Friend:

Prepping and winning. That was our week at AU. The Supreme Court term ended with a series of devastating decisions handed down by the court’s ultra-conservative bloc in June, but we’re already preparing for the next term, which begins in October.

This fall, the Court will hear a case called 303 Creative v. Elenis, which involves a Colorado business whose owner wants free speech and religious freedom exemptions from the state’s anti-discrimination law so they can discriminate against LGBTQ people. Sound familiar? It’s the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop case all over again, with the same Christian Nationalist hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom, behind it. What’s the biggest difference? The Court itself. Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh have replaced Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy. Also, unlike in Masterpiece, this business doesn’t yet have any same-sex customers to turn away; it’s seeking the right to refuse to serve hypothetical same-sex couples in the future. And here, the court only agreed to hear the free speech argument, though norms and rules don’t seem to mean much to the ultra-conservative bloc.

Yesterday, Americans United joined our allies in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, urging the Court not to grant this exemption. Our powerful brief explains how the business’s request for a speech-based exemption would lead to the very discrimination these laws are meant to protect against, especially for people from minority faiths. Our country’s foundational principle of church-state separation demands that the Court reject this misuse of religious freedom and protect the right of all of us to be treated equally under the law.

Even though we’re facing a Supreme Court majority that’s aggressively hostile to church-state separation, we’re still winning in lower courts. This week, the Second Circuit held that churches are not above the law. Our client Father Alexander Belya sued his old church and a few of his former colleagues for defamation. Alarmingly, the church officials argued that simply because they were all colleagues in the same church, the court couldn’t even hear the defamation case. If the court had agreed with the church officials, it would have had disastrous and far-reaching impact for anyone trying to hold a church or religious organization accountable in a court of law. That’s why AU’s legal team stepped in to work on this case. And, this week, we won. The court rejected that argument.

Equal justice under law. The freedom to live as ourselves and believe, or not, as we choose. These are pillars of democracy. That’s what Americans United has fought for over the last 75 years. With your support, that’s what we’ll keep fighting for.

With hope and determination,

Rachel K. Laser
President and CEO