1A/JEFF SESSIONS/LGBTQ/RELIGION: “The details were spare when the event appeared this past summer on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s public schedule. He would speak to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom at a summit on religious liberty. It would be in Orange County, Calif., but no exact location was specified. No news media would be allowed in.
Only after an outcry over the secrecy of the event — and the anti-gay rights positions of its sponsor — did a transcript of Mr. Sessions’s remarks emerge on a conservative website. ‘Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack,’ the attorney general told the gathering. ‘The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the *free exercise* of our faith have become acute.’
Mr. Sessions’s focus on religious freedom in his speech was not an accident. The First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon in the legal arsenal of social conservatives fighting to limit the separation of church and state and roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. And few organizations have done more to advance this body of legal thinking than his host, the Alliance Defending Freedom.”
-Jeremy W. Peters, “Fighting Gay Rights and Abortion With the First Amendment,” The New York Times online, Nov. 22, 2017