Suing for Jesus: a new legal team wants to cleanse the campuses for Christ.

A recent court case at the University of Wisconsin may have big implications for the nation's public schools. Last November, a federal circuit court ruled that students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison should be able to opt out of student-activity fees that support groups whose beliefs they oppose. It is the first federal suit to declare a student-activities fee unconstitutional.

The suit, Southworth vs. Grebe, began when three law students went after the University. But the case quickly became the pet project of a little-known legal outfit of the Christian right, the Alliance Defense Fund. It says it is out "to reclaim legal ground in this country for the body of Christ." Its leaders hope the decision against the University of Wisconsin will set a precedent for public schools around the country. And it may.

In April 1995, Scott Southworth, Amy Schoepke, and Keith Bannach -- all fundamentalist Christians -- sued Michael Grebe, president of the University of Wisconsin's board of regents, along with the other regents. But the plaintiffs were not acting alone. The three were receiving $35,000 in funding from the Alliance Defense Fund, which also recommended a lawyer. The Fund was formed in January 1994 to identify strategic, precedent-setting suits beneficial to the Christian right, and win them.

In newsletters and pamphlets, the Alliance Defense Fund touts its youth and its grassroots funding. But the organization is anything but populist. The Fund has the backing of some of the heaviest hitters in Christian rightdom, including James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association. The Fund's president, Alan Sears, served as executive director of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography in 1985 and 1986.

According to the conservative magazine Human Events, the Alliance Defense Fund will soon start a National Litigation Academy "to train an army of pro-religious attorneys. The group hopes to train about 200 attorneys a year from every state in the nation."

One such attorney is Jordan Lorence, who represented the plaintiffs in Southworth vs. Grebe. Lorence informs me that he is "a personal friend of Alan Sears." In addition to several stints for the Alliance Defense Fund, Lorence has also worked for what he calls "public-interest law groups" -- specifically Concerned Women for America (an influential Christian right organization), and the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Gary Bauer calls the Alliance Defense Fund "an attempt to level the playing field." With the help of the Fund, the Christian right is quickly becoming effective in court. Out of fifty-three court cases, boasts Sears, the Fund has had forty-seven wins to only six defeats. And the organization has won several times at the Supreme Court level, including cases against the University of Virginia and the Justice Department.

In describing the Fund's purpose, Scott Phillips, the assistant general counsel, recalls a scene from the movie Separate but Equal. The leaders of the early NAACP are sitting down together to chart the court cases the budding civil-rights movement should take on. "They were looking for the best cases out there," Phillips tells me, "cases that set precedents."

Alan Sears underlines Phillips's analogy. "We are a minority," he says.

The metaphor of the vulnerable minority fighting back against persecution runs through the Fund's newsletters and advertisements. "Hiring homosexuals in Christian schools, churches, and even as Sunday school teachers may soon become the law of the land," warns one radio advertisement for the organization. "Don't let Christianity become a crime."

In a recent Fund mailing, Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ, a founding member of the Alliance Defense Fund, writes: This statement may shock you, but I genuinely believe that unless the present anti-christ trend is dramatically reversed, we in this great country could actually lose our freedom to worship the true God, and organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ could become illegal."

"The luxury of asking `should we defend ourselves' has been replaced by the emphatic need for immediate courtroom action against an extremely hostile foe," writes D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Ministries, another founding member of the fund.

Scott Southworth is a man with a purpose. Before taking his case to court, Southworth had tried more than once to throttle the mechanism by which student fees at the University of Wisconsin are distributed to student organizations. According to his deposition. Southworth led a campaign to kill the U.W. student government when he was an undergraduate.

As chairman of the student government's finance committee, Southworth disbanded the committee so that no new money could be allocated to student groups. He eventually failed at both these projects, then lobbied in support of a state bill that would require the university to allow students to determine where their fees go. When the bill foundered, Southworth contacted the Alliance Defense Fund and took his complaint to the federal courts.

Southworth is pleased with his success. "It's definitely sent some shock waves through the educational community," he says.

Southworth vs. Grebe is just the kind of suit the Alliance Defense Fund likes. It argued that the University of Wisconsin "violates the First Amendment by requiring students to subsidize the political and ideological advocacy of various student groups." A small portion of the student-activities fee -- amounting to $37 per student per semester -- was the source of the problem.

"In order to attend the U.W-Madison law school, the three student-plaintiffs must subsidize groups that contradict their views opposing abortion, homosexuality, socialism, extreme environmentalism, etc.," reads the plaintiffs' brief. "The students must support groups that contradict their views in support of the free-enterprise system, Governor Tommy Thompson's policies, keeping sex within marriage, the death penalty, the Bible as the standard of truth, and support for widening U.S. Highway 12 from two lanes to four lanes."

"I didn't think it was fair," says Southworth. He tells me that a Christian shouldn't have to pay for a Muslim or Jewish organization.

The suit objected in particular to eighteen student organizations, among these: Amnesty International; the Campus Women's Center, a support group for Chicano students, two gay and lesbian support groups; the Madison AIDS Support Network; Madison Treaty Rights Support Group; the U.W Greens; and the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group.

"Student fees fund groups that advocate radical feminism, abortion, and homosexuality," says an Alliance Defense Fund letter in support of the Southworth case. "You can quickly see that these groups promote values and take actions contradictory to Christian beliefs."

The board of regents countered with its own First Amendment defense, arguing that it is the purpose of the university to promote a forum allowing the free expression of competing viewpoints, with preference to none. "The danger of accepting the plaintiffs, position is that it may not be long before all student ideological expression funded by fees is silenced," the university said. "Without the funds to support publications, speakers, fees, printing, advertising, and without the motivation provided by the ability to express themselves off campus, much student expression will end. Objecting students may simply be able to silence each other, rather than learning tolerance or how to respond in the context of constructive debate. The result is hardly consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment."

But the federal district court judge, John Shabaz, agreed with the students who had brought the suit. He ordered the University of Wisconsin to adopt a fee system allowing students to opt out of contributions to groups they dislike.

"This court finds that the balance between competing interests in this case tips in favor of plaintiffs, First Amendment right not to be compelled to speak or associate," Shabaz wrote.

More than a First Amendment case, Southworth vs. Grebe was a covert campaign to defund all campus groups receiving student funding. Southworth admitted as much in his deposition. It "would be just an insurmountable process for a student and, I believe, for the University as well," to cope with a system in which each student selects which campus groups, if any, should receive a portion of each student fee, Southworth said.

Associate Dean of Students Roger Howard concedes that such a policy will be a "practical impossibility." As of fall semester 1996, 39,826 students were enrolled at the U.W.-Madison. At the time, the university was funding approximately 200 student groups and services. It's formidable arithmetic.

If the university does manage to create an opt-out policy despite the accounting troubles, minority student groups are likely to take a hard hit. Jennifer Wertkin, a law student at the University of Wisconsin who assisted in an amicus brief on behalf of the board of regents, says that the targeted groups primarily affect "people who are traditionally underrepresented." Campus leaders are wondering whether their groups will survive. "I think we would be forced to close," says Jack Kear, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center.

Too bad, say the three plaintiffs, who invoked the language of capitalism in their letter to The Badger Herald: "If a particular group cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas, what justification exists for [university] life-support?"

Alliance Defense Fund president Alan Sears agrees. "Maybe they ought to get better at the marketing business," he says of the threatened groups. "Maybe the university could teach student groups how to market themselves."

The Southworth decision is far-reaching. "It's a very broad decision," says Donald Downs, a professor in the political-science department at the U.W.-Madison and an expert in constitutional law. "It's the broadest one in its area. It hurts the First Amendment more than it helps it." For instance, Downs says, the plaintiffs' argument could be extended to limit "student funds used to pay for things professors say that are not popular."

The breadth of Shabaz's decision has elated the folks at the Alliance Defense Fund. "There's a lot of spinoff," crows Sears. "High schools may be the logical next step," says Phillips, general counsel for the Fund.

The Fund is preparing to take on more cases like Southworth, university by university. Lorence says he has been contacted by students around the country who are interested in filing similar suits. Sears, who says he expects "perhaps even a Supreme Court precedent" out of the Southworth case, claims that the Alliance Defense Fund is "now in the process of filing lawsuits for students substantially similar to the lawsuit at the U.W."

Why all the attention to public schools and universities?

"The religious right's agenda is to establish a faith-based educational systems," says Nancy Novosad, who is writing a book about the Christian right. Novosad adds that groups like the Alliance Defense Fund are "attempting to break down the boundary between church and state."

"There is no boundary between church and state," Phillips tells me. "We can't break down something that doesn't exist."

Phillips and his boss agree on this unusual reading of the Constitution. At the Alliance Defense Fund's founding conference, Sears told reporters that he found Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state" to be not a particularly useful metaphor."

"Increasingly, we are going to see religious-freedom arguments used to undermine government. Student fees are an easy target, but the same argument applies to using public funds for public education," says Frederick Clarkson, author of the book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.

"Generally, they're looking to the abolition of the public school," he adds. "Many of the leaders are frank about saying so."

"They feel that the First Amendment means that they do not have to do business with certain people," says Sara Diamond, an expert on the religious right. "They want to say that their religion allows them to discriminate."

Diamond is concerned that the meaning of the First Amendment is changing bit by bit, as organizations like the Alliance Defense Fund win local lawsuits that attract little attention but have big implications. "Cases work at this piecemeal, local level," she warns.

Sears agrees. "I always refer to the religious freedom fighters as a big jigsaw puzzle," he says. This is one more piece of the puzzle put in place. This is not some insignificant case in Madison, Wisconsin," he adds. "This has national implications. Long term. Big time."

Blocking the

Anti-Christ

The Alliance Defense Fund describes itself as a protector of religious freedom. And civil libertarians would probably approve of some of the Fund's stances. For instance, the organization defended the right of a street preacher to proselytize in a public park. It also stood up for the right of pro-lifers to protest outside an abortion clinic.

The Alliance Defense Fund's biggest preoccupation appears to be cases involving public schools around the country. In 1995, the Fund gave money to Ronald Rosenberger, a student who was suing the University of Virginia for the right to receive funding from student-activity fees to start a campus Christian newspaper. Until Rosenberger v. The University of Virginia, the school had attempted to maintain a separation of church and state when it came to student fees. This suit changed that.

"This win was a big deal," boasted the newsletter of the Alliance Defense Fund after the Supreme Court commanded the University of Virginia to grant funding to the Christian newspaper. "It was not just a win against the university and the twenty-some other radical groups who filed opposing briefs. It was a win against the nation's entire public-education establishment, the American Civil Liberties Union, and similar groups who have marched this country down the anti-religious path for the past generation."

After Rosenberger, the Alliance Defense Fund took the offensive. "We also have begun to select key cases that would build on this foundation and to look for other cases that will create additional key precedents in our quest for true religious freedom in America," the newsletter added. Southworth vs. Grebe was the follow-up, though Rosenberger may seem a strange precedent for Southworth vs. Grebe.

The first suit extends university funding to a Christian newspaper, and might seem to be protecting the free speech of a controversial and unpopular organization on campus.

The second takes student-fee funding away from groups that fundamentalist Christian students find objectionable. But the two are anything but contradictory to an organization like the Alliance Defense Fund, which is celebrating both court decisions as part of a battle against that oppressive doctrine known as separation of church and state.