A Conservative Legal Group Finds Plenty to Litigate in Vermont 

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• Tim Newcomb

Alliance Defending Freedom's name conjures an image of patriotic superheroes clad in stars and stripes, ready to smack down anyone who tramples on their rights. But to those who stand by inclusive values, the well-funded conservative legal advocacy group represents something else: a threat to the secular, pro-LGBTQ+, pro-abortion rights laws and policies long cultivated in the Green Mountain State.

The Arizona-based organization, founded by a group of Christian leaders three decades ago, files lawsuits nationwide. In Vermont, it has sued the state and other entities. Emboldened by the former Trump administration and the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court, the group has grown in terms of both revenue and impact in recent years. With a mounting number of wins under its belt, Alliance Defending Freedom has ramped up its activity in Vermont, filing six lawsuits since 2019.

That's no surprise, according to Vermont Law and Graduate School assistant professor Jared Carter, who specializes in First Amendment law. Alliance Defending Freedom and similar organizations want to further their agendas by targeting "states like Vermont that have a reputation for being progressive when it comes to civil rights and antidiscrimination laws," Carter said.

According to Alliance Defending Freedom's website, that agenda encompasses five key areas: religious freedom, sanctity of life, marriage and family, parental rights, and free speech. Since 2016, it has been considered an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in part because of the lawsuits it has filed that attempt to deny rights to transgender students. The legal organization drafted a model policy in 2015 aimed at restricting transgender people's access to sex-segregated restrooms that has been parroted in numerous so-called "bathroom bills" across the country.

"Anti-LGBTQ groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, have long engaged in efforts to undo legal protections for the most marginalized and vulnerable communities in the country, seeking to encode anti-LGBTQ ideology into America's laws at the federal, state, and local levels," Southern Poverty Law Center senior research analyst R.G. Cravens wrote in a statement to Seven Days.

Alliance Defending Freedom referred Seven Days to a post on its website that says that while its legal positions "are informed by a biblically-based understanding of marriage, human sexuality, and the sanctity of life, we respect the human dignity of those with whom we disagree." It calls the Southern Poverty Law Center "a far-left organization that only targets the right."

Last month, Alliance Defending Freedom filed two lawsuits in Vermont, both centered around free speech issues.

On July 17, the organization sued the Vermont Agency of Education, the Vermont Principals' Association and the Windsor Central Supervisory Union on behalf of David Bloch, a former snowboarding coach at Woodstock Union High School. Bloch's suit says he was fired after he made comments about a transgender snowboarder on an opposing team. It further claims that the termination violated Bloch's rights to free speech and due process and asks that the school district reinstate him as snowboarding coach.

Attorney Pietro Lynn, who is representing Windsor Central, said the district did not violate the law or Bloch's rights. Meanwhile, Windsor Central superintendent Sherry Sousa, a defendant in the suit who is named as the administrator who fired Bloch, said her district "is committed to providing a supportive and inclusive environment for all of our community, including members who are LGBTQIA+."

A week after filing the Woodstock suit, Alliance Defending Freedom announced it was representing two Vermont anti-abortion pregnancy centers in a lawsuit against the state. The organizations claim that the recently passed Act 15, meant to crack down on deceptive advertising and medical misinformation, impedes the centers' ability to provide services to women and families. As in the Woodstock case, the lawsuit alleges that the act violates the free speech and due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

Attorney General Charity Clark said in a statement last week that she looks forward to defending the lawsuit on behalf of Vermont. Gov. Phil Scott, too, said he's confident "the law will be upheld."

"False and deceptive advertising is illegal in Vermont, and that protection is especially important when it comes to such significant decisions in one's life," Scott said in a written statement. "Vermonters have made it clear over and over again that we will defend a woman's right to choose. We will continue to do so."

Carly Thomsen, a Middlebury College professor who researches anti-abortion pregnancy centers, told Seven Days that Alliance Defending Freedom's claim that the state is trying to shut down such centers is "a lie."

The law says centers can be fined $10,000 for distributing false or misleading information, Thomsen said. "If [pregnancy centers] jump to the conclusion that this law could shut them down, we can ascertain that they must know the degree to which they are circulating deceptive and misleading information."

The recent litigation comes months after other Alliance Defending Freedom-backed cases in Vermont concluded.

Last year, the Vermont Agency of Education settled several lawsuits brought by the organization on behalf of Vermont families and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, which argued that Catholic schools should be eligible to receive public tuition dollars. Under the settlement, school districts agreed to reimburse tuition to Catholic schools that had previously been denied.

Then-education secretary Dan French issued a memo to superintendents in September 2022, saying religious schools could not be denied public tuition payments. French's memo cited the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2022 decision in Carson v. Makin, which compelled school districts in Maine to allow state funds to flow to religious schools. Alliance Defending Freedom filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in that case.

In May, Randolph Union High School student Blake Allen and her father, Travis Allen, settled a lawsuit they'd brought the previous fall against the Orange Southwest School District. Backed by Alliance Defending Freedom, the suit alleged the Allens' First Amendment rights were violated when the district punished them for comments they'd made about a transgender volleyball player. In the settlement, Orange Southwest's insurance company agreed to pay $5,000 to Blake, $35,000 to Travis and $85,000 to Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers.

Carter, the law school professor, said any entity being sued by a deep-pocketed group such as Alliance Defending Freedom — whether it be a small school district or the state — has to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth expending large amounts of time, energy and resources to fight the case. Sometimes, he said, they might decide "it's better to settle this, and be done with it."

Add to that the chance the case may reach the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal, Carter said, and defendants might make the calculus that fending off claims from conservative legal organizations isn't a battle worth fighting.

That doesn't stop Alliance Defending Freedom from characterizing settlements, even relatively small ones, as big wins. In a statement to Seven Days in June, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Phil Sechler called the Randolph case "a resounding victory for freedom of speech."

And in an interview this week, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel and vice president of U.S. litigation David Cortman said the commonality in all the cases it has taken on in Vermont is "generally some violation of constitutional rights by the government — either free speech or freedom of religion."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont has a different take. Executive director James Lyall characterized Alliance Defending Freedom's lawsuits as "sustained, bad faith efforts to end reproductive autonomy, roll back anti-discrimination protections, and undermine our democracy and our public institutions."

The group's actions, Lyall said in a statement, are "both a continuation and an escalation of longstanding attempts to take away our hard-earned rights and liberties, and to turn back the clock on the progress we have made as a society."

The faith-based nonprofit's tax documents, as well as its court victories, show its growing reach. The organization reported $104.5 million in revenue in 2022, up from $51.2 million in 2017. At any one time, it is involved in approximately 100 cases, Cortman said. Its 50 staff attorneys are aided by 4,700 allied attorneys who identify potential cases in their states.

Locally, those allies include Vergennes attorney Anthony Duprey, who is named as the local legal counsel in the Woodstock and Randolph cases. Another is Michael Tierney, a lawyer for Wadleigh, Starr & Peters in Manchester, N.H., who is cocounsel in the pregnancy-center suit. Duprey referred all questions to Alliance Defending Freedom, and Tierney did not respond to Seven Days' request for an interview.

A brochure on Alliance Defending Freedom's website describes allied attorneys as "Christians committed to using their God-given legal skills to keep the doors open for the Gospel" and deems them essential to the organization's ability to litigate. The role, which attorneys must apply for, comes with perks such as free legal training and webinars.

Alliance Defending Freedom's website features slick videos about its cases. Its 2022 nonprofit filings revealed that it paid $960,000 to the Daily Wire, a conservative news website that fans culture-war flames, to create video content.

One of the group's videos features a testimonial from former Rice Memorial High School principal Lisa Lorenz, who says Vermont violated the First Amendment in the religious school tuition case.

"It's up to the parents, not the government, to decide what kind of education their children should have," Lorenz says in the video. "Follow our case at adflegal.org and find more videos like this at adflegal.org-slash-freedom matters."

Alliance Defending Freedom's website says it's won 15 Supreme Court cases since 2011.

Most recently, in June, Alliance Defending Freedom notched a win in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The court ruled 6-3 that a Christian graphic designer in Colorado could refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples as an expression of her right to free speech.

Legal experts say the 303 Creative decision creates the possibility for further litigation related to antidiscrimination laws. Vermont's public accommodation law, for instance, states that the owner of a business that offers services to the general public cannot deny those services based on a person's race, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity.

"The questions arising in this case have a profound and deep impact on the progress of civil rights," University of Washington law professor Theo Myhre said in a video explaining the verdict.

Cortman, Alliance Defending Freedom's senior counsel, said it's likely that more litigation will be coming in Vermont, especially if the legislature tries to further restrict public money to religious schools, as it has telegraphed it might.

"As long as these aggressive policies continue to be enacted," Cortman said, "whether it's by the legislature or the Agency of Education or local school districts — whomever happens to be taking these actions that violate a client's constitutional rights — we'll certainly be looking to continue to sue the state and its agencies or subdivisions."