A Hero Lawyer Defending Our Rights
On Friday my friend and hero Chuck LiMandri (who was one of the first to help us get Prop 8 on the ballot!) will be in court in New Jersey, taking on the goliath Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its new militant attempt to misuse consumer fraud laws to attack a small Jewish nonprofit named JONAH that helps observant Jews with same-sex attraction live according to the Bible’s laws.
This is one of the hugest stories you’ve never been told by the media: the SPLC wants to use its $250 million budget and 7 full-time staff lawyers to bankrupt therapists, counselors, and religious nonprofits that offer help to people with unwanted same-sex attraction. And they are misusing “consumer fraud” statutes to do it.
I suspect SPLC picked a Jewish service organization first because they were hoping many of us in the Christian community would ignore it. But whatever you think about sexual orientation, it’s wrong to tell people they can’t ask for help to live their sexual lives as they choose, not as the SPLC’s lawyers want them to do.
This is a test case, in other words: if the SPLC wins, they hope to use it to unleash bankrupting civil lawsuits against 70 or more pro-family groups. They were hoping no one would take the case on and that JONAH would be left to fluster with little or no legal help.
The SPLC wasn’t counting on the courage of Chuck LiMandri. He’s a fantastic, first-class trial lawyer with a successful law practice in San Diego. For years he worked pro-bono winning cases like the Mt. Soldedad Cross case and the San Diego Firefighters case (where the government tried to force firefighters to appear in a gay pride gay against their will).
Chuck has just started up a public interest law firm, so he can defend us all from the mounting attacks that are coming from those well-heeled gay rights groups that want to shut down and threaten groups they disagree with. Both Alan Sears of ADF and Bill Mumma of the Becket Fund have written in support of Chuck LiMandri, his new nonprofit law firm the Conscience Defense Fund and the critical added value his work ads to the fight to protect traditional believers in this country.
If you want to learn more about this amazing man, and his amazing work, go to ConscienceDefense.org.
Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage