A Dangerous Alliance
“Today, conservative lawyers wield “religious liberty” to defend not just familiar, flashpoint issues like prayer in schools or display of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, but a broader reactionary policy agenda. As the writer Jay Michaelson has documented [politicalresearch.org], the right-wing legal establishment has invoked religious liberty to defend businesses’ right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and transgender people and to undermine contraception protections in the Affordable Care Act. The argument has also been mobilized to undermine labor: The Becket Fund, a Washington-based legal nonprofit founded in 1994, filed an amicus brief in the notorious 2018 Janus decision that gutted public-sector unions, claiming that requiring public-sector workers to pay union dues threatened religious liberties, since the unions might take positions that violated individual workers’ religious beliefs. Throughout, conservatives have placed this legal strategy within a broader narrative of persecution, in which traditionalist Christians are the new oppressed minority in America, in need of legal protection.”