religion will not protect religious freedom.  The attitude of the next generation towards religion is nothing short of frightening:  religious irreverence is commonplace and nothing is held to be sacred.  If the value that society allocates to religion could be measured on a sort of generational continuum, it would likely show the immediate past and current generation as apathetic towards religion; they are areligious.  No so for the rising generation where animosity is displacing apathy.  It’s antireligious.  The tone of the new intellectual religious critics, traditionally civil, has shifted to downright animosity, disrespect, and condescension.  Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and their associates daily derogate and assail the very existence of religion.

Thus, we face a difficult question:  in the future how will we succeed in arguing for the protection of religious freedoms in a society that places no value in religion?

Enacting legislative and judicial protections for religion would not generate respect for religion.  To think that it would transposes cause and effect.  Religion must be intrinsically valued before religious freedom protections would have any meaningful effect.  The Bible and prayer were thrown out of public schools, not because a majority of the Supreme Court woke up and decided that those things were no longer deserving of society’s protection, but because the value society placed in them had been eroding for decades.  The Supreme Court’s decision reflected this change in societal values.  This makes sense in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to retain “In God We Trust” as our nation’s motto.   The court found those words constitutionally acceptable because they no longer had substantial religious significance.  That is, the court did not protect the motto for what it literally meant; it protected it because it literally had no religious value to society.

While the protection for religion was being cast aside, other protections were taking its place, notably the protection of self-autonomy.  We now legally protect terminating childhood for the sake of protecting self-autonomy and choice, even if that entails fabricating constitutional interpretations to achieve that end.  Remember, in America we go to great lengths to protect the things we value; we now sacrifice life to protect choice.

Indeed, religious freedom exists only as long we value religion.  Why would society protect and fight for something deemed to have little or no value?  After all, fighting takes effort, resolve, and sacrifice—things reserved for causes worthy of that sort of effort.

The cliché is right.  Religious freedom is not free, and its continued existence is not guaranteed.  If we don’t value religion now, one wonders how we win the argument for religious freedom in the future.

Garrett Gibson is an Alliance Defense Fund Blackstone Fellow (2010) and a second-year law student at the University of Houston Law Center in Houston, Texas.  His column received first place in the 2010 Alliance Defense Fund “Blackstone Op-ed Quest.”  The opinions expressed here belong solely to the author.

Thanks to an incredible $1.25 million matching grant, you have the unique opportunity to help train exceptional Christian law students at the 2011 Blackstone Legal Fellowship. Click here to watch a video or give a gift that will be doubled.

This is it how the Left often attacks the approach of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism.”  Just like the little girl, the Left relies on the very thing they are attempting to stigmatize: the knowable ordinary plain meaning of written words.  They presume that their own words carry a fixed and discernible meaning which their readers can know and understand – but at the same time deny that the words of the Constitution merit similar treatment.  In other words, their attacks are self-refuting.  They must affirm what they intend to deny.

The Blackstone Legal Fellowship exposes the flaws of the prevailing Leftist jurisprudence, known as the “living constitution,” that dominates law schools today.  And it doesn’t stop there: Blackstone also provides a crucial, positive alternative to this harmful teaching, namely, “originalism.”

What then is “originalism”?  Let’s first be clear about what it is not. Originalism is not “strict construction,” if by that term, one means interpreting the document’s language in the most literally narrow possible way.  For example, under this approach, the US could not have an air force since the term “air force” does not appear in the text.  Nor is “originalism” akin to “original intent,” a favorite canard of the Left.  With this distortion, the objection is that no one can really know what every person subjectively “intended” by supporting the document’s text.

Against these distortions, “originalism” actually refers to discerning the meaning, which is knowable, by interpreting the original ordinary plain public meaning of the text.

This approach is not particularly revolutionary.  We do this every day when reading menus and traffic signs, and we do it regarding trusts, wills, and contracts.  When I order a hamburger, I do not expect to receive an umbrella or an ant farm.  My menu is not a “living menu,” and if it were, I would quickly evacuate that business.  When my will leaves a gift to a particular pro-life charity, I do not expect it be given to another charity, or to a pro-abortion group like Planned Parenthood.  Words have meaning, and a “living constitution” is simply a fig leaf to cover for the exercise of “raw judicial power,” as Justice White famously remarked in his Roe v. Wade dissenting opinion.  Next time you order food and get what you ordered, remember Blackstone and support it.  Your food order, and this country’s basic legal foundation, depend on originalism.