John Oliver used his perch on Last Week Tonight to look ahead to an upcoming supreme court case over the charter school St Isidore of Seville in Oklahoma, which seeks to become the first religious charter school in the country. If the court rules in its favor, the school would receive public funds for an explicitly Catholic education, marking what Oliver called on Sunday evening “yet another step on the slippery slope of breaking down the establishment clause separating church and state”.
The supreme courtwill probably not rule on this particular case until next month, but Oliver trained on the “key group” behind the case: the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “Even if you don’t recognize their name, you’re familiar with their work,” he explained. In their own words, ADF is “the world’s largest legal organization advancing every person’s God-given right to live and speak the truth”.
But as Oliver explained, “the freedom ADF fights for is selective at best.” Among other things, the group had argued for the Christian baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple in Colorado, orchestrated the attack on the abortion pill mifepristone in the supreme court and was a leader on the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade. Since 2011, the group has represented parties in 15 supreme court wins, and claims victory in 77 cases since its founding, from removing the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act to throwing out a law that provided a protest buffer around abortion clinics. “So they are way more powerful than many are aware,” said Oliver, “and they are using that power for – I’ll say it – bad.”
Yet ADF has avoided the notoriety and name recognition of, say, the National Rifle Association (NRA), “which works very much in their favor”, said Oliver, before digging into the group’s history, aims and deflections.
Originally called the Alliance Defense Fund, ADF was founded in 1993 by prominent evangelical Christians as an endowment to pay for lawyers to take on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its ilk. Under Alan Sears, who led the group from its founding until 2017, the ADF argued for state laws criminalizing gay sex and against laws legalizing gay marriage. In his 2003 book The Homosexual Agenda, Sears described gay rights as “the principal threat to religious freedom” and said gay activists were engaged in “a war of propaganda, just as Hitler did so masterfully in Nazi Germany”.
“From ADF’s outset, attacking the rights and dignity of gay people was at the center of its work,” Oliver said, “along with rolling back access to abortion and giving Christians more leeway to discriminate against someone who offends their faith. And those ideals have not changed even as the organization has massively grown.” ADF now employs more than 450 people in its domestic and international offices, and boasts nearly 5,000 network attorneys who work on their behalf. The group has a legal scholarship and conference frequently attended by the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett; Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, worked there for nearly a decade, eventually becoming senior legal counsel. While there, Johnson advocated for the criminalization of gay sex, urged people to “say Christmas!” and wrote op-eds arguing that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural”. “That is who they are at their core,” said Oliver.
The group has been successful, Oliver argued, partially through the sheer volume of legislation they draft – 107 bills in 24 states in 2024. The Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade was modeled on a bill drafted by ADF. And the group sells its desired outcome to the public by “foregrounding sympathetic individuals whose liberty they present as being violated”, Oliver explained. “ADF goes out of its way to craft wholesome stories that present their side as the victims.”
Oliver played a clip of ADF’s general counsel, Kristen Waggoner, who said in 2016: “We need to win back culture … And I would say we need to engage and tell the stories in a winsome way.”
That “winsome” way, Oliver continued, often meant misrepresenting data and personal experience, including using Waggoner’s daughter to advocate against a fictional trans teen playing softball at a rival school (the suggested teen was in fact not trans).
Waggoner argued that cases such as the baker refusing to make cakes for a gay wedding were “about whether the government can use the power of law to force Americans to say things that they don’t believe”.
But as Oliver contended: “pretty fucking rich, coming from the same people who brought you saychristmas.org. Say it! You have to say it!
“Throughout all of these lawsuits, ADF insisted it was just sticking up for the little guy,” he added. “But for all its careful, ‘winsome’ positioning, it is worth remembering that this is a group that in 2003, filed a brief at the supreme court urging them to uphold state bans on sodomy, has sought to uphold bans on gay sex in India in Belize, which still fights for faith-based adoption agencies who refuse to serve same-sex couples to get public funding, and that right now is fighting to overturn bans on conversion therapy.
“Despite what it says, each case ADF brings is in service of their larger worldview,” he continued, “one in which abortion and the rights of gay and trans people are a thing of the past, and they’re going to keep chipping away at those rights all while cheerily telling you that they’re doing so in the service of freedom.”
To return to the upcoming court case, ADF insists that the St Isidore school in Oklahoma will not reject any student based on their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, but it also has a policy that staff will interact with students, faculty and staff “according to their biological sex”.
As Oliver noted: “Allowing taxpayer funds to go directly to a school with policies like that feels like we’re moving another step closer of ADF’s ultimate goal of eliminating LGBTQ status as protected class citizens.”
As for what can be done, due to the status of the courts, “unfortunately, a lot of this is out of our hands right now,” Oliver concluded. “But I do think at the very least, there’s value in everyone knowing exactly what we are dealing with here. Because at least with the NRA, you understand what its endgame is, as they will happily tell you to your face.”
But ADF has “worked extremely hard to put a misleadingly friendly face on what is an utterly hateful ideology”, he said. “And it benefits immensely from people not knowing just how poisonous and disingenuous it is.”
