The Nine [51]
Sekulow’s mission wasn’t easy, at least at first. For one thing, he didn’t look the part. His New York accent never faded, and his sharp suits, loud ties, and monogrammed shirts suggested a Seventh Avenue garment executive more than an evangelical activist. Once, at a hearing where he was defending Operation Rescue’s antiabortion protesters, clinic workers assumed the fast-talking lawyer represented them. “Wrong table,” he said.
But the evangelical community was growing so fast, and bumping up against government regulation so often, that cases flooded the ACLJ. In many of them, the question was how much of a Christian message the evangelicals could get into the schools. Organized prayer was out; Christian student groups were in. What, then, about nonstudent evangelical groups using school property after hours?
That was Sekulow’s first major case under Robertson’s auspices. New York state law allowed community groups to use school property for “social, civic, and recreational meetings” that were “nonexclusive and open to the general public.” Lamb’s Chapel, a small evangelical church on Long Island, asked to use the Center Moriches school district’s facilities to show a series of six films featuring lectures by James Dobson, a central figure in the national evangelical movement. Dobson had founded Focus on the Family, in Colorado Springs, and turned it into a sprawling enterprise with a broad (and very conservative) political and religious agenda. The lectures were a guide to “the undermining influences of the media that could only be counterbalanced by returning to traditional, Christian family values instilled at an early stage.” In Focus on the Family’s description of one lecture, for example, “ ‘The Family Under Fire’ views the family in the context of today’s society, where a ‘civil war of values’ is being waged. Dr. Dobson urges parents to look at the effects of governmental interference, abortion and pornography, and to get involved.” (This disclaimer followed: “Note: This film contains explicit information regarding the pornography industry. Not recommended for young audiences.”) The school district rejected the request to show the films, because they “appear to be church related.” Sekulow took the case to the Supreme Court.
There, from the start, Sekulow stuck with his trademark argument. “Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court,” he began. “This case is about censorship of Lamb’s Chapel’s speech, which was entertained for the purpose of having a film series at the school facilities to show and discuss contemporary family issues. The direct targeting of religious purpose as an exclusion under the access policy of the school district is both content based and viewpoint based, and does not meet constitutional scrutiny.” Like the Jews for Jesus leafleters in L.A. and the Christian students in Omaha, the Lamb’s Chapel evangelicals were victims of government repression, not the advance agents of a state religion.
“So what provision of the Constitution are you relying on?” O’Connor asked.
“First Amendment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth, freedom of speech.”
“Which part of it?”
“Free speech.”
Religion couldn’t be privileged under the Constitution, Sekulow insisted, but it couldn’t be penalized, either. “The way I understand the respondents’ argument, the atheists are in, the agnostics are in, the communists are in, the religion is not in,” Sekulow told the justices. “This is the type of viewpoint discrimination that this Court has not sanctioned.” The result, in Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, was another unanimous victory for Sekulow. In 1995,