The judicial dispute of a colorado law prohibiting conversion therapy for minors can be new, but the group behind the case is familiar to judges.
Kaley Chiles, a professional advisor approved in Colorado Springs, is represented by lawyers of the alliance defending freedom. The group based in Arizona, founded more than three decades ago as legal defense funds focused on conservative Christian issues, has become a pillar before the Supreme Court in recent years, in particular in high -level cultural war affairs.
The group, known as ADF, was involved in the challenges of gay and transgender rights, access to abortion and a dispute as to whether public money can be used to finance schools with a religious charter.
In the organization’s annual report in 2024, Kristen Wagoner, the director general, underlined the election of President Trump as a “reprimand for progressive ideology” and said that the ADF was “made for this moment” and would help “recover the truths and freedoms that made the West really big”.
ADF has several cases that should be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming months. The group works with Idaho and Virginia-Western to defend the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting transgender athletes from sports teams for girls and women. ADF lawyers should also argue that a assignment to New Jersey seeking the identity of donors to a confessional pregnancy center violated the rights to the first amendment to the center. In this case, the Office of the Attorney General of the State had published the summons in the context of a broader survey to find out whether certain non -profit entities of New Jersey had misleaded donors and potential customers on the health services they have provided.
The Colorado conversion therapy affair is the third recent legal challenge to the rights of gays and transgenders to reach the Supreme Court of ADF customers in this state.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips, a baker from Colorado and an ADF client who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. In a close decision, the court judged that the Colorado civil rights committee, which had evaluated the reasons for the baker to refuse to make the cake, had violated the clause of the first amendment guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.
In 2023, the judges rose to the side of the ADF in another challenge of Colorado, this time involving a website designer who declared that she had the right to the first amendment to refuse to design marriage sites for the same sex couples despite a law of the state which prohibited discrimination against homosexuals.
The legal organization has also set up a number of challenges to access to abortion and contraception. In 2014, ADF argued on the side of Hobby Lobby, a craft store belonging to Christians, successfully arguing that the health insurance sponsored by the employer could exclude the coverage of contraception. The group worked with the Mississippi in its successful business in 2022 which canceled Roe c. Wade, upsetting constitutional law for abortion. In 2024, the judges rejected the ADF’s challenge for approval by the Federal Food and Drug Administration of the abortion drug widely available.
They also put pressure on the public funding of religious education. The last mandate, ADF represented the School Board at Oklahoma Charter on the scale of Oklahoma in its attempt to use the government’s money to manage the first school with a religious charter in the country. The court immersed 4-4 in the case, judge Amy CONEY BARRETT turning. The decision meant that, for the moment, Oklahoma could not use public funds for the school.
