WoLF & ADF: What’s a “Radical Feminist” Org Doing in Court with Advocates of Patriarchal Religion?
Guest post examines Wolf’s amicus brief writing activities in aid of Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) legal strategy, WoLF’s legal team, and its latest amicus filing.
It takes a lawyer to really pick apart Women’s Liberation Front’s (WoLF) legal shenanigans and Dar Guerra (pseudonym) is one of the best. In this guest post, Dar examines Wolf’s amicus brief writing activities in aid of Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) legal strategy, WoLF’s legal team, and its latest amicus filing.
WoLF and ADF
Women's Liberation Front's (WoLF) legal efforts have been, since its founding, closely connected to the vastly wealthy and influential legal arm of the US right-wing Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF has its own ever-expanding legal staff and offers various perks including money grants, education, and connection-building to thousands of US lawyers so long as they subscribe to its central religious mission, to promote "Christian values" such as banning abortion, stripping LGB and trans people of their civil rights, and maintaining traditional sex roles that maintain women as subordinate to men. A respected civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has denominated ADF as a hate group. In vain: ADF is running away with the US Supreme Court on these issues.
Despite calling itself a radical feminist organization over the vehement objections of many radical feminists, WoLF's funding has always been primarily from right-wing sources. It started with $15,000 from ADF in 2016. In 2020 and 2021 WoLF raked in over a million dollars from sources it keeps secret. Its IRS form 990 tells the story.
Since 2016, WoLF has engaged in legal work and legislative work. The legal work has included about 14 amicus briefs (legal briefs filed with appellate courts that support a party) since then.
Amicus briefs these days are often "coordinated" by one party to a case or another. "Coordination" means a number of front or real organizations are marshaled to submit seemingly "independent" briefs more or less together. The number of such briefs in Supreme Court cases has recently exploded, because parties find them useful to advance ideas they want the Court to hear but don't want to make directly.
Arguments from seemingly-independent organizations, or even organizations usually considered hostile to the party, are especially useful. For instance, Independent Women's Forum, another regular amicus filer for ADF, is quite open that it is not independent, but instead a right-wing group masquerading as independent:
Heather Higgins, the President of the Independent Women’s Voice and the Board Chair of the Independent Women’s Forum, admitted as much in a speech to potential 2016 donors at a David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat:
“Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position. Our value here and what is needed in the Republican conservative arsenal is a group that can talk to those cohorts [women who are not Republican conservatives] that would not otherwise listen but can do it in a way that is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable."
Reviewing WoLF's amicus briefs from 2016 to 2023, it is obvious that WoLF's usefulness to ADF has been due to its own branding as a "radical feminist" organization. Under this imprimatur it has made feminist arguments ADF's own lawyers can't stand, but which help it win its cases.
The wide ADF publicity regarding WoLF's alliance with the Right on the trans issue always stresses how "different" the two organizations are. That difference is getting harder and harder to see over the years. As WoLF descends into a pattern of financial and media dependence on its hyper-conservative sponsors, its arguments and the issues it raises become more and more anti-feminist. If it ever sought to maintain some boundaries associating with ADF, they seem to have disappeared. Now WoLF appears to be filing religious arguments to support ADF in its anti-trans efforts, while still calling itself "radical feminist".
WoLF’s Legal Team
Let's look at WoLF's latest filed amicus brief in the Supreme Court case of Tingley v Ferguson.
First, I note that WoLF hasn't filed this brief alone, though it is filed solely as a brief from the Women's Liberation Front. There are two firms as WoLF's lawyers. There is a counsel of record, ordinarily considered the leading counsel, and there is a secondary counsel. The counsel of record is Andrea L. Shaw of the Law Office of Andrew H. Shaw and secondary counsel is Lauren Bone, who was recently on WoLF’s payroll.
Now why does WoLF need a co-counsel at all, having its own able counsel at hand? It isn't because WoLF needs for some reason to associate local counsel. I can't imagine why. Perhaps Ms. Shaw's firm is a specialist in handling radical feminist submissions, like Ms. Bone? Not at all; Ms. Shaw has laid out her point of view freely on the website of the small firm her husband heads:
Andrea L. Shaw, Esquire, is a Christian attorney in Carlisle, operating as a general practice attorney concentrating in religious freedom and constitutional law. Andrea grew up in Syracuse, New York, obtaining her Bachelor’s Degree in pre-law from Cedarville University. She then attended the Dickinson School of Law, earning a degree in law. While at Dickinson, Andrea was active in the Federalist Society and the Christian Legal Society....She is an Allied Attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom — the leading defender of religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family in America.
Apparently ADF has seen fit to provide a chaperone to make sure WoLF doesn't accidentally say anything in its brief that is not desirable -- why else would Ms. Shaw be sitting there as the Chief Counsel? Surely WoLF at least is making its usual radical feminist arguments without undue interference, since they have been so helpful to ADF?
The secondary counsel is Lauren Bone of Jackson Bone Law. I assumed that the Bone firm was still trying to make radical feminist arguments, though it had certainly been overshadowed in its latest brief by the heavy-hitting ADF-associated firm which was the Counsel of Record for the Brief. I didn't look hard enough at Lauren Bone's new firm. Her partner is none other than Candice Jackson, who, when she was with the Department of Education, was forced to apologize for saying that “90%” of sexual assault accusations on college campuses “fall into the category of “we were both drunk.”
Jackson, who was appointed by the Trump administration to head the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, has said that women today have all the same opportunities as men, and that “college women who insist on bonding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”
Jackson was previously employed at Judicial Watch, whose president, Thomas Fitton, is also the current president of the Council for National Policy. That organization is an umbrella right-wing funder of many rightwing organizations and a main subject of Anne Nelson's book Shadow Network. Naturally, Michael Farris, CEO of ADF, is a secret member.
Ms. Jackson has connections! And I'm not even talking about Betsy DeVos, her mentor.
I thought it was a scandal that WoLF was "chaperoning" Ms. Bone's law firm with a separate ADF-associated firm. But Ms. Bone's new law firm doesn't need any chaperoning as it moves more and more toward making bogus religious and religion-promoting free speech arguments while continuing to represent itself as feminist. It has Candice Jackson.
WoLF is hanging with its usual homies in the amicus briefs in this case, groups like Liberty Justice Center, (a partner organization of the Charles Koch Institute), Ethics and Public Policy Center (the counsel is J. LiMandri, ADF stalwart), Institute for Faith and Family, (the attorney, Deborah Dewart, is ADF), Heartbeat International (brought to you by the Antonin Scalia Law School Supreme Court Clinic), and quite a few more Catholic, hyper-conservative, ADF organizations of varying recency and legitimacy. There's not one mainstream feminist organization here, not even one vaguely liberal organization, yet here is WoLF still flying its increasingly dubious radical feminist flag.
WoLF and Tingley v Ferguson
Let's turn to the 2023 pending request that the US Supreme Court hear the 9th Circuit case of Tingley v. Ferguson. Tingley is a counselor who says he's not able to help trans-questioning clients properly because the State of Washington has passed a law banning "conversion therapy", that is, the practice of making sure the alternatives to "gender-affirming" medical treatment are discussed. What does WoLF’s amicus brief argue?
It's a long brief, and some familiar feminist arguments are raised, but in a context that becomes increasingly disturbing. Gender identity proponents hold a quasi-religious belief in a soul and the divineness of transness. Eh? Actual religious people are being obstructed from laying their views on clients. Huh? What's all this about religion? A new religion is being established in the US. What? Are my eyeballs deceiving me?
Jumping to the Conclusion of WoLF's brief:
To affirm the Ninth Circuit’s ruling and dismiss this case would be to ignore a significant body of jurisprudence on the Establishment Clause, and the First Amendment generally. Dismissing Tingley’s claims would embolden further state advancement and promotion of an ideology that is harmful specifically to women, girls, and LGB people. The outcome of this case is a statement on whether this Court will honor the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of a state religion. Young people in Washington state in counseling for distress related to sex, gender nonconformity, and sexuality deserve more than what the Ninth Circuit’s ruling gives them, and we urge the Court to reverse that decision.
Wait... "The outcome of this case is a statement on whether this Court will honor the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of a state religion." This case is about the Establishment Clause? This is surely Chief Counsel Shaw's conclusion, not WoLF's! She doesn't want a new religion to be established that will presumably be a threat to Christian beliefs? If Tingley can't push his own Christian beliefs, the Church of Trans sure as heck can't either? But yes, that is what the WoLF brief concludes, reinforced in the third major point of the brief, the heading of which reads: "III. SB 5722 VIOLATES THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE BY PROMOTING AND ADVANCING GENDER IDENTITY IDEOLOGY ABOVE ALL OTHER RELIGIONS, SECULAR BELIEFS, AND SCIENTIFIC FACTS."
Are we to believe that these radical feminists just had to write to tell the Court of its alarm that the Washington law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution (which says the State can't establish or encourage a particular religion or lack of a religion)? Does this sound like a radical feminist argument to you? Or does it sound like a religious right argument with the name of a front organization on the first page?
To me the brief reads like the secondary counsel wrote up her arguments, and then the Counsel of Record came in and twisted them all up into a novel, overreaching, indeed preposterous, religion-centered argument.
The nonsensical aspect of the religious argument doesn't matter. What matters is that it's a religious argument being made by putative radical feminists. Mary Daly is springing up from her grave and trying to invent some new words for this weirdness.
It's bad enough to see WoLF's briefs in ADF cases helping ADF co-opt radical feminist arguments. But this is the first one I've seen where the main point is that a state's bill or law violates a religious right. Aren't there enough hack amicus briefs already on file in the case making that argument for ADF? Why on earth would radical feminists bestir themselves all the way to the Supreme Court to make ADF arguments?
I can't wait to see WoLF's 2022 Form 990.
The author responds with clarification about the transgendersim-as-religion argument.
"I'm hearing that some readers of my post are saying that transism really is a sort of religion, as though I should have noted that. I'd like to offer a response to that.
This viewpoint is understandable, but it is based on a category of confusion I see often, as feminists discuss social/cultural issues that take on a different legal status as they are codified or judicially examined. When does a belief system become a "religion", sociologically? That's irrelevant to when it becomes a religion, legally.
Transism is surely a belief system, however incoherent. Religious/spiritual imagery no doubt has crept in -- it's always good to invoke supernatural encouragement of one's belief system. But transism is not a religion in legal terms and the ADF Establishment Clause arguments are just more smoke.
Legally, certain kinds of belief systems are under constitutional protection. They are also under certain constitutional strictures. Generally, the government doesn't interfere with their practices, no matter how bizarre, so long as the practices apply only to their adherents. See the Church of Babalu case. Generally, the government can't tax their income, a very important protection. They are even exempted from certain laws of general applicability that are applied to all other institutions; their ministers can discriminate in employment, for example. They can refuse to perform abortions in their hospitals. They can counsel their adherents and discipline them, within certain bounds, as they wish. They can say whatever they like from their pulpits. The government can't prefer one of these legally-recognized religions over another.
The strictures are also important. The government does not fund them with public (taxpayer) money. The government requires them on the whole to follow laws of general applicability. Where government funding and licensing is provided, the government sets the rules of professional practice.
The religious right wing has mounted a legal campaign for many years to expand religious legal protections and weaken the strictures. Looking at the examples above, the right wings of Christian churches (including LDS, Catholic, and Evangelical churches for instance), have mounted a coordinated legal campaign to hide the sources of their income, be able to introduce and lobby for legislative bills, influence secular politics with dark money, stack courts with their adherents, obtain religious exemptions from laws of general applicability, and participate in government programs funded with taxpayer money.
The churches also want to able to proselytize to non-adherents and enforce their belief systems against non-adherents, even where they are doing so with government money.
This is the religious issue in Tingley v Ferguson. The religious right-wing wants to persuade the courts that a government-licensed professional counselor working with an organization that receives federal funding should be allowed to counsel women, LGB and T people, and people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, according to his or her Christian religious tenets. Their lawyers are careful to cloud this motivation by promoting secular arguments such as freedom of speech, and in this case, Establishment Clause protections.
The reversal here is that the RW religious institutions WANT the government to get rid of the Establishment Clause when it applies to them. Here, they're agin it. Next case, they'll be tryin' to get more taxpayer money for themselves and will say it doesn't apply to them.
Lately they have added feminist arguments, effectively, as we know.
Now, they have flown to the heights of sophistry by arguing that transism is a religion in the same legal sense they are. Give me a break.
My point in the OP is that WoLF has become so involved in this religious right wing campaign that it is now morphing its advocacy-for-women's-rights arguments into religious arguments. It's like the movie The Thing, where the people turn into something really weird. WoLF says it stands for women. Promoting spurious right-wing arguments for a broadening of protections for the Christian churches does not seem to me to be standing for women in the Tingley case.
WoLF can advocate for whatever it wants. All I ask is that they stop telling courts they're radical feminists."
I don’t think it’s weird at all, on the contrary, making the argument that trans is not a human rights issue but the establishment of a government religion infringing on the rights of the Christian majority, is the only way it will be picked out piece by piece from the law. Trans has transcended the realm of material facts into the metaphysical where it must compete with the other religions.
“Does this sound like a radical feminist argument to you?” Well kinda since I and other radical feminists have made the serious argument that trans is a religion (which is likely where ADF got the idea, conservatives have stolen 99.9% of their material from RFs) but even if it’s not a radical feminist theory based argument it sounds like one the court would be interested in.